The clock could not have been ticking any louder. With only two hours before the end of this year’s legislative session, the California Assembly voted late Monday night to approve a new bill that will offer the state’s 4 million tenants some protection against eviction for the next five months if they can’t make full payment on their rent. Had the bill not passed—and been swiftly signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom— tenants who were behind in their rent due to the pandemic could have faced eviction proceeding the next morning.. That’s when the state’s moratorium against such evictions—enacted earlier this spring--expired.
Santa Barbara’s tag-team in Sacramento, State Assembly member Monique Limón and State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who were closely involved in the bill’s passage, however, were not particularly thrilled with the results. “This doesn’t feel wonderful or great,” said Limón, who cosponsored the bill, AB 3088, and had a seat at the bargaining table as chair of the Assembly Banking Committee. “From my perspective, it’s not very satisfying,” added Jackson, who played a significant role as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We were not able to make a global settlement, but for the next few months we at least have this.”
The “this” in question was the subject of intense negotiations, deliberations, and lots of hardball lobbying between California’s powerful landlord lobby, the banking industry, and tenants’ rights advocates. Under the terms of the final compromise language, tenants who pay 25 percent of their monthly rent between now and the end of January cannot be evicted for failure to pay full rent so long as they notify their landlords that their ability to pay has been undermined because of the COVID crisis.