Richmond Passes Emergency Tenant Protections, Blocking Most Evictions for Rest of Pandemic

The Richmond City Council on Tuesday night passed emergency tenant protections to keep more renters safe from being evicted during the pandemic.

Approved by a 5-2 vote, the new rules go into effect immediately, prohibiting landlords from evicting Richmond tenants unless there is an imminent health and safety concern or if a property is being taken off the rental market. The local protections don’t cover nonpayment of rent cases between March 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, which are covered by the state’s eviction moratorium.

The council heard hours of passionate debate from renters and tenant advocates pleading for stronger protections, as well as from struggling landlords who pushed back on stricter rules.

“What’s going to be the impact on landlords when tenants are saying, ‘Hey, we can’t pay the rent and you can’t evict us?’ ” said Jeanne Llewellyn, a landlord who rents out a Richmond fourplex. “Landlords, especially small mom-and-pop ones like me are living on the edge of bankruptcy.”

Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin co-authored the ordinance, citing Richmond’s high rates of evictions and notices of termination as compared to those in many other Bay Area cities, likely because neighboring counties issued stronger eviction protections earlier in the pandemic.

“The situation we’re in is very dire,” said McLaughlin. “We need to protect people in a really intensified way, given the pandemic and given the economic challenges that our community faces.”

The ordinance cites a KQED analysis of sheriff lockouts that found the rate of evictions in Richmond was 118.2 per 100,000 renter households, significantly higher than in nearby Oakland, which had an eviction rate of 4.2 per 100,000 renter households.

“It has been difficult to watch the gross disparity in protections between the city of Richmond and the 14 other cities that we serve,” said Anne Tamiko Omura, executive director of the Eviction Defense Center.

“The vast majority of these families are African American and Latino. There are children in these households, disabled people in these households,” she added.

Vice Mayor Demnlus Johnson III, who voted for the ordinance, said county and state moratoriums don’t go far enough and called on the city to lift up its residents who are struggling to stay housed.

“It’s ridiculous and it’s embarrassing,” he said. “I understand that people need that money, but at the same time, we are in the middle of a global pandemic.”

Mayor Tom Butt and Councilmember Nathaniel Bates cast the two votes against the ordinance, saying that more information needs to be gathered to explain the number of eviction cases in the city and the reasons for them. Butt said he also felt the new rules put an additional burden on the city’s property owners.

“Landlords didn’t cause the pandemic and they didn’t cause the housing crisis. They’re just like the rest of us,” Butt said.

Other council members said they sympathized with those concerns and urged landlords who have not been able to collect full rent from tenants impacted by the pandemic to apply to the state’s new rental assistance program.

The new eviction protections remain in effect until 60 days after pandemic emergency measures have been lifted.