UD Day Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles

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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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Blasi, Gary
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University of California
UD Day: Impending Evictions
and Homelessness in Los Angeles
Gary Blasi
UD Day: Impending Evictions
and Homelessness in Los Angeles
Gary Blasi
This volume is part of the Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 series,
published by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
ISBN: 978-1-7347497-8-6
Volume designed and edited by Andrés Carrasquillo.

Cover art by Eden McNutt.
Publication date: May 28, 2020

Foreword: Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19
This report is the first in a series of publications by the UCLA Luskin Institute
on Inequality and Democracy to address the urgent question of housing justice
in the time of COVID-19. Concerned with dispossession and displacement in Los
Angeles, our research and analysis is informed by a global approach to cities and
inequality.
If the Great Depression conjures up images of shanty towns (Hoovervilles)
and endless breadlines, and if the Great Recession is associated with the hollow-
ing-out of cities and neighborhoods through foreclosure, then what is the face of
the COVID-19 pandemic? This important analysis by Gary Blasi, Professor Emer-
itus at UCLA Law and one of the luminaries of public interest law, reveals that a
surge in evictions and homelessness will indubitably be a key dimension of the
present crisis. As the countdown to UD Day, or the filing of evictions through un-
lawful detainer complaints, begins, it is worth keeping in mind that such housing
insecurity is not inevitable. Writing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, housing
policy scholars Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires (2006) emphasized that
“there is no such thing as a natural disaster,” and drew attention to the “long
history of institutional structures and arrangements that have produced current
realities.”1 The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and deepened inequality in cities
such as Los Angeles, with the burden of the crisis carried disproportionately by
poor and working-class communities, especially those of color. But the crisis at
hand is not so much the containment of a virus as it is the inertia of political in-
stitutions to enact social protections for the vulnerable and disadvantaged. What
is to come then will be yet another round in the systematic unhousing of people,
a process that has been underway in Los Angeles for a while now.
But it is precisely such crisis that requires us to consider housing justice.
Inspired by Black Studies scholar, Clyde Woods, we refuse to become “academic
coroners,” using our tools only for “autopsies” or “social triage.”2 Whether in
the time of COVID-19 or in the long arc of struggle in unequal cities, the fo-
cus on housing justice centers those most impacted by crisis. Tenancy, and the
associated payment of rent, can be narrowly conceptualized as a contract, one
that primarily upholds the property rights of landlords. Or, as tenant movements
teach us, tenancy can be understood as the right to housing, which in turn is
foundational to social democracy. It is thus that the LA Tenants Union has long
insisted that what is at hand is not a housing crisis but rather a tenants’ rights
crisis.3 As Professor Blasi meticulously demonstrates, in Los Angeles, these rights
have been, and continue to be, tenuous. The fancy terms used by California and
Los Angeles political executives and lawmakers – evictions moratorium, right of
tenants to sue landlords – for the meager programs they have offered up in the
1 Chester and Squires, There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane
Katrina, 4.
2 Woods, “Life After Death,” 63.
3 Rosenthal, “101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union (You Can’t Do Politics Alone)” in Housing Justice
in Unequal Cities.
3
time of COVID-19 are no substitute for enforceable rights and robust protections.
As the nationwide call for rent and mortgage cancellation grows, whether in the
form of support for Representative Ilhan Omar’s bill or in renewed imaginations
for building an equitable and just housing system, it is crystal-clear that another
way must be made possible. The specter of austerity is no excuse for inaction. As
you read this report, the human and economic costs of a vast surge in evictions
and homelessness will be self-evident. Keeping tenants in their homes would be a
wise public policy choice, especially in a renter-majority city such as Los Angeles.
This report makes the case for how the failure to do so will unleash a devastating
and prolonged crisis. We hope that it will serve as the impetus for action and
change.
Ananya Roy
Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at UCLA
The Meyer and Renee Chair in Inequality and Democracy
Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy
4
Introduction
This paper is part of a larger project by researchers at UCLA working in collabora-
tion with other researchers and with housing justice movements and community
organizations to warn policy makers and the public of the impending humanitar-
ian, social, and political disaster that Los Angeles County now faces and what can
be done to mitigate the damage to Angelenos. That disaster becomes visible when
the current freeze on most residential evictions is lifted and thousands of Los
Angeles County tenants—both individuals and families—face imminent eviction
and homelessness because they are unable to pay rent as it then becomes due.
Those impending waves of evictions and homelessness will arrive in a community
with the second highest percentage of renters in the United States and that was
already facing an unprecedented crisis in the availability and cost of rental hous-
ing, especially for those with the least to spend.
This study focuses on the precarious state of housing for workers in Los An-
geles County who are unemployed and have no replacement income. It does not
address the housing precarity of the much larger number of unemployed tenants
who are unable to pay rent because of the inadequate amount of the income re-
placement they do receive. In addition, where data are unavailable but estimates
from other sources offer a range of possibilities, I have chosen the more optimistic
assumption. For these reasons, the estimates of the scale of the impending waves
of eviction and homelessness are likely to be underestimates. With that under-
standing, the key findings of this study are as follows:
• As of May 9, 2020, approximately 599,000 workers in Los Angeles County

have lost their jobs and have no unemployment insurance or other income
replacement.
• About 449,000 of those unemployed and with no income live in about

365,000 units of rental housing and have long been bearing the second
heaviest rent burdens of all the urban areas in the United States.
• Most of those households lack savings or other resources to use for paying
rent.
• Approximately 558,000 children live in households very unlikely to be able

to pay rent.
• Legal evictions for nonpayment of rent have been frozen since April 6, 2020
by the Judicial Council of California. The Judicial Council or the Governor
can lift that freeze at any time.
• Nearly all of those tenants who are unable to pay rent will face eviction.
• Those facing eviction will be heavily concentrated in communities and

neighborhoods with larger percentages of low-income people of color.
• Within days of that freeze being lifted, thousands of unlawful detainer

(UD), or eviction, complaints will be filed against tenants.
5
• The existing executive orders and ordinances at state and local levels and
ordinances purporting to reduce or delay evictions offer very little effective
protection to tenants who have been unable to obtain and follow legal ad-
vice.
• Without a massive increase in access to both information and legal ser-

