Santa Clara County evictions have shot up over the past year, prompting local groups and governments to find ways to support renters.
The county recorded 3,180 evictions last year, the highest amount since 2014. Compare that to the less than 2,000 evictions between 2020 and 2022 during the pandemic. Key protections tenants won at the onset of COVID-19 have expired, leaving fewer options for renters facing eviction . Experts said increasing free and accessible legal services for tenants in Santa Clara County would lead to a drop in evictions , as many renters might not know how to fight an eviction , or don’t want to.
“The situation today looks more like the (pre-pandemic) status quo, where tenants have a very short timeline to respond to an eviction notice and fight for their rights or fight an unlawful eviction,” Suzanne Dershowitz, senior staff attorney for Public Advocates, told San José Spotlight. “Many tenants don’t know where to begin when they receive a notice, oftentimes tenants will just move out and do what we call ‘self evict.’”
Public Advocates , a nonprofit calling for equity in housing among other issues, put together a checklist summarizing existing tenants rights, ways to identify unlawful evictions and the names of organizations with useful resources, including Housing Now, Tenants Together and the Western Center on Law & Poverty.
March 27, 2024 
December 25, 2022 
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California’s temporary ban on evictions, among the last of the pandemic-era tenant protections , expired on April 1, 2022. Existing tenant protections include the California Tenant Protection Act , which provides some safety against extreme rent hikes and unfair evictions. The Homelessness Prevention Act went into effect in April and aims to stop property owners from evicting longtime tenants without justifiable cause in written notice.
While these state level protections offer some support, San Jose has taken steps to help renters in the city facing eviction.
City officials earlier this year approved a policy giving tenants priority based on location. New affordable housing projects funded by the city must save 15% of homes for low-income residents who live in the same district and 20% for those who come from a district with high displacement rates.
San Jose also has a tenant helpline for renters with questions about potential evictions.
Emily Ann Ramos, a preservation and protection associate with Silicon Valley @ Home, said San Jose recently started exploring the concept of tenants having the legal right to counsel.
It’s a program already implemented by cities such as San Francisco, where officials said 92% of tenants who received representation through Tenant Right to Counsel avoided homelessness.
“(San Jose) sent out a request for proposal to do a study on tenants legal right to counsel, but they expanded the scope of that to include their eviction defense program,” Ramos told San José Spotlight. “Essentially they are looking at how can San Jose help tenants and their homes within the court process.”
Emily Hislop, San Jose rent stabilization and tenant protection division manager, said the city requested bids in March to find a consultant to study not just the tenant right to counsel programs, but also consider programs developing nationwide thanks to pandemic recovery funds.
The city wants a holistic look at every program and resource it may be able to implement, Hislop said.
“We’re trying to find out how to get people further upstream — where we connect both landlords and tenants to the right resources to resolve the problem before it gets to court,” she told San José Spotlight. “We also want the consultant to look at, ‘What’s our existing system? What are the resources, gaps and hurdles?’ Because every county is going to be different.”
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Hislop said she aims to present the San Jose City Council with the study’s results in spring 2025.
City housing officials also recommend tenants facing eviction reach out to legal aid organizations such as Bay Area Legal Aid and the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley.
Dershowitz said the availability of legal services varies from by county across California.
“There are parts of the Bay Area that have numerous legal services, organizations, many attorneys and the ratio is much better for attorneys to represent tenants and support them in fighting eviction cases,” she said. “Then there are other parts of the Bay Area, across the state of California that have much, much fewer legal services organizations.”
Contact Vicente Vera at vicente@sanjosespotlight.com or follow @VicenteJVera on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The post Silicon Valley evictions increase after pandemic protections expire appeared first on San José Spotlight .
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