30 tenants received eviction notices in Madera ahead of new California law. Here’s why
Claudia Garza, a cancer patient and mother of four, was handed her 60-day eviction notice by a 3-year-old child playing on her front yard.
Corrina Gutierrez was undergoing a blood transfusion when her daughter sent her a text message saying they’d been forced out of their home.
On Oct. 25, about 30 tenants received notices to vacate their homes in Laguna Knolls, an apartment complex in Madera. They have to leave by the end of the year. Some tenants have lived there for more than two decades.
On the heels of California’s new rent-cap law, landlords across the state seem to be making room for new, higher-paying tenants before the law goes into effect.
Forty tenants in an apartment building in Sacramento received eviction notices in September. At least 30 tenants received notices in Los Banos. In San Francisco, a legal aid attorney said they saw a 200% spike in eviction notices in the month after the law passed.
Housing advocates say evictions are nothing new to the area, and tenant protections have long been absent in the Central Valley.
“Evictions are happening. It’s just that they’re hidden. We don’t know they’re happening every day. But then when it happens en masse it becomes part of the public radar,” said Janine Nkosi, a sociology professor at Fresno State and regional advisor for Faith in the Valley. “It speaks to how landlords are able to use the court system as rent collectors, as a tool for their business model.”
New Fresno State study
Nkosi and Fresno State sociology professor Amber Crowell led a team of researchers sponsored by Faith in the Valley in analyzing 3,694 eviction lawsuits filed across Fresno County in 2016. They found that tenants had legal representation in 1% of the cases, whereas landlords were represented 73% of the time.
Evictions were concentrated in the south and southwest parts of the city — the poorest areas of Fresno. The highest eviction rates were located in majority non-white areas.
In fiscal year 2017-8, the latest data available, 3,815 eviction lawsuits were filed in Fresno County and 137,130 statewide, according to the Judicial Council of California.
In Fresno, 269 households of every 10,000 renter-occupied households had evictions filed against them, according to a Fresno Bee analysis of the Judicial Council data. The statewide average is 234 households. Lake County led the state in evictions. Fresno ranked 19th.
These counts ignore informal evictions, however, which never make it to court. Housing advocates at Faith in the Valley suspect that number is far higher in Fresno because of the large population of renters who are undocumented.
‘It was a lawyer against a little black girl’
It’s unclear how many of those tenants were kicked out. But in 2016, 62% of eviction lawsuits in Fresno went to default judgment, according to a report put together using Judicial Council data. The tenant always loses those cases because they don’t respond to the lawsuit within the allotted five days, according to Steve Hrdlicka, a prominent landlord attorney in Fresno.
Marsha Hicks fell into that category. When the 38-year-old mother of three went to court to file her answer to an unlawful detainer complaint posted on her door a month earlier, she was told it was too late. Hrdlicka, the landlord’s attorney, had filed a default, so she never got a chance to make her voice heard.
Hrdlicka said a process server had made several attempts to serve the complaint in person. By the time Hicks noticed the complaint, which she said had been taped to her door and fallen to the floor on June 21, she scrambled to get it to her child’s father. Days later, he gave it to his cousin, a paralegal. The paralegal was going through health issues, however, and was hospitalized, delaying the process. By the time Hicks filed her answer on July 19, it was too late.
“I felt so lost in the process of trying to fight for myself. I’m not from here so I didn’t even know who to ask,” Hicks said. “I’m like, why are we even in litigation?”
Hrdlicka said Hicks was evicted over missed rent in June, which Hicks maintains she paid. She said she only withheld rent from November 2018 because her apartment was in serious disrepair. Her place had leaks, mold and brown water running from the faucets, which the city corroborated in a November inspection, documents show.
Sara Hedgpeth-Harris, a supervising attorney at Central California Legal Services, said the timing is suspect. In California, a landlord can be accused of unlawful retaliation if they serve an eviction notice within six months of a tenant reporting habitability issues. She handled Hicks’ case after her answer was rejected.