vices, most tenants will face eviction within weeks because they are unable
to file a legally sufficient response to the unlawful detainer complaint with-
in 5 business days and have a default judgment entered against them not
long thereafter.
• For those able to avoid a default judgement, nearly all of those who are
forced to defend themselves will lose and be evicted.
• Even before the pandemic, the lack of adequate income to pay rapidly in-
creasing rent was already the leading cause of homelessness in Los Angeles
County.
• Because there are a great many uncertainties regarding the course of the
pandemic, the economy, and the federal and state responses to both, it is
not possible to estimate with any precision how many and how quickly
those tenants who are evicted will become homeless. Unless there is a mas-
sive infusion of federal resources or much more effective state or local leg-
islation to prevent it and assuming that only one third of those evicted
with no resources become homeless, members of approximately 120,000
households in Los Angeles County, including 184,000 children, are likely
to become homeless at least for some period over the next several months.
If social networks and informal resources have escaped the economic dev-
astation, and assuming only one tenth of those evicted become homeless,
those numbers would fall to 36,000 additional homeless households with
56,000 children.
• There is no evidence that state or local leaders have begun to plan for what
now appears to be an inevitable intensification of what was already a hu-
manitarian crisis.
• Without intelligent planning and immediate action, Los Angeles faces the
prospect of many thousands of people, including families with children,
joining the thousands already on the streets or living in their vehicles.
Unless Los Angeles officials take immediate action now, they will then be
forced to scramble to erect something like refugee camps, on a scale never
before seen in the United States. Most of the individuals and families in
those camps, as well as those still left on the street, will be lower income
people of color, especially Black Angelenos.
Between January 2018 and January 2019, the number of unhoused people
in Los Angeles County grew by almost 6,200 people—an annual increase of 12%.4
During the same period the official unemployment rate in the County remained
at historic lows: increasing only from 4.9% to 5.0%.5 In 2019, however, the home-
less count showed high rates of first-time homelessness, 23% in 2018 and 40%
before 2018, with 53% of people experiencing first-time homelessness citing “eco-
nomic hardship” as a leading factor.6 Clearly, then, rising unemployment was
4 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), “2019 Greater Los Angeles County Home-
less Count – Los Angeles County.”
5 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate in Los Angeles County, CA.”
6 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). “2019 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count
Presentation,” 20.
6
not the main driver of the dramatic increase in homelessness last year; rather,
the primary “economic hardship” causing rising homelessness was the dramatic
increase in rents over the past several years, accompanied by stagnant wages. In
2018, the Economic Roundtable reported that nearly 600,000 Los Angeles County
residents were not only in poverty, but were also in households spending 90% or
more of their income on housing, putting them at severe risk of eviction and, in
many cases, homelessness. 7 The dual crises of extreme poverty and high housing
costs in Los Angeles have long continued unabated, even in times of extremely
low unemployment, leaving poor and working class Angelenos especially vulner-
able to the effects of the pandemic and massive economic downturn that are now
upon us.
Those vulnerabilities are especially acute in some communities as a result
of the also long-standing patterns of inequality in Los Angeles, including those
reflected in the dramatic overconcentration of homelessness among Black An-
gelenos, who are eleven (11) times more likely to be homeless than White An-
gelenos.8 While the COVID-19 pandemic portends increased housing insecurity
across the region, such impacts, especially in the form of evictions, will most
likely be concentrated in vulnerable neighborhoods. A 2019 HCID-LA report es-
timated eviction risk through indices of tenant vulnerability, neighborhood dis-
placement, and housing condition and identified at-risk zip codes (see Appendix
1). The COVID-19 pandemic will certainly deepen such crisis, with disproportion-
ate impact on renters in low-income neighborhoods. A recent report by Paul Ong
and colleagues develops a renter vulnerability index which takes into account
high rent burdens, job displacement due to retail and service sector closures, and
exclusion from relief funds, such as the CARES Act individual rebates. The report
finds that
“the most vulnerable neighborhoods have more Latinx renters and fewer
white renters; conversely the least vulnerable neighborhoods have more
white renters and fewer Latinx. Twice as many black Angelenos reside in
high-vulnerability neighborhoods than in low-vulnerability areas. More-
over, immigrants are more relatively concentrated in higher-vulnerability
neighborhoods” (see Appendix 2). 9
Indeed, across California, and especially in Los Angeles, the perfect storm of
high unemployment and high rent burdens is brewing. Analyzing initial unem-
ployment insurance claims filed during the COVID-19 emergency, the California
Policy Lab finds Los Angeles to be especially hard hit, with such claims consti-
tuting 25.5% of the labor force of the county.10 Needless to say, such claims only
represent a partial picture of workers in crisis, especially in Los Angeles where
many communities rely on informal labor in sectors such as street-vending. The
reopening of the economy only threatens to worsen the situation, as “essential
workers” as well as those in the retail and service sectors return to work under
conditions of precarious employment, public-transit dependence, and hazard. A
7 Flaming et al, “Escape Routes: Meta-Analysis of Homelessness in L.A.,” 3.
8 Within the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, the odds of a person of the same Census racial
category being homeless are as follows: for Black people, 1 in 44 and for White people, 1 in 479.
The Los Angeles Continuum of Care includes all of Los Angeles County except the cities of Long
Beach, Pasadena and Glendale. The homeless racial data relied upon come from LAHSA, “2019
Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count – Los Angeles Continuum of Care.” Comparison popula-
tion data come from U.S. Census QuickFacts service for Los Angeles County, subtracting the
relevant data for the three cities in the County that are not in the Continuum of Care.
9 Ong, et al, “Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis in Los Angeles: Identifying Renter-Vul-
nerable Neighborhoods.”
10 Hedin, et al, “An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the
COVID-19 Pandemic,” 6.
7
recent report by Race Counts tracks how COVID-19 is increasingly taking hold in
predominantly Black and Latinx communities in Los Angeles. It finds that “com-
munities with a higher percentage of residents under 200% of the Federal Poverty
Line have 2.29 times as many cases as communities with a lower percentage of
residents in poverty.”11
Unemployment and the Coming Waves of Eviction

Nearly all eviction cases are for non-payment of rent. In most cases, the tenant
simply has insufficient money. In other cases, the tenant is willing to pay rent, but
the landlord believes that another tenant will pay more rent and seeks to remove
the tenant to make that possible. In order to assess how many evictions are likely
and when they are likely to come, we need to know something about the num-
bers of tenants who will be unable to pay the rent and when they may arrive at
that point. Those estimates depend, in turn, on (a) the number who have lost their
income; (b) what income replacement (e.g. unemployment insurance) they are
able to obtain; (c) how quickly they can find employment as parts of the economy
reopen; (d) and their financial reserves. Some of these factors have a very high de-
gree of uncertainty. For those that are most uncertain, including possible changes
in income replacement programs or how different sectors of the economy may
recover, we assume no change from the current situation.
The First Wave: Unemployed Workers with No

Replacement Income
Our colleagues at the California Policy Lab (CPL) have analyzed unemployment
insurance (UI) claims filed between March 15 and May 9, 2020, during which
period 1,198,141 Los Angeles County workers filed UI claims. 12 Many more claims
were and will be filed after May 9. In any case, the number of UI applicants un-
derstates the number of people who lost their jobs, many of whom do not apply
for UI benefits. These include the 13% of the labor force in Los Angeles County
who are undocumented and thus ineligible for UI benefits as well as those who
are self-employed in the formal economy. 13 There are many reasons that those
who are eligible for UI may not apply. They may not think they have not worked
enough hours in enough quarters to qualify. For those who may have worked
enough hours but earned minimum wage, the benefits to which they are entitled
may not seem worth the effort compared to spending the same energy looking
for another job, particularly if they were unaware of potential supplemental ben-
efits during the COVID-19 emergency. In this emergency, they may have been
unable to apply online, and if they did, they may have given up after spending
hours trying to gain access through the state’s aging and overstressed computer
system. Whatever the reasons, as the CPL researchers note, “Typically, not all
unemployed workers apply for UI. If one assumes the unemployed apply to UI
benefits roughly at the same rate as during the Great Recession, the underlying
total increase in the rate of unemployment could be one-and-a half times as large
as the total fraction of UI claimants of the labor force.” Applying the historical
correction factor to account for non-filers, the true number of newly unemployed
workers through May 9, 2020 in Los Angeles County would be about 1.8 million.
11 Cabildo, et al, “How Race, Class, and Place Fuel a Pandemic.”
COVID-19 Pandemic.”
13 Based on estimated undocumented labor force of 656,000 workers from Migration Policy
Institute, Profile of Unauthorized Population, Los Angeles County, CA, and total estimated total
workforce of 5,004,400 in the County from California Employment Development Department,
Labor Market Information.
8
Of those, 599,000 would be expected to neither apply for nor receive any replace-
ment income from state or federal sources.
Of course, some workers who do receive Unemployment Insurance (UI) or
the federally funded supplemental Federal Pandemic Unemployment Insurance
(FPUC) will also face eviction, especially in single-earner households with chil-
dren whose rent exceeds the combination of UI and FPUC. The number of such
households will rise sharply if the FPUC program is not extended past the current
end date in July. The analysis below makes the very optimistic assumption that all
unemployed workers receiving UI/FPUC have enough income to pay their rent
as it becomes due. The starting number for the analysis includes only the 599,000
workers who are unemployed but have no income replacement.
Unemployment across California in this pandemic crisis is especially high
in the lower-wage sectors of the economy and among those with less education.
Nearly one-third of all claims have come from just two low wage sectors, Accom-
modation & Food Services and Retail Trade.14 Two-thirds of UI claims have come
from workers with no more education than a high school diploma or GED.15 From
these and other data, it is clear that the proportion of the unemployed receiving
UI benefits skews significantly toward those with lower income. There is every
reason to believe that the unemployed who do not apply for UI benefits, notably
the 13% of workers in Los Angeles County who are ineligible because of immigra-
tion status, skew even further toward those with lower incomes. Although there
is no available data regarding the housing status of the currently unemployed,
we can infer that the unemployed, particularly those receiving no benefits, are
much more likely to be renters rather than homeowners. In Los Angeles County
54.2% of housing units are rentals, the second highest rate of any metropolitan
area in the country. 16 Given the heavy skewing of unemployment toward the
lower end of the education and income spectrum, along with the very high cost
of homeownership in Los Angeles, a conservative estimate is that at least 75%
of those currently unemployed and receiving no assistance live in renter house-
holds. From that assumption, we can calculate that the number of unemployed
workers with no replacement income in rental housing is at least 449,000.
It is possible, of course, that some of those unemployed renters with no
income live in a household with another worker who is receiving UI benefits or
some other income sufficient to pay the rent for the entire household. In Los An-
geles County, 37.7% of households with at least one person in the labor force are
households with two adults.17 The assumption that leads to the lowest estimate
of the number of households unable to pay rent is that each of those households
has two unemployed adults with no replacement income, or about 85,000 such
households. The remaining 62.3% of renter households with one adult worker in
the household comprise about 280,000 households with no income to pay rent.
Combining the two sets of households leads to the estimate that there are at least
365,000 renter households with no adult who is employed or has sufficient re-
placement income to pay rent.18
14 Hedin, et al., “An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the
COVID-19 Pandemic,” 26 (Figure 11).
15 Ibid., 5 (Table 12).
16 U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Los Angeles County, California.”
17 Analysis of American Community Survey, Public Use Microdata Sample 2014-2018, family type
and employment status, courtesy of Dan Flaming, Economic Roundtable.
18 For purposes of this analysis, the potential effects of welfare programs are not included at this
stage of the analysis because the amounts provided are generally insufficient to pay rent. For
one person households, the General Relief benefit amount is $221 per month. For households
with children, CalWorks provides a grant for a three-person household of $785. Moreover, a
large fraction of those not applying for UI are undocumented workers who are also ineligible for
welfare
9
Some lower income renter households with no income may still have other
assets with which to pay rent, including savings or cash on hand, even though
they have been paying a very high proportion their income on rent in recent
years. Data specific to Los Angeles is not available, but studies conducted by the
Federal Reserve on a national sample can provide some insight. At a time of his-
torically low unemployment in 2019, the Fed reported that 38% of Americans did
not have the resources to pay an unexpected expenditure of $400.19 In the current
crisis, that percentage has almost certainly risen in Los Angeles and elsewhere, as
households without income struggled to secure food and other necessities.
Households also often have other kinds of resources to which they can turn
for help, in the form of familial and social networks of mutual support. Some will
no doubt be able to call on those resources in this time of crisis, as they often do
in times of personal crisis. But this crisis is not personal; it is more widespread
than any we have faced in the past 90 years. That means that familial and social
networks, especially those of lower income Angelenos, are also under great eco-
nomic stress and will be unable to help. Thus, there is little basis to believe that a
significant number of renter households with no income will obtain enough re-
sources to pay their full rent due from social networks for more than a month or
two. Therefore, we leave the estimate at 365,000 renter households in imminent
danger of eviction once the current restrictions on evictions expire.
It is very important to note here that there are, on average, 1.53 children
in renter households with someone in the labor force.20 That means it is not only
the adults whose lives will be disrupted by dislocation, but also the lives of ap-
proximately 558,000 children in those same households. Whether or not eviction
leads to homelessness, we know that eviction itself causes grave harms to fam-
ilies, and especially to children.21 Whatever the costs of reducing both eviction
and homelessness are, however measured, they are far less than the costs of al-
lowing families and children to lose their homes.
As explained in the next section, the only effective limitation on evictions
that has held back the impending wave of evictions is the action taken by the
California Judicial Council to stop all courts in the state from issuing the criti-
cal document necessary to proceed with an eviction case, the Summons on Un-
lawful Detainer Complaint. The day after that restriction is lifted, the very large
wave of evictions now just over the horizon will come into view. The current
Judicial Council Order will expire on the earliest of the two following dates: (a)
90 days after the Governor declares that the state of emergency related to the
COVID-19 pandemic is lifted; or (b) the order is amended or repealed by the
Judicial Council.22 This critical restriction on proceeding with eviction cases will
almost certainly be lifted by amendment or repeal of the Judicial Council, if only
because the Governor is unlikely to declare the state of emergency related to the
pandemic ended in the foreseeable future. To do so would end all his emergency
powers, which no rational executive would do until there is no further need of
them. No one can say when the tsunami of evictions will arrive. We can say that
it is coming.
The Second Wave: When Income Replacements End

