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UD Day Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
UD Day Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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Title
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gz6c8cv
Author
Blasi, Gary
Publication Date
2020-05-28
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
1 Chester and Squires, There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane
Katrina, 4.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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:
• Most of those households lack savings or other resources to use for paying
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.
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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
• 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.
• 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.
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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
12 Hedin, et al, “An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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).
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
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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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.
22 Judicial Council, “Emergency Rules Related to COVID-19,” Rule 13(e), effective April 20, 2020,
www.courts.ca.gov/documents/appendix-i.pdf
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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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-
12
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
not restrict pre-eviction agreements, and some of the state and local rules appear
to actively encourage them, as discussed below.
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.
14
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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.”
17
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
40 Hedin, et al, “An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the
COVID-19 Pandemic,” 2.
18
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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-
41 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), “2019 Greater Los Angeles County Home-
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.
46 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), “2019 Greater Los Angeles County Home-
less Count – Los Angeles County.”
19
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
49 Myers, John. “California considers unprecedented $25-billion economy recovery fund, rental
relief.”
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
21
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.”
23
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
24
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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UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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27
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
28
lowest vulnerability.
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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.
Note: Only census tracts with at least 500 renter households are displayed.
11
29
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
Appendix 3
Answer to Unlawful Detainer Complaint
30
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
31
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
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
UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles
35