Eviction filings can go on tenants’ record for seven years unless otherwise settled with the landlord. Darcy Brown, an associate attorney at Central California Legal Services, said it’s “virtually impossible” for once-evicted tenants to find a new place to live.
“Now nobody will rent to me,” Hicks said. “It was a lawyer against a little black girl. Now I’m stuck seven years with an eviction on my record.”
Hrdlicka said that evictions are a last resort for landlords because of how costly they can be; not only does the landlord have to pay the court and attorney, but they lose out on rent, sometimes unit repairs, and have to find a new tenant.
Housing advocates counter that some landlords evict in retaliation to tenants’ demands, as Hicks believes happened to her, or price out tenants by hiking up rent. Prior to the new law, there were no protections against rent hikes or no-cause evictions in Fresno, according to Brown.
Evictions are good for business, researchers say
Evicting people can be a lucrative business for lawyers, and indirectly, landlords, the researchers concluded.
Fresno County Superior Court ordered that tenants pay Hrdlicka, who handled one-third of all unlawful detainer lawsuits, nearly $1 million in legal fees in 2016, the Fresno State researchers found.
The average compounded burden on an evicted tenant was fourfold what they originally owed in missed rent.
One lawsuit they analyzed was triggered because the tenant had not paid rent within six days of an increase. Their state-subsidized rent jumped from $274 a month to $624. By the end of the court process, they owed $2,520.80 in past due rent, holdover damages, attorneys fees and court costs.
Hrdlicka told The Bee most tenants settle on lower amounts and only a handful of tenants pay what they owe.
The legal fees are still collected from landlords, but Hrdlicka said they do not constitute profit, but rather revenue that goes to pay the many costs of running his business, including rent and the salary and benefits of 13 employees.
In 83% of cases, researchers found, the lawsuit was set off by missed rent. In only 15% of those cases did the tenant owe two or more months of rent.
Hrdlicka said a whole series of “behavioral issues,” like playing loud music late at night or having unauthorized tenants living in the unit, set off the legal process. He said landlords rely on a missed month of rent because it is easier to prove in court.
“There’s always a reason you evict somebody,” he said.
New tenant protection law
The new state law will cap rent hikes at 5% plus inflation annually. It will primarily impact tenants living in large apartment complexes but exempts those living in newer buildings and single-family homes rented out by small property owners, according to Brown.
Hrdlicka said imposing rent control for the first time in the Central Valley would end the affordable prices its residents have been able to enjoy.
“The very fact that they decided to impose a rent cap has caused some (landlords) to panic and I think if they’d left it alone, rents would not have necessarily risen the way they have,” he said.
The residents of Laguna Knolls were told they were being kicked out for renovations. Substantial renovations will still be grounds for an eviction under the new law, but landlords will be expected to provide one month of rent for tenants’ relocation, or waive a month of rent in their current unit. Missed rent, on the other hand, remains lawful grounds for an eviction and does not require relocation assistance.
Several municipalities, including Los Angeles and Milpitas, recently passed no-cause eviction moratoriums to protect tenants before the new law kicks in. In response to the residents’ complaints, the Madera City Council will consider whether to draft a moratorium on Wednesday.
Michelle Aguilar, 43, and her disabled husband said they were barely making rent, but they never missed a payment. She has been scrambling to find a new place in neighboring cities, to no avail.
“When I say there is nothing, there is nothing,” Aguilar said. “I don’t want to live in a tent.”
Santos Garcia, a Madera city councilmember, said some residents would inevitably end up homeless.
“We don’t have enough housing in Madera to take in 30 families. We just don’t have that capacity,” he said. “They’re probably going to live with other family members in crowded conditions, sleeping on the couch. Others that don’t have family will be living on the street, exacerbating a condition we have already in Madera of homelessness.”
Manuela Tobias is a journalist at The Fresno Bee. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.