Recall that the previous section assumed that those swept up in the first wave of
evictions will be those who have no income to pay current rent due because they
19 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. House-
holds in 2019, Featuring Supplemental Data from April 2020,” 3.
20 U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Los Angeles County, California.”
21 Desmond and Kimbro, “Evictions Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health.”
22 Judicial Council, “Emergency Rules Related to COVID-19,” Rule 13(e), effective April 20, 2020,
www.courts.ca.gov/documents/appendix-i.pdf
10
have neither income from a job nor from UI or FPUC. But for a great many more
households with unemployed members, the replacement income currently avail-
able may well not be enough to pay rent due, in the second most heavily rent-bur-
dened metropolitan area in the United States. 23 Importantly, an offer of less than
the full rent is not a defense to eviction for nonpayment. Ironically, lower income
workers typically pay less rent, so those who UI/FPUC benefits may be better able
to pay that lower rent than those had a higher income before the current crisis.
As noted earlier, because the current income supplement regime expires
in July 2020, this study focuses only on those with no replacement income—a
situation that is highly unlikely to be changed by any proposal now under active
consideration in the U.S Congress. Under these circumstances, all we can say
with some certainty is that when income replacements end or are significantly
reduced, Los Angeles will face a second wave of evictions not long thereafter. It
is certainly possible that second wave will be much larger than the first, given
that two-thirds of unemployed workers are now entirely dependent on UI/FPUC
payments. For reasons explained in the next section, the size of neither the first
nor subsequent waves of evictions will be much reduced by the current state and
local limitations on evictions, all of which promise more than they will deliver in
practice.
The Process of Eviction and the Illusory Promise of

Existing State and Local Restrictions
The Eviction Process in Ordinary Times

While many civil cases take years to resolve, unlawful detainer cases move very
quickly. Official statistics for Los Angeles Superior Court (LASC) are difficult to
obtain; LASC is the only non-rural county court system that does not provide
the California Judicial Council with this time-to-resolution information and con-
sistently refuses requests for eviction case data under public records laws.24 But
across California, as of the last reporting through 2018, nearly two thirds (62%) of
eviction cases were disposed of within 30 days and 77% ended within 45 days.25
The great majority of all of the cases that were closed within 30 days were cases in
which a default judgment was entered against a tenant who did not file a response
to an unlawful detainer complaint within 5 days.26 Despite recent efforts in Los
Angeles to provide more legal assistance to tenants facing eviction, only a small
proportion of tenants in eviction cases are represented by lawyers, compared to
95% of landlords.27 This is not surprising, given that there are in Los Angeles
County approximately 1.9 million rental units, more than 40,000 eviction cases
filed in the last year before the pandemic and about 50 attorneys who specialize
in eviction defense.28
23 Freddie Mac Multifamily, “Rental Burden by Metro,” 8.
24 A pending bill in the California Legislature, AB 2271, would compel LASC to make public at least
some data regarding unlawful detainer cases (as amended in the Assembly through May 4, 2020.
25 Judicial Council of California, “2019 Court Statistics Report: Statewide Caseload Trends 2008-09
Through 2017-18,” 95.
26 In a random assignment study, unassisted tenants in Los Angeles failed to file an answer in 73%
of cases. NPC Research, “Evaluation of the Sargent Shriver Civil Counsel Act (AB590) Housing
Pilot Projects,” iii.
27 Ibid., 53.
28 Estimate of eviction specialists based on interviews with three such specialists. Rental units cal-
culated as non-owner-occupied units from data at U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Los Angeles
County, California.”
11
When a residential tenant in California fails to pay all rent due by the
agreed due date (most commonly, the first of the month), the landlord can begin
the process of evicting the tenant the next day. The process begins with delivering
or mailing a written notice informing the tenant to either pay the rent due within
three days or vacate the room, apartment, or house. If the tenant does not pay the
full rent due by the 4th day after receiving the notice, the landlord or landlord’s
attorney can file with the Superior Court a document called an unlawful detain-
er complaint, which begins the eviction proceeding. The great majority of UD
complaints are filed by attorneys on behalf of their landlord clients. When the
UD complaint is filed, the court clerk issues and gives to the landlord or attorney
a document called a Summons – Unlawful Detainer/Eviction. The landlord or
attorney then arranges for a copy of the UD complaint and the summons to be
“served” on the tenant, most often by physical delivery of those documents to the
tenant. The text of the Summons provides, in both English and Spanish, a notice
to the tenant that the tenant has been sued and some additional information
about the nature of written response the tenant must file within 5 business days
in order to avoid losing the case by default.
If the tenant does not file and serve on the landlord or landlord’s attor-
ney within 5 business days a document responding to the complaint, the land-
lord or attorney can file with the court a “Declaration for Default Judgment by
Court,” asking the court to enter an immediate judgment for possession against
the tenant. The landlord can then take that judgment to the Sheriff and ask the
Sheriff to enforce the judgment, if necessary, by physically removing the tenant.
Before physically evicting the tenant, the Sheriff must post a notice on the prem-
ises advising the tenant that if they do not leave the within 5 days the Sheriff will
remove them. The Sheriff can then return on the 6th day thereafter and remove
the tenant.
If the tenant does file an answer or other response, no judgment is entered
until either a trial or a settlement. The answer must respond to the factual alle-
gations in the complaint and add any other relevant defenses (“affirmative de-
fenses”) that the tenant may have under the law. Before filing an answer or other
response, the tenant must pay a filing fee of a $240.00. Tenants unable to pay the
fee can seek a fee waiver from the court by filling out a lengthy form setting forth
the reason they cannot pay the required fee.
As soon as the tenant files an answer, the landlord can ask the court to set
a trial date. By statute [C.C.P. § 1170.5(a)] the trial must be set within 20 days of
the request. At trial, tenants without lawyers almost always lose. In one study of
a random sample of unlawful detainer cases in Los Angeles Superior Court, not
one of 151 tenants who represented themselves prevailed at trial. Moreover, those
unrepresented tenants who settled on the day of trial did no better than if they
had gone to trial and lost.29 These outcomes are not difficult to explain. Tenants
with no training and little to no preparation can reasonably be expected to put
on sufficient evidence to win in only one category of non-payment cases: those
in which the tenant actually did pay the rent within 3 days of receiving the pay-
or-quit notice and has a receipt or a convincing witness who saw cash change
hands, or saw the tenant offer to pay the rent and the landlord refuse to accept
it. Virtually all other defenses require the marshalling of significant evidence and
an understanding of often complicated law. As we explain below, the potential
evidence and law have gotten even more complicated as a result of restrictions on
some types of evictions by executive orders and ordinances at the state, county
and local levels.
Those orders and ordinances only highlight the critical role of legal assis-
tance in determining the outcome of evictions. The difference that lawyers make
appears in administrative data collected by the single largest provider of legal
services to tenant in eviction cases, the Shriver Project coalition of eviction de-
29 Blasi, “How Much Access? How Much Justice?,” 865, 869.
12
fense attorneys from four legal services organizations: Neighborhood Legal Ser-
vices, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Inner City Law Center, and Pub-
lic Counsel. As provided in the government contracts that fund it, the Shriver
Project collects detailed data on the unlawful detainer cases it handles, which are
compiled and evaluated by an independent firm. Analysis of evaluation data com-
piled by the outside firm for 840 unlawful detainer cases handled during the pe-
riod from October 2018 to September 2019 revealed the following: The attorneys
identified at least one affirmative defense in 96% of cases, including habitability
violations (in 89% of cases), illegal retaliation (57%), and rent control violations
(67%). In 96% of cases handled, the landlord was represented by counsel. Almost
all (95%) of the cases were ultimately either dismissed or settled, most often by a
reduction in rent owed and more time to move to other housing. In 28% of cases,
the tenants stayed in their current housing, which had been the primary goal
of 39% of tenants when they were first interviewed. In those terms, the tenants
achieved their initial housing goal in about 3 of 4 cases.
The Eviction Process and the Pandemic

