Sonoma County poised to OK tenant protections for rental housing outside city limits

The proposed ordinance, which applies to multifamily housing, has left parties on both sides of the table at times unsatisfied. |

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is poised to vote on a set of hotly debated local tenant protections, centered on evictions, that would be the first of their kind for the unincorporated area.

The ordinance has been in the works for more than a year and contains measures advanced so far by a slim three-member majority of the board.

“Just-cause” protections that make up the ordinance restrict when and how landlords can evict tenants and would build on a state law from 2019.

Sonoma County’s new rules would limit evictions for nonpayment until more than 30 days have passed, limit evictions during declared states of emergency, boost relocation benefits for evicted renters and require evictions be based on certain state requirements — nonpayment, lease violations or criminal offenses — at the start of tenancy. Landlords would also be required to notify the county of evictions.

Currently, tenants across the state are covered by the California Tenant Protection Act of 2019, but many local jurisdictions, including the Board of Supervisors, have grappled with building on the law, especially since pandemic-era safeguards expired.

Similarly, parties on both sides of the table — tenant advocates and landlord representatives — have sparred over the extent of any local rules. Advocates for renters have called for stronger measures, while real estate groups have called county proposals too harsh.

The proposed policy barely advanced in May, when Supervisors Chris Coursey, Lynda Hopkins and Susan Gorin pushed the measures forward to be drafted into a formal ordinance. At the time Gorin and Coursey criticized the measures as “timid,” “tepid” and “moderate.”

The ordinance will apply only to tenants in multifamily housing, including apartment complexes.

Coursey on Thursday said he would have liked to see the board take the ordinance further, applying it more uniformly to include single-family housing, but he said there was not enough “appetite” among his colleagues to do so.

“I try to remind myself that this is an improvement over what we have,” Coursey said. “We could always do better but the first rule is to always do good and to try harder next time.”

Supervisors David Rabbitt and James Gore previously voted against crafting the measures into an ordinance, citing concerns about the impact on the rental market.

“I’m always leery of the government’s intervention in markets because sometimes unintended consequences can happen,” Rabbitt said in May.

Some landlords, real estate agents and property managers and the organizations that represent them have raised concerns that protections would restrict property owner rights and further add to the patchwork of state and local policies that can be difficult to navigate.

They have said the new regulations would make it harder to evict problem tenants and hinder smaller-scale “mom and pop” landlords in particular. Pam Williams, a landlord with “a few units,” told the board in May that evicting a tenant is “the last thing a landlord wants to do.”

“Landlords are not the enemies. They are trying to provide housing and also a means to make an income,” Williams said.

Unable or unwilling to manage the headache under stricter regulations, more property owners will sell, opponents argue, leading to fewer desperately needed rental properties on the market. That prospect has caused some hesitancy among officials considering the change, while other doubts center on overregulation more broadly.

“We already have pretty stringent rules in the state of California we all abide by,” said Ross Liscum, a real estate broker in Santa Rosa for Century 21 Epic who has been in the business for 46 years. “Every time the local government steps beyond the state requirement is another reason for someone to get out of the business.”

In a survey of the Santa Rosa real estate market, Liscum said that 6,426 homes sold between 2020 and 2023. In that time, 184 were dwellings taken out of the rental market, which he attributed in large part to landlord frustrations, based on conversations he’s had with real estate agents. He was not aware of other comparable snapshots for prior periods.

“Where are the protections for the landlords?” Liscum said. “I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve had that have said get me out of this.”

Just-cause laws and the housing crisis

Tenant advocates, however, say there is little concrete evidence demonstrating any marked exodus from the rental market can be traced in particular to just-cause laws.

Instead, they argue, what has long been clear is the prospect of ever-higher rents in tight rental markets and rapidly changing neighborhoods has displaced tenants, with disproportionate impacts on lower-income residents and communities of color.

Solutions to the state’s housing woes, meanwhile, remain elusive. A $20 billion Bay Area affordable housing bond that sought to enlarge and speed the production pipeline was abruptly pulled last week from the November ballot.

