Almost 36,000 California Households Got Eviction Notices Last Year

Close to 36,000 California households were hit with eviction notices in the 2021 fiscal year (from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021). According to an article by Lauren Hepler and Raheem Hosseini in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Those numbers don’t include many tenants who left under threat of eviction, negotiated move-out deals or who still owe back rent from the pandemic — groups that advocates warn are hard to track and still growing as emergency state renter protections expire.”

The authors write that “The data comes from the most recent annual report by the Judicial Branch of California and underscores the limits of state efforts to mute the pandemic’s effects on financially vulnerable residents. Renter advocates fear it’s also a preview of evictions to come after two years of upheaval in one of the country’s most expensive places to live.” About 11 percent of the eviction filings were in the San Francisco Bay Area, primarily in Santa Clara, Contra Costa, and San Francisco counties.

“Statewide eviction protections that were cobbled together in real time from gubernatorial executive orders, state judicial decrees, public health orders and legislative action were supposed to buy time for residential tenants struggling to pay rent and other living costs as a result of pandemic economic quakes. The protections were extended multiple times, and finally expired after 27 months on July 1.” Now, the future of tenants across the state is uncertain. According to the National Equity Atlas, 738,000 California households are behind on rent as of May 2022.