As of this writing most, but not all, evictions in California have been effectively
suspended by the California Judicial Council, the policy body of the state’s judicial
branch chaired by the Chief Justice. Effective April 8, 2020, the Council directed
local courts to stop issuing a “summons on a complaint for unlawful detainer
unless the court finds, in its discretion and on the record, that the action is neces-
sary to protect public health and safety.”30 This simple action made it impossible
for a landlord to proceed with an unlawful detainer case for nonpayment of rent,
because without a summons the landlord cannot effectively serve the tenant.
Landlords can still file the UD complaint in nonpayment cases, and they can still
file and fully litigate cases alleging that the eviction is necessary “to protect public
health and safety.” By its terms, the emergency rules are in place until 90 days af-
ter the Governor declares the current emergency lift, or until the Judicial Council
modifies the rule. The latter can happen at any time.
Interviews with legal services and other attorneys indicate some landlords
and their lawyers are attempting to be creative with the legal tools still available.
First, a landlord can file and obtain a summons on an unlawful detainer complaint
alleging health and safety violations; one attorney described a complaint in which
two tenants, a married couple, were allegedly seen within 6 feet of each other in
the common area of the apartment building. Even in such overreaching cases, a
tenant who does not respond by filing an answer within 5 business days, perhaps
because of publicity regarding a freeze on eviction cases, will still face possible
eviction on a default judgment, unless the degree of overreaching is spelled out in
detail in the landlord’s own UD complaint.31
Second, since landlords can still file and receive a court-stamped certified
copy of their UD complaint, some landlords have “served” the tenant with a copy
of the complaint without a summons, but with an “informational” flyer contain-
ing language similar to that in the summon, explaining what a tenant must do to
avoid eviction. In at least two cases, a landlord printed a copy of the summons
form from the court’s website and “served” the purported summons and com-
plaint on the tenant. While in extreme cases such tactics might rise to the level
of fraud or forgery, the tactic can at least put the landlord in a strong position to
convince the tenant to move, or to enter into a payment agreement the tenant be-
lieves they must sign to avoid eviction. The judicial council’s emergency rules do
30 Judicial Council, “Emergency Rules Related to COVID-19,” Rule 1(b), effective April 6, 2020,
www.courts.ca.gov/documents/appendix-i.pdf.
31 Judicial Council, “Emergency Rules Related to COVID-19,” Rule 13(c), effective April 6, 2020,
www.courts.ca.gov/documents/appendix-i.pdf.
13
not restrict pre-eviction agreements, and some of the state and local rules appear
to actively encourage them, as discussed below.
State and Local Government Restrictions are Ineffective
Current state and local government restrictions will have little effect on the
numbers of tenants being evicted in UD cases, because some restrictions depend
upon tenants knowing their details and complying with detailed requirements;
few tenants—especially those at immediate risk—will be able to comply with
these requirements without assistance. The vast majority of defendant tenants
have had and will continue to have very little access to timely legal assistance.
Provisions of executive orders and local ordinances that seem reasonable in the
abstract quickly seem less so once one examines the details as they will unfold in
the real world.
Most tenants will lose by default
The threshold requirement to take advantage of the protections afforded by

these orders that the defendant tenant file an answer or other responsive pleading
within 5 business days after being served with a complaint. As noted above, even
in normal times nearly two-thirds of tenants fail to file and answer and never
have a chance to present any defense to a court. These are not normal times. Ten-
ants who are expected to file an answer within 5 days may have been without an
income for months, have depleted any savings they may have had and are relying
on food banks and other charity to survive, and who are trying their best to avoid
themselves or their families from becoming infected with the COVID-19 virus.
And filing an answer to a UD complaint requires that a tenant in these
circumstances must do all the following within 5 business days after receiving a
summons and complaint:
(1) fully understand what they must do or seek information from already
overwhelmed legal services provider;
(2) locate, download, and print a form answer or generate their own an-
swer in a very specific typed format;
(3) complete not only the standard parts of the form answer, 32 which are
themselves not easy to understand, but state in their own language the
local government order, regulation, or ordinance that affords them a
defense related to COVID-19 and
(4) all the facts necessary to constitute a defense under the that order, reg-
ulation, or ordinance related to COVID-19;
(5) make a copy of the completed answer to serve to the landlord’s attor-
ney;
(6) find and properly complete a proof of service by mail form and attach
that proof of service to the complaint;
(7) find someone other than the tenant who is over the age of 18 to mail the
copy of the complaint and proof of service form to the landlord’s attor-
ney and then sign the proof of service form under penalty of perjury;
(8) travel to the courthouse in required protective gear with a check in the
amount of $240—or prepare to go through a complicated procedure to
seek a waiver of court fees;
(9) file the answer as directed by court personnel.
Highly resourced tenants with computers and printers and the money to
pay an electronic filing service could do the above more easily and without leav-
32 A copy of the approved form Answer to Unlawful Detainer Complaint is in Appendix 3.
14
ing their “safer at home” location. But the tenants at highest risk of eviction are
unlikely to have access to expensive electronic equipment and the funds to pay
both court fees and electronic filing service fees. There is thus no reason to be-
lieve that there will be a decline in the very high historical tenant default rate in
unlawful detainer cases.
Restrictions on evictions offer little protection
Since March 2020 Governor Newsom, the County Board of Supervisors,

the City of Los Angeles and more than 48 other cities in Los Angeles County
have issued orders or ordinances providing some temporary protection to tenants
from evictions. In order to obtain the benefit of those orders and ordinances, a
tenant must both file an answer and indicate in the answer that those order or
ordinances apply to them. Completing and filing such an answer is a daunting
task for most tenants. In addition, if the answer filed does not raise as an affirma-
tive defense the argument that they are within the protection of one or more of
these laws, they will not be able to raise that defense thereafter at trial. Moreover,
if they do not do so but fail to deny that they owe rent, the landlord’s attorney
can obtain a judgment long before any trial date by filing a motion for summary
judgment. Thus, the barriers to effectively relying on state or local protections are
not insignificant.
Unfortunately, even if they are effectively asserted in the tenant’s answer,
the state and local laws restricting evictions offer very little protection in the real
world of unlawful detainer litigation.
(1) Governor Newsom’s Executive Orders
The least effective restrictions on evictions are those contained in the Gov-
ernor’s Executive Order N-28-20 (March 16, 2020) and Executive Order N-37-20
(March 27, 2020).33 The order extends limited protections only to a narrow range
of tenants who can meet all of the following requirements: (1) the eviction is for
nonpayment of rent; (2) the tenant paid the landlord rent all rent that was due
as of March 27, 2020; (3) the tenant cannot pay the full amount of rent due be-
cause of the COVID-19 pandemic; and (4) the tenant notified the landlord of their
inability to pay no later than seven days after rent was due. The tenants must
also retain evidence of inability in the form of documents “such as termination
notices, payroll checks, pay stubs, bank statements, medical bills, or signed letters
or statements from an employer or supervisor explaining the tenant’s changed
financial circumstances.” Extremely few tenants can be expected to both file an
answer asserting compliance with all these requirements and to produce such ev-
idence without assistance. The Governor’s orders will have little to no impact on
evictions in Los Angeles County, because of the marginally more effective actions
of the County Board of Supervisors and the actions of the local governments of
the City of Los Angeles and 48 other cities in the county. Unless extended, the
Governor’s orders expire on May 31, 2020.
(2) City of Los Angeles
Tenants in the City of Los Angeles face lower barriers to asserting a

