The defendant, a dark-haired woman named Dahbia Benakli, watched nervously as the prosecutor took the stand one final time.
The prosecutor, Steven Pinza, was defiant as he gave his closing statement. “If you don’t believe me,” he said to the jury, “one last thing. If you guys don’t believe me, let’s extend this trial.”
The judge interrupted: “Mr. Pinza, your time is up. And no, we’re not extending the trial. The trial is going to be over.”
It was a scene straight out of any courtroom, except for one thing: This case was about an eviction lawsuit, a kind of proceeding that almost never goes before a jury in California. Benakli was a tenant, waiting to find out whether the court was going to evict her. Pinza was Benakli’s landlord, a local real estate investor and president of the Pinza Group, representing himself in an eviction lawsuit against her.
Benakli’s case, unique as it was, also reveals what many tenants may be facing outside the public eye. More than two years after the beginning of the pandemic, evictions are on the rise. Many of the far-reaching emergency housing protections passed in 2020 have since expired, leaving millions of renters facing eviction.
As new rules for California tenants and landlords vanish and the old rules return, Benakli’s case — and its aftermath — show the challenges renters face in charting their way through this moment of uncertainty and change.
Part 1: The notice
It was May 2021 when Steven Pinza bought the wide, gray apartment building where Dahbia Benakli had lived for 11 years.
Benakli, a single mother and preschool teacher in Walnut Creek, didn’t think anything of the change in ownership at first. She said she had always had a good relationship with the previous management and wasn’t expecting anything different.
At the time, she also had other priorities. Benakli was a single mom taking care of her two young daughters — Leah, 7, and Elina, 2 — by herself, juggling a frantic job search and gig work during the pandemic, in a year-long scramble to pay her bills.
Then, later that month, the eviction notices began to arrive. Pinza told 11 of the building’s 18 tenants they needed to move out.
“If I was someone that’s not paying rent or just pay part, and he gets tired of that situation, I would understand,” Benakli told me. “But I’m someone that pays the full rent. I do nothing illegal.”
Benakli is one of a growing number of California residents facing eviction as millions of people across the state wrestle with the return of pre-pandemic housing laws.
Between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021,
landlords filed nearly 4,000 eviction lawsuits across the Bay Area — more than 700 of them in Contra Costa County, where Benakli lives.And the number of eviction lockouts in the Bay Area — that’s when sheriff’s deputies physically remove people who were evicted in court from their homes — rose from 184 in March-December 2020, to 349 during the same months of 2021, according to an analysis by The San Francisco Chronicle.
In the case of Benakli and her neighbors, Pinza was ordering them to move out because he claimed the building needed major renovations.
“While we wish these repairs were not necessary or could be done without you moving out, it is not possible,” he wrote in a letter to the tenants.
He gave tenants the option to relocate for two months at their own expense “while renovations are made,” then pay an additional $600 per month when they returned — a proposition Benakli could not afford.
She had lived in her one-bedroom apartment for 11 years, and her monthly rent was still only $1,000 — less than half the market rate in Walnut Creek.
“I want to move,” Benakli said. “I want to have two bedrooms. I want to have a backyard for my kids. I do want to have all that — but I cannot afford it right now.”
Upon receiving the letters, most of the tenants moved out. But Benakli, DeCher Young and John Taylor decided to stay and wait for the landlord to file an eviction lawsuit.
“I do understand he got this building and he wants to raise up the price,” Benakli said. “I do understand that he’s the new owner. I do understand he doesn’t know us. But he does not have the right to treat us less than a regular person.”
Steven Pinza declined to speak on the record for this story.
Part 2: The lawsuit
Benakli and her neighbors thought they stood a chance of fighting Steven Pinza’s lawsuit in court, and in an unusual request, they wanted a jury to decide the case.
Experts say eviction cases almost never go to a jury trial. In roughly the first year of the pandemic, 3,000 eviction cases went to trial and only 16 of them were decided by a jury.
But representing Benakli and her neighbors was David Levin, a Bay Area-based housing attorney, who saw cracks in the foundation of Pinza’s legal reasoning — specifically, two of them.
According to court filings, Pinza had initially sent eviction notices to tenants who were mostly Black, Algerian or other people of color. Of the eight tenants who had decided to move out voluntarily, seven had been replaced by white renters. Levin planned to make the case that the evictions were racially motivated.
His second argument was that the repairs Pinza planned would not “substantially remodel” the building.
The Tenant Protection Act of 2019 gives landlords the right to remove their renters for a major remodel if the repairs are extensive enough that the renter has to move out for their own safety — for at least 30 days.
But what “substantially remodel” means is murky, according to multiple attorneys who specialize in housing cases, because the Tenant Protection Act has not been tested in court.
And to Levin, its vague language presented a potential foothold to challenge Pinza’s eviction lawsuit.
It’s hard to overstate how much was at stake for Benakli, Young and Taylor. If they lost, their eviction would be public in a court record, visible to any future landlord. Some tenants’ advocates call this the “scarlet E.” Families who are evicted also tend to lose their jobs or have to switch their children’s schools, and they report higher rates of anxiety and depression.
Somehow, though, Benakli wasn’t nervous. She had faith that the courts would hear their concerns and would find in their favor.
“He wants to take it to the court?” she said. “That’s my dream. I want to go to the court with him. Because I know the truth will always win in the end.”
Part 3: The trial
The trial began at the end of February in the Superior Court for Contra Costa County, a tall, gray, downtown building in the sleepy Bay Area suburb of Martinez.
Before he could use a particular argument in front of the jury, Levin had to convince Judge Danielle Douglas of it: that Pinza had shown a pattern of discrimination by evicting mostly tenants of color and bringing in white renters to replace them. But Douglas tossed it out, saying Levin couldn’t prove Pinza intended to discriminate.
As the jurors arrived the next day, Benakli, in a black shirt with pink flowers, sat with her neighbors in the front row of the courtroom. Levin, in a dark suit, sat between them and the judge like a shield, with a rolling bin full of legal papers on the floor next to him. To his left, at the prosecutor’s table, sat Pinza in a crisp suit of light gray.
Pinza, who had elected to represent himself, argued that his plans to renovate the apartments — which included adjustments to the plumbing and electrical systems and installing new stoves, dishwashers and ceiling fans — were extensive. He said his expert witnesses would demonstrate that the scale of these renovations did justify evicting Benakli and her neighbors.