Also, as COVID-19 pandemic-era limits have expired, eviction cases have shot back up. There were 503 sheriff lockouts, the final step in the eviction process, in Sonoma County in 2019. That figure dipped to a low of 183 in 2020 before rising up to 292 in 2022 and then 441 in 2023.

“We need to be doing everything we can do to keep people housed in the meantime,” said Margaret DeMatteo, former housing policy attorney at Legal Aid of Sonoma County, member of the Sonoma County Tenants Union and current directing attorney at Movement Legal Services. North Bay Organizing Project and Legal Aid of Sonoma County recently launched an eviction mapping tool to track trends locally.

In public meetings, tenants, too, have shared horror stories. In May, Shardae Phillips, a Sonoma County renter, described how the security firm she worked for shut down during the pandemic, leaving her unable to pay rent and facing eviction.

“I was already not sure where to go, having to pay for a hotel, still trying to work and having a teenager. It was overwhelming,” Phillips said.

With help from Legal Aid of Sonoma County, Phillips worked out a payment plan with the company managing her rental and paid off the rent owed. She asked the board to think of people like her.

Just-cause protections “play a very important role,” said Tim Thomas, research director for the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley. Really they’re a “baseline” — more of a “speed bump” — to managing the expected “housing precarity for the foreseeable future,” he said. Essentially, “it’s just, give a good reason to evict.”

As the housing crisis has deepened, just-cause policies have gained in popularity across the country. “Ever since the pandemic, there really has been a spike,” Thomas said. “Before it was tooth and nail, but it's been a lot easier, even in areas you wouldn't expect these policies to go through.”

A number of California cities and counties have passed just-cause protections through lawmakers or ballot initiatives, building on what housing advocates say are gaps in the state law passed in 2019. Petaluma was the first to do so in Sonoma County in 2023.

Building on state regulations

DeMatteo contended that much of the opposition from landlords in Sonoma County is misguided, noting that the proposed changes don’t affect rent setting, which undercuts the argument that the new regulations would disincentivize development.

No jurisdiction in the county has any local rent-control measures, but state laws do apply to some sets of rental housing.

The proposed county ordinance also doesn’t prevent landlords from evicting a tenant who doesn’t pay rent or otherwise seriously violates a lease.

Liscum said that landlords were put on a back foot with limits on rent hikes and other restrictions during pandemic years. Prior state limits on rent increases also applied in the years following the 2017 North Bay fires.

Many property owners have yet to recover, Liscum said.

Even now with pandemic-era eviction bans lifted, it is costly to go through the court process, he said.

“You do have to hire a lawyer. That's across the board,” DeMatteo said. “You're in a business, and the business is regulated.”

DeMatteo said Sonoma County’s ordinance is “a lot weaker” than ones being passed elsewhere. She pointed to the exclusion of single-family home rentals in particular, which is also the case in state law and has been framed as a concession to “mom and pop” landlords.

But with these dwellings making up just over half of Sonoma County’s rental stock “the majority of our renters aren’t protected from evictions for any or no reason,” she said. “You're not inherently a good landlord just because you only own one or two or three homes. Every tenant deserves the same treatment.”

Coursey, too, lamented the proposed exemption. “If you’re renting a single-family home or an apartment, there’s not a whole lot of difference when an eviction notice appears on your door,” Coursey said. “If you’re losing your home, you’re losing your home.”

For Gore, however, who says he’ll only support the ordinance without further amendment, the carve-out is a nonnegotiable. “To me, that is an overreach of what state law is right now,” he said.

Given the long road, and firm stances, DeMatteo considers the consensus package a success, particularly elements like the disaster protections, which she called groundbreaking.

“Progress is meted out in small steps, but I'm still very proud of the campaign, the Tenants Union, Legal Aid and all the folks that have shown up. I'm just very excited that we have a first reading happening. It's not getting punted anymore. For better or for worse, something is going to either pass or fail on Tuesday.”

If passed Tuesday, the ordinance will come back to the board for a second formal reading in September and will take effect in October.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to include Margaret DeMatteo’s current job title. It has also been updated to correct when the ordinance will take effect.

“In Your Corner” is a column that puts watchdog reporting to work for the community. If you have a concern, a tip, or a hunch, you can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On X (formerly Twitter) @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.

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