COVID-19 defense than those who can rely only on the Governor’s actions, but
those barriers are nonetheless real. On March 15, March 23, and March 30, Mayor
Garcetti issued executive orders restricting evictions and providing other protec-
tions to tenants. On March 31, 2020, the Mayor approved Ordinance 186565, ad-
opted by the City Council on March 27, 2020.34 The ordinance prohibits evictions
33 Exec. Order N-28-20 (March 16, 2020); Exec. Order N-37-20 (March 27, 2020).
34 The ordinance established a new Article 14.6 to Chapter IV of the Los Angeles Municipal Code
(LAMC), commencing at Section 49.99.
15
of Los Angeles tenants for “non-payment of rent during the Local Emergency
Period if the tenant is unable to pay rent due to circumstances related to the
COVID-19 pandemic” and explicitly provides that “tenants may use the protec-
tions afforded in this section as an affirmative defense in an unlawful detainer
action.”35 Unlike the Governor’s orders, the City of Los Angeles ordinance does
not require specific notice to the landlord or the maintenance of documentation.
But in order to avoid eviction, the great majority who represent themselves will
nevertheless have to convince a judge that their nonpayment of rent was directly
connected to COVID-19 and not just the general collapse of the local economy.
Those who lost jobs near the beginning of the pandemic may have an easier time
making a more direct connection, but many will have lost jobs because of a long
series of falling dominoes in the economy. Even those with lawyers may find that
a challenging task.
The City of Los Angeles ordinance also prohibits evictions beyond those
for nonpayment, including “no-fault” evictions, those under the Ellis Act (allow-
ing evictions when the landlords intends to remove the property from the rental
market), and evictions based on unauthorized occupants, pets or a nuisance re-
lated to COVID-19. Finally, while the ordinance does not relieve a tenant of any
obligation to pay rent, it allows a tenant to “repay any past due rent” within the 12
months following the date the Mayor declare an end to the local emergency. Un-
less extended, limitations on evictions for nonpayment in the City of Los Angeles
will end on the date the Mayor declares an end to the local emergency. Failure
to pay any rent coming due after that date can serve as the basis of an immediate
3-day notice to pay rent or quit, and the filing of an unlawful detainer complaint 4
days later. Assuming the tenant can pay the rent on the date due and does so for
the next 12 months, the tenant will face eviction on that if they have not paid all
back rent that had accrued before the emergency began. Accordingly, the City of
Los Angeles may expect to see another smaller second wave of evictions one year
after the first and largest wave.
The most recent City effort to respond to the expected surge of evictions
are the provisions of Ordinance 186606, enacted on May 6, 2020. Rather than
preventing evictions, this effort provides that a tenant can sue a landlord who
violates the provisions of the prior ordinance, after first giving the landlord 15
days’ notice. The threat of litigation is effective only to the degree that a landlord
believes that the tenant will be able to persuade a lawyer to take such a case on
a contingency basis. The number of such lawyers in Los Angeles County who
might be likely to do so is extremely limited. Perhaps a very unsophisticated
landlord might be deterred by lawyer’s letter threatening litigation, but that, too,
requires a lawyer.
(3) County of Los Angeles
On March 19, 2020, the Chair of the County Board of Supervisors, Kathryn
Barger, issued an executive order placing a moratorium on evictions for nonpay-
ment of rent on two conditions: (1) the tenant “demonstrates an inability to pay
rent and/or related charges due to financial impacts related to COVID-19, the
state of emergency regarding COVID-19, or following government-recommended
COVID-19 precautions” and (2) the tenant “has provided notice to the Landlord
within seven (7) days after the date that rent was due, unless extenuating cir-
cumstances exist, that the Tenant is unable to pay.”36 On April 14, 2020, the full
35 Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) Section 49.99.2. A recent amendment to the Munici-
pal Code also allows tenants to sue their landlords if the landlord violates the ordinance. The
effectiveness of such a provision is extremely limited unless there are significant numbers of
attorneys to take such small cases on contingency.
36 County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, “Executive Order of the Chair of the County of Los
Angeles Board of Supervisors Following Proclamation of Existence of a Local Health Emergency
Regarding Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19),” Section 1(a).
16
Board of Supervisors passed a resolution amending the March 19 order, which

the Board had ratified on March 31, 2020. In the amendment, the full Board add-
ed some additional specific circumstances constituting “financial impacts” relat-
ed to COVID-19. Those circumstances do include loss of employment, but only
those that result from business closure or other economic or employer impacts of
COVID-19.” As with the action by the City of Los Angeles, the County executive
order appears to require that the tenant prove the causal connection between
the job loss and COVID-19, which will in many cases be the result of a cascading
chain of events of which the tenant can provide little proof. The order does re-
quire the landlord to accept the tenant’s self-certification that the tenant is unable
to pay rent, but that provision occurs in Section 4, pertaining to repayment of
back rent and in any case does not refer to self-certification of the reasons the
tenant cannot pay rent. The full Board left in place the requirement that in order
to be protected by the order, the tenant must give the landlord notice within
seven days of the rent falling due. As with the City’s ordinance, the County’s or-
der thus has technical procedural loopholes through which most tenants can be
expected to fall.
(4) Other cities in Los Angeles County
The County’s executive order, as amended on April 14, 2020, applies not
only to the unincorporated areas of the County, but also to incorporated cities
that have not themselves adopted similar ordinances or orders. As of May 6, 2020,
at least 48 of the 88 incorporated cities in the County of Los Angeles have enacted
similar laws. The County order exempts those cities but does apply to all incorpo-
rated cities not taken such action.37 The nature and scope of the ordinances in all
48 cities is beyond the scope of this study.
The Eviction Outbreak on “UD Day”: The Day the

Judicial Council Allows Issuance of an Unlawful
Detainer Summons
As noted in the previous section, many unlawful detainer proceedings alleging
threats to public health and safety have already been filed and litigated in the Los
Angeles Superior Court, under the exemption from the freeze on the issuanc-
es of summons in such cases. Moreover, nothing in the Judicial Council order
prohibits the filing of an unlawful detainer complaint on any other basis during
the declared emergency. Neither does the City of Los Angeles ordinance nor the
Los Angeles County Executive Order forbid the filing of UD complaints, even in
nonpayment cases related to COVID-10. Rather these laws prohibit only the ul-
timate potential result—eviction—in those few cases tenants will have been able
to successfully defend for reasons explained above.38 The Governor’s Executive
Order of March 27, 2020, (which expires unless extended on May 31, 2020) does
even less, merely extending the tenant’s time to respond to the summons and
complaint from 5 days to 60 days, and then only for tenants who have given the
landlord a timely written notice meeting specific criteria and retained “verifiable
documentation” as to the COVID-19 cause of the nonpayment.39 To summarize,
there is not and has never been a prohibition on a landlord’s filing an unlawful de-
tainer complaint and preparing to litigate that case immediately once the Clerk of
37 Ibid., Section 1.
38 LAMC Section 49.999.2 provides only that “No Owner shall evict a residential tenant for
non-payment of rent during the Local Emergency Period if the tenant is unable to pay rent due
to circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
39 Exec. Order N-37-20 (March 27, 2020), Section 1.
17
the Los Angeles Superior Court issues a Summons on that complaint. The number
of such cases already filed and merely awaiting a summons is unknown, but local
officials should be asking the Los Angeles Superior Court to make that number
public so that they can prepare for the consequences.
There is every reason to expect a dramatic “outbreak” of eviction cases only
a few days after “UD Day,” the day the Judicial Council first permits the issuance
of a summons in unlawful detainer cases. Such permission can come either 90
days after the Governor declares that the state of emergency has ended or on the
day set by amendment by the Judicial Council of Emergency Rule 1(b). There is
little possibility that Governor will declare the current emergency ended before
the Judicial Council amends the Emergency Rule. If the Governor were to declare
and end to the emergency, he would immediately lose all his emergency powers
to deal with every other aspect of the pandemic in California. The Judicial Coun-
cil, however, has much narrower concerns and will be under enormous pressure
to allow the courts to begin processing the huge backlog of the either inevitable
or already filed eviction cases, now held back only by the emergency freeze on the
issuance of the summons.
If “UD Day” were to come now, the number of renter households at high
risk of eviction is 365,000. That expected number will rise dramatically, if there
is any reduction in the income replacement programs that currently help many
tenants to meet their monthly rent obligations. It is even more certain that the
odds of eviction will continue to rise as those unemployed workers not receiving
UI or FPUC completely exhaust any resources they have or can obtain from their
social networks.
There are other methodologies of estimation of potential evictions from un-
employment and economic data that may produce lower estimates. Some of them
involve using statistical regression techniques on data from past periods. One lim-
itation of those techniques is that they must assume that the present resembles
the past, at least as regards the main causal connections and processes reflected in
the data used in the regression. That is not a good assumption for the current pe-
riod, which resembles nothing we have seen since the quite different world of the
Great Depression. The period that comes closest was the Great Recession. In the
worst full year of the Great Recession (2009) there were in California about 3.8
million claims for unemployment. This year, over 4.6 million initial claims were
filed statewide in just the eight weeks between March 15th and May 9th.40 Though
we are truly in uncharted waters, we can see what is coming without much more
effective interventions to help renters stay in their homes. Even if the number of
evictions filed over the next few months turns out to be only a fraction of those
projected above, the staggering number of Angelenos without housing is about to
get much worse.
From Eviction to Homelessness

