Janae Randolph waited nervously with her boyfriend outside a wood-paneled courtroom at the Contra Costa County courthouse in Martinez, California. She scanned the increasingly crowded hallway for somebody official-looking — maybe a public defender, she hoped — who would explain why they’d been summoned after receiving an eviction notice at their Concord apartment.
The bailiff motioned Randolph toward the defendant’s chair. Then suddenly, their names were called and a trial started. The couple found themselves seated alone, across from their landlord’s attorney at a separate table. Before them, a black-robed commissioner perched on the judge’s bench began asking pointed questions about their missed rent payments.
She answered carefully the questions from the commissioner, who oversees eviction cases, even though she didn’t fully understand what was happening. “You don’t want to make her upset, or say the wrong thing,” Randolph said. “So I felt like I just had to go with it, against my own judgment.”
Randolph’s case is one in a surge of more than 10,000 eviction lawsuits filed across the core five-county Bay Area since the fall of 2021, when state and local pandemic eviction protections started to wind down, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of court data.
While court data affirms advocates’ warnings of an “eviction tsunami” in areas where protections lapsed, it also reflects the disparities in resources available to the growing numbers of tenants facing eviction across the Bay Area. Only some have access to rental aid and legal representation, leaving many to navigate the often intimidating eviction process on their own.
Contra Costa County “does not have the same level of protections or tenant resources” as other parts of the region, said Alex Werth, policy and research director with the nonprofit East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. “The results of this disparity are really borne out in the data.”
Over the second half of 2022 — after most emergency protections had fully expired — eviction filings soared 43% above pre-pandemic levels in Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties combined, according to court data. Despite the distribution of a half-billion aid dollars to struggling renters across those counties, advocates expect eviction cases to remain high in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where a narrow eviction protection ordinance has been in effect since July, cases rose to pre-COVID-19 numbers.
The exception was Alameda County, where strict limits on evictions dating back to March 2020 are keeping cases at historic lows. Multiple landlord groups have sued to end those protections, arguing they are no longer needed since the worst of the pandemic is over and most people have returned to work. Officials have said the safeguards could end April 30.
Last year, Contra Costa County had the highest eviction case rate in the core Bay Area, with one filing for every 116 households, according to court data. Next came San Francisco, with one for every 171 households; Santa Clara, with one for every 195 households; San Mateo, with one for every 210 households; and Alameda, with just one for every 616 households.
Between May and October, advocates with the East Bay Alliance attended and tracked 56 eviction proceedings in Contra Costa County Superior Court. They found that 86% of landlords came to court with an attorney, while only 7% of tenants had legal representation. As a result, renters lost cases they might otherwise have won had they had access to “high-quality and timely legal services,” according to a report summarizing the findings.
To shift the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, the report recommends creating a program to offer all renters facing eviction a lawyer, similar to an effort San Francisco started in 2019. Unlike in criminal cases, defendants in eviction suits have no right to counsel.
A city report on San Francisco’s program — one of the few anywhere in the country — found that during the first half of 2019, over two-thirds of households with an attorney were able to stay in their homes, compared to just 38% of households without representation.
Even though Santa Clara County doesn’t have its own eviction defense program, Todd Rothbard, a landlord attorney, said he’s seen few renters there actually forced out of their units in recent months, even as eviction cases have spiked. That’s because local government agencies and nonprofits have been stepping in to cover tenants’ unpaid rent at eviction proceedings, he said.
“Landlords don’t wake up in the morning saying, ‘Gee, who can I evict?' ” Rothbard said. “They’re generally thrilled if someone can step up and pay rent.”
That same level of aid, however, doesn’t appear available in other parts of the region.
Most counties across the state offer a mediation program for landlords and tenants, however. The goal of mediation is generally to help the two sides agree to a repayment plan or move-out date and then prevent an eviction case from showing up on a tenant’s record and ruining their chances of renting another home.
For some renters, however, just getting an appointment with a court-appointed mediator can be a nerve-racking process.
Randolph wasn’t able to sign up for mediation in January because her landlord didn’t go to court that day. The commissioner agreed to set a new date, but Randolph still hasn’t received notification from the court and isn’t sure whether a hearing has been scheduled. She said lawyers representing the landlord haven’t returned her desperate calls to hash out a deal.
Randolph’s property manager did not respond to requests to discuss the case, and attempts to reach the owner were unsuccessful.
“My problem is that I don’t have an attorney,” she said. “But everywhere I call, they want money, and I can’t provide any money when I’m in the situation I’m in.”
After the pandemic hit, emergency assistance covered the couple’s rent while they were laid off. But once that program ended, Randolph, 27, who worked at a cannabis store, and her boyfriend, Douglas Pineda Jr., 35, an electrician, racked up around $11,000 in unpaid rent during the months she couldn’t return to work after undergoing surgery.
Randolph hopes that her landlord will agree to hide the eviction so the couple and her brother’s family can move into a house together in Pittsburg, where rents are less expensive. With a new job in the mailroom of a worker’s compensation company, she thinks she could help pay off the rent debt, and the couple could slowly get back on their feet.
But without a clear understanding of where they stand in the eviction process, that plan remains in limbo.
“It’s just the two of us and our two little cats,” Randolph said. “It would be hard to be on the streets.”
