The City of Oakland, California has protected renters over landlords in a trend that will see more evictions and homelessness in the future, according to a San Francisco Bay real estate expert who specializes in the city.
In short, he said, the city has embraced the idea that property owners are the enemy, and it has sided with tenants who chose not to pay during the pandemic because they could get away with it.
“I’ve worked in the business for over two decades, and I’ve never seen so many people stop paying rent,” he said.
The fact that the city is providing free legal aid to some on the verge of being evicted simply adds insult to injury, he said.
“When you are a taxpaying owner of a property in Oakland, when you’re trying to evict some of your tenants, you’re also fighting the city of Oakland because they are funding” such help, he said.
Mr. Fleming said such practices are “killing landlords” and are “kicking good people to the curb who own property.”
“The city went out of its way ... to tell people not to pay rent,” he said. “[Landlords] just basically got the middle finger from the government for the last four years.”
Many tenants facing eviction know if they stretch it out long enough, it will force the property owner to pay high legal fees, exhausting their resources, he said.
He likened the issue to someone eating daily at a restaurant for years and the government telling the restaurant’s owner they can’t charge for those meals.
The upshot is, some landlords are calling it quits or facing foreclosure. Mr. Fleming additionally said the city has made the rules and paperwork for eviction so onerous, that many have just given up.
“They’ve created all these different layers of ways to stop hard-working small property owners, who have done everything right, from evicting people out of their property who don’t want to pay the rent,” he said. “It’s like a rigged system ... that favors people who didn’t do the right thing.”
He said instead of the city embracing its small landlords, it has turned its back on them.
“There’s really nobody advocating for them in the right way,” he said.
He said many landlords have been bought out by corporations or even the city itself.
“They’ve killed their own housing stock because they’ve killed the landlords,” he said. “Where is the justice for the small property owner?”
Mr. Fleming blames the city council, which, he said, has started to lean further left, even flirting with socialism.
“Because the mindset today,” he said, “is if you own something you’re like the bad guy,” he said. “They started painting property owners as Public Enemy No. 1.”
He said the attitude is actually encouraging homelessness, because the city “devalued ethical principle, which is work hard, pay your bills, pay your rent.”
He said some have embraced this mindset and think the government has all the answers.
“Government has never had all the answers,” he said.
Mr. Fleming said he thinks the city can provide a good lesson to others.
“The political leaders ... they went far radical. ... It was just the perfect story in the last three or four years,” he said. “Radicalism infected common sense.”
He said the business community can no longer be silent and that tax dollars should not go toward funding programs, such as providing free legal aid for tenants facing eviction who have refused to pay.
“California needs to adopt a landlord Bill of Rights ... that protects them against a certain type of government overreach,” he said.