In the previous sections, we set out the connections between unemployment and
eviction. In this section we address the connection between evictions and home-
lessness. Just as not everyone who loses income is evicted, not everyone evicted
becomes homeless. Just as loss of income can lead to eviction through a process
with many contingencies, as discussed in the prior section, so too are there differ-
ent paths leading from eviction to homelessness. Almost no one who is evicted
goes directly from their lost housing to a sidewalk encampment. There are typi-
cally several steps along the way, which vary for each person or family. Some can
find shelter or temporary housing provided through private organizations or local
government, which operate primarily through contracts with nonprofit organi-
COVID-19 Pandemic,” 2.
18
zations. But of all urban areas in the United States, Los Angeles has, by far, the
greatest number of unhoused people for whom there is no such shelter or tem-
porary housing. Of the 58,936 homeless people identified in Los Angeles County
in the 2019, 44,214 lacked shelter of any kind, up 12% from the 39,396 unsheltered
people counted in 2018.41
Those without shelter make do the best they can. People with some money
but not enough to pay a security deposit or first month’s rent can stay in a cheap
motel or hotel room for as long as they can pay the daily or weekly rate. For
others the best available first option may be some kind of shared housing situa-
tion, from “couch-surfing” to sharing the overcrowded apartment of a relative or
friend. Those situations tend to be tenuous, unstable and temporary. Although
not counted as homelessness for some assistance program purposes, these situ-
ations constitute homelessness by any conventional understanding of “home,”
which requires some expectation of, if not permanence, at least more than con-
stant precarity. For those without such opportunities but who have vehicles, the
vehicle becomes a poor substitute for housing. The 2019 Los Angeles Homeless
Count found 4,001 people living in cars, 3,697 in vans, and 8,827 in campers or rec-
reational vehicles.42 Those with none of the foregoing options have few choices.
In 2019, there were 11,087 unhoused people trying to survive in tents or makeshift
shelters.43 The rest slept out in the open wherever they could.
The connection between eviction and homelessness is not controversial in
academia, although there have been few systematic empirical studies. One of the
most recent and certainly the most extensive study was conducted by scholars at
NYU and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. After examining New York
City housing court records for the period 2007-2016, together with an extensive
administrative dataset containing information about people in contact with New
York’s shelter system (the most extensive in the country), they concluded that
“[e]victions cause large and persistent increases in risk of homelessness, elevate
long-term residential instability, and increase emergency room use.”44
Although that connection would seem reasonably obvious, understanding
of the causes of homelessness of homelessness is often distorted by stereotypes.
Many people believe that homelessness is the direct result of a mental health or
addiction problem or both. It is true that the prevalence of mental health and ad-
diction has indeed long been higher among homeless than among housed people,
primarily because they are less able to compete for scarce housing with higher
functioning people. But the great majority of people with serious mental health
problems are housed, not homeless. There are about 300,000 adults in Los Ange-
les County with serious mental illness45, compared to the 13,670 homeless people
with serious mental illness identified in the most recently published homeless
count.46 What most distinguishes homeless people with mental health or addic-
less Count – Los Angeles County”; Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), “2018
Greater Los Angeles County Homeless Count – Los Angeles County.
42 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), “2019 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count
– Vehicles, Tents, and Makeshift Shelters by Geographic Area.”
43 Ibid.
44 Collison and Reed, “The Effects of Evictions on Low-Income Households,” 1. A similar con-
nection has been found to exist between foreclosures and homelessness. Faber, “On the Street
During the Great Recession: Exploring the Relationship Between Foreclosures and Homeless-
ness.
45 Data from U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services averages of 2012-2014 data, available
at https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2012-2014-nsduh-substate-region-estimates-excel-tables-
and-csv-files.
less Count – Los Angeles County.”
19
tion problems from housed people with similar problems is that those who are
homeless are also very poor. Across all groups, the primary cause of homelessness
is neither mental illness nor addiction, but the combination of those problems
with extreme poverty. These data are entirely consistent with the explanations
noted earlier given by unhoused people for their own circumstances with 53%
of people experiencing first-time homelessness citing “economic hardship” as a
leading factor.47 Some additional evidence comes from the data collected by the
Shriver Eviction Defense Project discussed above. When tenants facing eviction
were asked about their alternatives if they were to lose their housing, 81% said
they were either “likely” or “very likely” to become homeless, with 41% saying
that homelessness was “very likely.” Given the wide range of uncertainties, princi-
pally in the types and amount of assistance that may be forthcoming from Wash-
ington, D.C., for purposes of planning and policy, a reasonable estimate is that at
least one third of those households at very high risk of being evicted (365,000)
will become homeless, with no source of income. That is, we can expect to see the
unhoused population of Los Angeles County grow with the addition of at least
120,000 evicted tenant households, including 184,000 children. A more optimistic
assumption that only one tenth of households will experience homelessness leads
to an estimate of 36,000 newly homeless households, including about 56,000 chil-
dren. As of this writing, there is little evidence that any level of government is
planning or preparing for either scenario.
Conclusions and Policy Options

There is no question that Los Angeles faces impending waves of evictions and that
such evictions will result in many more people becoming homeless. But there
are questions about (1) whether the number of UD cases filed can be reduced; (2)
whether the percentage of tenant defendants in UD cases avoiding eviction can be
increased; (3) whether the number of those evicted who become homeless can be
reduced; and (4) how best to temporarily and safely shelter or house those who do
lose their housing, given the already critical shortage of both shelter and housing
that existed before the pandemic.
Reducing the number of UD cases filed

Certainly, the most direct strategy of reducing nonpayment evictions is to elimi-
nate the need to make rent payments. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has introduced
legislation to cancel rent and mortgage payments nationwide amid the coronavirus
pandemic. Tenant and community-based organizations are making similar pro-
posals in the context of rent strikes.48 Whatever the outcome in the legislative
arena, these proposals are subject to legal attacks as unconstitutional “takings” of
private property. Arguably, state or local governments could use the emergency
police power to commandeer private property to enact the cancellation of rent
payments during an emergency, provided landlords are compensated for the fair
value of the use of the rental property once the emergency has ended.
The next most direct way to reduce nonpayment evictions is to reduce
non-payments, by continuation and expansion of the UI/FPUC and rent subsidy
programs that currently enable millions of eligible tenants to pay their rent. That
will require extension by the federal government of the most vital provisions of
the CARES Act beyond July 2020. At the state level, the response that appears
to be both sufficient in scale and clearly constitutional is the proposal by Senate
47 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). “2019 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count
Presentation,” 20.
48 Haag and Dougherty. “#CancelRent Is New Rallying Cry for Tenants. Landlords Are Alarmed”;
See also Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), https://www.rent-
strikemovement.org/.
20
Democrats for California to pay landlords the equivalent of the rent due, in the
form of transferable tax credits, the value of which would be paid off without
interest by tenants over 10 years beginning in 2024.49 The repayment obligations
of tenants could be reduced or forgiven in the future. The proposal would require
the cooperation of individual landlords.
Over a longer term, the only way to decrease non-payment evictions is to (a)
impose much stricter rent controls or (b) to address the very important but often
ignored income component of the “affordable housing” problem. The first option
requires repeal of the Costa-Hawkins law, prohibiting new rent control measures.
An effort to do so recently failed at the ballot box but will be on the ballot again
in November 2020.50 The second option means thinking about affordable housing
not only as a housing problem but also as an income problem. The most direct
and efficient way to address the income problem, absent a huge expansion of the
social safety net, would be a substantial increase in the minimum wage, together
with a public employment program along the lines of the Depression-era WPA,
by employing people who cannot find private sector jobs to work on projects
contributing to the public good. While the New Deal programs that followed in
the wake of the Great Depression were structured by various social exclusions, in-
cluding along race and gender lines, this time around such programs will have to
be robust and expansive. For those unable to work, California must finally redress
the damage done since the 1990’s to the very last level of the social safety net,
General Relief, when Los Angeles County successfully lobbied the legislature not
only to void a court-approved settlement agreement to increase General Relief to
$341 per month, but also to freeze in perpetuity the County’s payment at $221 per
month, where it had been in 1984 and where it remains today.51
Give tenants a chance to defend themselves while

staying in their homes
For many tenant defendants in unlawful detainer (UD) cases there will be no
legal defense. But in many, tenants may have a defense that will prevent their
eviction, sometimes on payment of a reduced rent they can afford. For example,
some tenants in nonpayment cases will have defenses based on violations by the
landlord of habitability standards, requiring a reduction in the rent to an amount
the tenant can afford. There are many other potential defenses to eviction, but
without significant outreach and education effort, few tenants are aware of them.
Even if they know their basic rights, in the real world of technical paperwork and
courthouse procedures, virtually all tenants without access to legal help lose be-
cause either (a) they were unable to respond within 5 business days to a summons
and complaint for unlawful detainer, (b) they could not without help respond to
such things as motions for summary judgement or complicated discovery, or (c)
they could not marshal evidence and present it in coherent fashion at trial. Recall
that in a study of random sample of 151 UD cases in the Los Angeles Superior
Court, not one tenant prevailed without a lawyer to represent them.52
For all these reasons, state and local governments must establish a mean-
ingful right to counsel in eviction cases. That requires a serious expansion of legal
services for tenants. The expansion must include a much more extensive effort to
inform tenants of their rights and how to obtain assistance, as well as a very large
49 Myers, John. “California considers unprecedented $25-billion economy recovery fund, rental
relief.”
50 Ballotpedia, “California Local Rent Control Initiative (2020).”
51 The history of this effort is recounted in detail in the dissent of Justice Earl Johnson in Mendly v.
County of Los Angeles, 23 Cal.App.4th 1193, 1239 (1994), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?-
case=5194532292547408591&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
52 Blasi, “How Much Access? How Much Justice?”
21
increase in the number of attorneys available to assist them, either at no cost or

for an affordable fee. The foundation of such a program already exists in the Los
Angeles County’s implementation of California’s Sargent Shriver Civil Counsel
Act, originally enacted in 2009 and expanded in 2019.53 The Shriver Project in Los
Angeles is composed of attorneys from four leading legal services organizations,
who provide eviction defense services to tenants in a few selected geographical
areas.54 An expanded Shriver Project would include services across the County,
link public communications efforts with legal assistance, and provide a sufficient
number of attorneys and other staff to respond to the need.
Expand capacity of existing “rapid rehousing” programs

