California’s COVID eviction moratorium is ending Thursday. Here’s why that’s too soon

If a society’s first duty is to its most vulnerable, California is falling short of a basic obligation. As of Thursday, the state’s eviction moratorium will end with the Legislature out of session, a mountain of crucial rental assistance undistributed and hundreds of thousands of renters facing a deeply uncertain future.

The eviction moratorium has helped keep hundreds of thousands of California tenants housed during the pandemic even if they were unable to pay their rent due to COVID-related hardships. The Legislature has already extended the moratorium twice, coming to an agreement in each case just days before the deadline, but no further reprieve is in the works. The expiration of the moratorium means that as of Nov. 1, landlords can begin to sue tenants for any rent owed.

While protections are in place through March for tenants who apply for state rental assistance, many renters are finding it hard to access the funds in a timely manner. Some cities and counties working through backlogs were forced to close applications for relief and refer renters to the state. But state officials have also struggled to dispense funds ahead of the deadline.

The state has dispensed about $650 million to about 55,000 households, but that’s a small fraction of the more than $5 billion in federal funds available, which were split between the state and localities for distribution. A state audit this month found that California was in jeopardy of forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding because it had been so slow to distribute the assistance.

Fortunately, tenants do continue to enjoy some protections and should not assume they face eviction as of Thursday. Those with past-due rent will be protected from eviction even beyond the moratorium if they have applied for assistance, and landlords are required to seek government help before they evict anyone. The moratorium protected tenants who paid at least 25% of their rent, and state aid may cover back rent in its entirety dating to April 2020.

A separate state law also prohibits so-called no-cause evictions, requiring landlords to provide legal justification for throwing out tenants. And Fresno and other cities have imposed their own eviction moratoriums to protect renters past Thursday, though local jurisdictions ultimately can’t be relied on to respond to a crisis that spans the state and indeed the country.

To add insult to injury, federal supplemental unemployment benefit programs instituted in response to the pandemic also ended this month. About 2.2 million Californians who were receiving unemployment assistance stopped receiving any as a result, according to the state Employment Development Department.

Recent research has found that 744,000 California households, or 7% of the state’s tenants, owe some $3.5 billion in back rent, leaving many of them at risk of losing their housing as the state rolls back pandemic-era protections. A chorus of advocates have expressed alarm at the potential repercussions. The peril should be obvious in a state that is already home to about a quarter of the nation’s homeless population, half those who are unsheltered and among the fewest homes per capita nationwide.

While the eviction moratorium obviously could not last forever, the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom should have had a better plan in place than allowing countless residents to jump without much of a safety net. Letting the eviction moratorium end while the delta variant is still spreading, families are still recovering from the losses of the previous 18 months and the state is still struggling to address a housing and homelessness crisis could prove to be a grave abdication of duty.