For those who are evicted, it is critical to end their homelessness as soon as pos-
sible. The more time people spend both unhoused and unsheltered, the more dif-
ficult and expensive it is to help them get back into housing. Rapid rehousing
programs aim to get unhoused people into housing temporarily but immediately,
to improve their chances of exiting to permanent housing. The Rapid Rehousing
programs funded with Measure H funds by the County of Los Angeles have not
been without problems, but in general those served have “…moved into housing
at higher rates and more quickly, and has been more likely to exit into permanent
housing without a subsidy following move-in.”55 What is most critical for these
programs is that they lead relatively quickly to permanent housing. Otherwise,
they merely provide a temporary respite from homelessness.
Plan for alternatives to refugee camps

Given the scale of the impending crisis and the realities of funding and politics,
even if all of the above responses are fully funded and successfully implemented,
it is certain that we will see a very large increase in the number of unhoused peo-
ple and families. In most respects they will resemble those who were unhoused
before the pandemic: they will be much more likely to be lower income people
of color, most of whom were last housed in Los Angeles neighborhoods too long
neglected. The major difference will be that the newly homeless economic refu-
gees from the current crisis will include many families with children. Many will
receive aid from welfare programs like CalWorks, but a great many will not. It
is unthinkable that Los Angeles will leave them on the streets, as it has long left
75% of those unhoused before the pandemic. But the unthinkable has a way of be-
coming reality unless there is planning and commitment on the necessary scale.
How then, can we expand the supply of temporary housing, hopefully in a way
that will leave in place resources that can be used for more permanent housing
in the future?
Hotels and motels
One obvious resource is the huge number rooms in hotels and motels in Los
Angeles County that now sit empty. Project Roomkey, the effort of the County
of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), as
well as another project with the same name operated by the State, have taken ad-
vantage of that resource. Los Angeles’ Project Roomkey entails contracting with
hotels or motels to make some or all of their rooms available for a three month
period for use occupancy by homeless individuals at high risk if they are infected
53 Assembly Bill 330, approved by Governor September 4, 2019.
54 Neighborhood Legal Services, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Inner City Law Center, and
Public Counsel.
55 Wagner et al., “Evaluation of Los Angeles County’s Strategies to Expand and Enhance Rapid
Re-Housing Services for Multiple Populations,” 6.
22
with COVID-19 or are required to be isolated or quarantined and have no place to

do so. The initial program goals went beyond those two categories and set a goal
of contracting for 15,000 rooms. As of May 22, 2020, Project Roomkey had con-
tracted for 3,514 rooms, of which 2,390 were occupied.56 One of the difficulties in
moving people into the contracted rooms has been a shortage of staff to provide
social and healthcare services to the residents.57 If hotel or motel rooms were
used for those displaced by evictions, there is no reason to believe that such a
high level of staffing would be required. There is also an effort, now mostly behind
the scenes, for local government to acquire or lease cheaper hotels or motels for
longer term use, principally so that the current Project Roomkey occupants are
not merely checked out and sent back to the streets when their occupancy is no
longer necessary for health reasons.
While hotel and motel rooms can provide interim housing, they are not
well suited for use by families. Other important considerations include at least
the following: First, many are located far from the communities with which the
residents are familiar and where they have social connections. Second, hotel and
motel properties at the lower end of the cost spectrum are often already in use
by people without the funds for a security deposit and first month’s rent. Gov-
ernment should not be in the business of making some people homeless so that
others can replace them. Third, lower income hotels are frequently staffed by very
poorly paid housekeepers and other staff who are themselves at risk of homeless-
ness. To the extent they continue to be operated for short term use, any acquisi-
tion plan should account for operations that pay the workforce wages that at least
equal those paid in hotels with unionized staff. Compared to other immediately
available options, however, acquiring hotels and motels that can be converted
to interim or even entry-level housing for some has the advantage of securing a
longer-term housing asset.
Other options
Somewhere near the last resort are large government-operated camps pop-
ulated by people living in tents, essentially refugee camps for people who have
been displaced not by war or natural disaster, but by an economic and political
disaster of historic proportions. For such refugee camps, the United Nations can
offer operational guidance.58 Somewhat more humane options that have been uti-
lized elsewhere have included villages of small structures, authorized and sup-
ported encampments and authorized and supported places for safe parking.
Or else…
Unless we take immediate action now to either prevent or prepare for the
coming waves of eviction, the toll on those evicted will go beyond the damaging
effects, especially for nearly a half million children, of forced displacement itself.
That toll is largely invisible, if no less painful. The much more visible and more
painful toll will be seen in the massive increase in the numbers of Angelenos who
lack both housing and shelter and are forced to fend for themselves. In January
2020, at the same time as the coronavirus was spreading in Wuhan, China, vol-
unteers in Los Angeles were counting the number of our neighbors who had lost
their housing. The number of homeless Angelenos they counted, and how many
of those were without shelter will be made public very soon. As of this writing,
we know that one year prior, in January 2019, an identical effort found 58,936
56 Daily updates on Project Roomkey are made available as part of the Los Angeles County Emer-
gency Operations Center COVID-19 Update, available at https://covid19.lacounty.gov/.
57 Smith and Oreskes. “California leased 15,000 hotel rooms to help homeless people. Half now sit
empty.”
58 See, e.g., UN Refugee Agency, “Camp planning standards (planned settlements).”
23
unhoused people, of whom 44,214 were unsheltered. No one needed a statistic

to know that homelessness in Los Angeles last year was already a humanitarian
crisis. It is now past time to prepare for the fact that the housing and homeless-
ness crisis is about to deepen to a level never before seen in any urban area in the
industrialized world. A grossly disproportionate number of the newly homeless
in Los Angeles will be low income people of color. And if the only options the
unhoused are given are refugee camps or the streets, no one should be expected
to peacefully tolerate such a result, nor to forgive those who did little to stop it. §
24
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27
Appendix 1 Eviction Defense Program Indices - Results

Eviction Defense Program Indices (HCIDLA, 2019)
Tenant Vulnerability Index Neighborhood Displacement Index

90026 Silver Lake/Echo Park/Westlake 60
90011 Historic South Central/Central Alameda/South Park 96
90018 Jefferson Park/Adams-Normandie/Exposition Park 54
90044 Vermont Vista/Vermont Knowles/Vermont Slauson 96
90016 West Adams/Mid-City/Baldwin Hills 51
90006 Pico Union/Harvard Heights 75
90DZB Hollywood 51
90003 Florence/Broadway-Manchester 73
90029 East Hollywood/Silver Lake 51
90037 Vermont Square/Exposition Park/Vermont-Slauson/South 73
90004 East Hollywood/Larchmont/Windsor Square 49
91331 Paco ima/Arl eta 70
90026 Si Iver Lake/Echo Park/Westlake 63
90033 Boyle Heights 47
90019 Mid-Wilshire/Mid-City/Arlington Heights 67
90291 Venice 47
90008 Baldwin Hi I Is/Crenshaw/Leimert Park 46
90057 El Sereno/Montecito Heights 66
91402 Panorama City 66
90043 Hyde Park 43
90065 Glassell Park/Cypress Park/Mt Washington 43
90813 Long Beach 64
90038 Hollywood 42
90001 Florence 61
90011 Historic South Central/Central Alameda/South Park 41
90004 East Hollywood/Larchmont/Windsor Square 61
90042 Highland Park/Montecito Heights 41
90731 San Pedro 61
90007 University Park/Adams-Normandie/Exposition Park 40
91405 Van Nuys 61
91335 Reseda/Tarzana 59
91601 North Hollywood/Valley Village/Toluca Lake 40
90002 Watts/Green Meadows 58
90012 Chinatown/Arts District 39
Housing Condition Score

90011 H istoric South Centra l/Ce ntra I Al a m e d a/South Pa rk 32
90003 F Iorence/Broadv:ay-Manche5ter 30
90044 Vermont Vista/Vermont Knowles/Vermont Slauson 30
90731 San Pedro 21
90026 Silver Lake/Echo Park/Westlake 20
90012 Chinatown/Arts District 18
90034 Palms/Mid-City/Beverlywood 17
90043 Hyde Park 17
90066 MarVista/Oel Rey/Playa Vista 17
91331 Paco ima/Arl eta 17
90004 EastHollywood/Larchmont/WindsorSquare 16
91402 Panorama City 16
91405 Van Nuys 16
28
lowest vulnerability.
Some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods are concentrated in South and Central Los
Angeles,
Appendix 2 including areas near downtown such as MacArthur Park, Pico-Union, Harvard
Heights,County
Los Angeles Koreatown, Hollywood and by
Neighborhoods East Hollywood,
Renter and Boyle Index
Vulnerability Heights. There are
pockets
(Paul Ong et of
al.,vulnerability
2020) in San Fernando Valley (e.g., Van Nuys), Antelope Valley, and
central Long Beach.
Map 1. Los Angeles County Neighborhoods by Renter Vulnerability Index
Note: Only census tracts with at least 500 renter households are displayed.
11
29
Appendix 3
Answer to Unlawful Detainer Complaint
30
31
Acknowledgements
This paper could only be written because of the hard work and generosity of spirit
of the community of researchers and expert practitioners in Los Angeles who
have risen to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ananya Roy
provided not only the support of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and
Democracy, but also a foreword and many hours of guidance and constructive ed-
iting suggestions. No one could wish for a better colleague. The important work
on unemployment data by UCLA colleagues at the California Policy Lab, Thomas
Hedin, Geoffrey Schnorr and Till von Wachter, provided a critical starting point
for the analysis in this paper. The excellent work by Paul Ong, Chhandara Pech,
Elena Ong, Silvia R. González, and Jonathan Ong provided critical information
about the demographic and geographic inequality of renter vulnerability and pre-
carity across Los Angeles neighborhoods. Dan Flaming, President of Economic
Roundtable, provided invaluable assistance and advice in data analysis and access
to data extracted from U.S. Census sources.
Cassandra Goodman, attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services and a leader
of the Shriver Eviction Defense Project in Los Angeles, not only provided import-
ant insights from her own extensive experience in the field, but also worked with
the outside evaluator of the Shriver Project to obtain important data about a very
large sample (840) of unlawful detainer cases and tenants whose housing was at
risk. Kyle Nelson, who has done important work on eviction cases in Los Angeles,
generously allowed access to otherwise inaccessible unlawful detainer case data
that he had meticulously collected in his own research. Other experienced legal
practitioners provided a deeper understanding of the past, current and expected
processing of unlawful detainer cases. These included the indefatigable Elena I.
Popp, who has likely represented more low income Los Angeles tenants than any
other human being, Barbara Schultz and Jeff Uno of the Legal Aid Foundation of
Los Angeles, and Rob Reed and Jake Crammer of Inner City Law Center.
The remarkable group of UCLA graduate students and movement-based
researchers assembled by Ananya Roy for the larger project of which this paper is
a part, including Joel Montano, Jonny Coleman, Elana Eden, and Hilary Malson,
provided both important insights and inspiration by their dedicated work.
Notwithstanding any of the above, I alone am responsible for any remain-
ing errors.
Gary Blasi
32
The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin ac-
knowledges the Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar
(Los Angeles basin, So. Channel Islands) and are grateful to have the opportunity
to work for the taraaxatom (indigenous peoples) in this place. As a land grant in-
stitution, we pay our respects to Honuukvetam (Ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom (Elders),
and ‘eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging.
33
Gary Blasi is Professor of Law Emeritus at the UCLA School of Law. He joined
the faculty of the law school in 1991, after working as an advocate and attorney
for people in poverty for 20 years. Early in his career, Blasi specialized in the
representation of low-income tenants in both eviction defense and affirmative
cases against slumlords, from municipal court to the California Supreme Court.
At the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA), he handled hundreds of
unlawful detainer cases and co-founded LAFLA’s Eviction Defense Center. When
mass homelessness came to Los Angeles in 1983, his primary work began to focus
on working with and representing unhoused people. For eight years, he directed
the Homelessness Litigation Project at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles,
where he coordinated litigation on behalf of indigent and homeless people in Los
Angeles County. In addition to his legal work, Blasi held leadership positions in
nonprofit organizations working on issues of homelessness and extreme poverty,
including terms as Board President of The National Coalition for the Homeless,
of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, and of the Los Angeles Coalition to End
Hunger and Homelessness. After becoming a law professor, Blasi’s research in-
cluded examining the public response to homelessness across a range of issues,
including the cognitive and social psychology of how people understand the caus-
es of homelessness and why people come to support particular solutions to the
problem, with a special focus on the role of race in shaping both.
Professor Blasi took emeritus status in 2012 but continues to do research
and maintain an active pro bono legal practice, working with community groups
and in collaboration with the leading public interest and pro bono law firms in
California. His professional recognition has included the 2013 Loren Miller Legal
Services Award from the State Bar of California, given to one lawyer in California
each year for work extending legal services to the poor. He was named a Cali-
fornia Lawyer of the Year in 2015 in for his work on behalf of indigent welfare
recipients and a California Lawyer of the Year in 2016 for his work on behalf of
homeless military veterans.
34
OTHER UCLA LUSKIN INSTITUTE ON INEQUALITY

AND DEMOCRACY PUBLICATIONS
2020. Paul Ong et al. “Neighborhood Inequality in Shelter-in-
Place Burden: Impacts of COVID-19 in Los Angeles.” https://
challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/2020/04/22/neighborhood-
inequality-in-shelter-in-place-burden/
2020. Ananya Roy, Terra Graziani, and Pamela Stephens. “Housing

Inequality in Los Angeles.” https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.
edu/2020/04/27/data-for-democracy-housing-inequality-in-la/
2020. Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, eds. Methodologies for

Housing Justice Resource Guide. https://escholarship.org/uc/
item/41g6f5cj and https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3v76q8q5
2019. Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, eds. Housing Justice in

Unequal Cities. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4kq1j0df.
35

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Volume designed and edited by Andrés Carrasquillo.

Publication date: May 28, 2020

2 Woods, “Life After Death,” 63.

• As of May 9, 2020, approximately 599,000 workers in Los Angeles County

• About 449,000 of those unemployed and with no income live in about

• Approximately 558,000 children live in households very unlikely to be able

• Those facing eviction will be heavily concentrated in communities and

• Within days of that freeze being lifted, thousands of unlawful detainer

• Without a massive increase in access to both information and legal ser-

7 Flaming et al, “Escape Routes: Meta-Analysis of Homelessness in L.A.,” 3.

Unemployment and the Coming Waves of Eviction

The First Wave: Unemployed Workers with No

11 Cabildo, et al, “How Race, Class, and Place Fuel a Pandemic.”

15 Ibid., 5 (Table 12).

16 U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Los Angeles County, California.”

The Second Wave: When Income Replacements End

20 U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: Los Angeles County, California.”

21 Desmond and Kimbro, “Evictions Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health.”

The Process of Eviction and the Illusory Promise of

The Eviction Process in Ordinary Times

23 Freddie Mac Multifamily, “Rental Burden by Metro,” 8.

29 Blasi, “How Much Access? How Much Justice?,” 865, 869.

The Eviction Process and the Pandemic

State and Local Government Restrictions are Ineffective

Most tenants will lose by default

The threshold requirement to take advantage of the protections afforded by

32 A copy of the approved form Answer to Unlawful Detainer Complaint is in Appendix 3.

Restrictions on evictions offer little protection

Since March 2020 Governor Newsom, the County Board of Supervisors,

(1) Governor Newsom’s Executive Orders

(2) City of Los Angeles

Tenants in the City of Los Angeles face lower barriers to asserting a

(3) County of Los Angeles

Board of Supervisors passed a resolution amending the March 19 order, which

(4) Other cities in Los Angeles County

The Eviction Outbreak on “UD Day”: The Day the

39 Exec. Order N-37-20 (March 27, 2020), Section 1.

From Eviction to Homelessness

Conclusions and Policy Options

Reducing the number of UD cases filed

Give tenants a chance to defend themselves while

50 Ballotpedia, “California Local Rent Control Initiative (2020).”

52 Blasi, “How Much Access? How Much Justice?”

increase in the number of attorneys available to assist them, either at no cost or

Expand capacity of existing “rapid rehousing” programs

Plan for alternatives to refugee camps

Hotels and motels

53 Assembly Bill 330, approved by Governor September 4, 2019.

with COVID-19 or are required to be isolated or quarantined and have no place to

58 See, e.g., UN Refugee Agency, “Camp planning standards (planned settlements).”

unhoused people, of whom 44,214 were unsheltered. No one needed a statistic

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. “Report on the Economic Well-

Calif. Exec. Order N-28-20 (March 16, 2020). https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-

Calif. Exec. Order N-37-20 (March 27, 2020). https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-

Collinson, Robert and David Reed. “The Effects of Evictions on Low-Income

County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. “Executive Order of the Chair

Desmond, Matthew and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro. “Evictions Fallout: Housing,

Freddie Mac Multifamily. “Rental Burden by Metro.” (2019). https://

Judicial Council of California. “2019 Court Statistics Report: Statewide Caseload

Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). “2019 Greater Los

Los Angeles Housing and Community Investement Department (HCIDLA).