Advocates hope interactive maps exploring Sonoma County evictions will shape tenant protection discussions

The “Struggle for Home” project presents interactive maps and data on evictions and rental patterns in Sonoma County. |

From eviction notice to lockout

The process of an eviction is as follows:

First, a landlords gives a tenant an eviction notice, usually for three days, 30 days or 60 days.

Second: If the tenant does not move out, the landlord goes to court and secures an eviction filing, known as an unlawful detainer, or UD.

Third: If the tenant loses at court or does not respond, the Sheriff’s Office, at the landlord’s request, will remove the tenant and their possessions from the property and lock them out.

In 2017 there were 1,137 UDs issued and 582 Sheriff’s lockouts made.

2018: 938 UDs / 511 lockouts

2019: 939 UDs / 503 lockouts

2020: 360 UDs / 183 lockouts

2021: 337 UDs / 227 lockouts

2022: 822 UDs / 292 lockouts

2023: 907 UDs / 441 lockouts

Where in Sonoma County do renters who are Latino live? How many eviction filings were made in court between 2017 and 2023 in different Sonoma County ZIP codes? What percentage of renter households in neighborhoods that see a high number of evictions are headed by single females?

Tenant advocates who hope such data will help convince policy and decision makers to enact new protections for renters in Sonoma County have rolled out an ambitious project to answer those and other questions about who is getting evicted and where those evictions are happening in the county.

Called “The Struggle for Home,“ the project brings together interactive maps, interviews with tenants and other resources to examine eviction trends between 2017 and 2023.

It is built upon census data and information about evictions obtained from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and Sonoma County Superior Court through public records act requests.

“It is a tool to apply pressure to our decision makers to move on making decisions that could really impact the lives of our working and renting families,” said Lina Blanco, communications strategist with the North Bay Organizing Project, a community advocacy group that includes a tenants rights program and that is one of the collaborators behind the project.

The project, two years in the making, was funded by the nonprofit Legal Aid of Sonoma County; UC Irvine researchers were also involved in creating it.

The rollout is timed to an effort to convince the county Board of Supervisors to adopt an ordinance that would make it harder to evict tenants living in the unincorporated areas of the county and also trigger a countywide eviction moratorium in the event of a disaster such as fires, floods or a pandemic.

The board is set to discuss a proposed ordinance at its meeting today.

“If they care about their district, they will go down into the maps and they will look at their district and look at the statistics for every part of their district and every map, and be interested because that's who they represent,” said Margaret DeMatteo, who launched the project as a Legal Aid housing attorney.

“That's really what my hope is,” said DeMatteo, who is now an attorney with California Center for Movement Legal Services but remains a consultant to the mapping project. “I hope they come with questions, and I hope it makes a dialogue.”

A guide for outreach too

“The Struggle for Home” is set up as a website to scroll through and review the breakdown of renters versus homeowners; where renters live by different ethnicity and race; housing characteristics such as the year the renter moved in and building age (buildings 15 years old and newer are not subject to rental protections); and how financially burdened renters are by census tract.

A wide range of other data is available including: renter household demographics; successful eviction filings in court and sheriff lockouts between 2017 and 2023, including the racial and ethnic demographics of census tracts where lockouts occur; and the average tenure of renters in different census tracts.

The project is rounded out by video interviews with tenants who have experienced eviction and substandard rental conditions, brief introductions and links to research about the history of racial covenants in Sonoma County that drove residential and rental segregation patterns; and summaries of what additional protections tenant advocates are seeking.

The various maps serve as a guide to where evictions occur and suggest who is suffering their effects, which can guide efforts to work with tenants, said Patrick McDonell, supervising housing attorney at Legal Aid of Sonoma County.

“The ability to see the layers of demographic data shows me what are the communities in which we need to potentially be doing greater outreach or greater advocacy around,” McDonell said.

Research shows that eviction happens most to people of color, especially African Americans and especially Black women, he said.

Since the map displays where renters of those demographics predominate, “I learn what are the communities that are being most burdened by the displacement in our community, and we can sort of structure our attempts at policy response around being able to see that visually,” McDonell said.

The maps serve other functions, too, he said. They might help identify whether particular landlords or rental complexes are eviction hotbeds. They could also narrow down data on where in the landscape of evictions there are large populations of children, another way to help shape both policy and the efforts of tenant organizers.

“It's showing me we have a problem that's going to manifest itself in so many different ways, 10, 20 years from now,” McDonell said. “There's a generation worth of problems that's potentially coming down the pike because we are subjecting the youth in the county to having their families and their neighborhoods destabilized by evictions.“

More data needed

County Supervisor Susan Gorin, after reviewing the mapping project, said it helps make a case for creating additional safeguards for renters — as well as the fact they are overdue.

“You can see the tension and the stress and the importance of housing and the precariousness of those being housed over time,” said Gorin. “That’s not a surprise to me but it’s really helpful to determining the sense of urgency in creating tenant protections now versus a decade ago.”

As she continues to study it, said Gorin, “I hope to really get a more nuanced understanding of what we’re facing from a demographic perspective as well as everything else. I think its major conclusions are not a surprise to me even at a surface level, but to understand the depth and detail of this will be very important.”

Sonoma County tenant advocates have long pushed for a local rental registry, essentially a database of rental properties including information about rent and when landlords issue a notice to renters to vacate and why.

Supervisor Chris Coursey, who along with Gorin has advocated for such a registry, said, “The Struggle for Home” project itself shows how necessary one is because it doesn’t include more exact information about how many people are getting eviction notices and who they are.

“I think any data is valuable here and this sounds like more data than I've seen,” Coursey said. “But it's also based on incomplete information. If we don't have a clear picture of the whole thing, then we're missing stuff. I think we have the ability to do a better picture even than this, and we're missing out on that.”

One can get a sense of of how many evictions take place countywide annually from Legal AID’s caseload.

According to McDonell, in 2023, the nonprofit’s attorneys worked with 408 households on cases involving a notice to vacate given by the landlord — and 45% of tenants in eviction court were represented by Legal Aid.

The mapping project’s data shows 907 eviction filings (or unlawful detainers) in 2023; the map shows 944 such filings between January 2019 and January 2020, before the pandemic started and temporary eviction moratoriums were implemented.

Blanco and DeMatteo concede the map doesn’t have complete data, including about how many people are evicted each year in Sonoma County and why, and say they will continue to update it as new data is gathered. Those updates will include information about how racial covenants — property deeds used to prevent people of color from moving into certain neighborhoods — helped determine the county’s housing patterns and how those play into present day eviction trends.

“The long term is that we continue to apply as much data as we can to try to pull out these threads,“ said DeMatteo. ”It's going to take an equally affirmative policy or law to undo the harm that these racist covenants created.“

“The Struggle for Home” serves another purpose, too, said Blanco: helping reassure evicted tenants they are not alone in their circumstances.

“It's also for folks to see themselves reflected in the tool. A lot of times when people go through an eviction, there's a lot of shame in that. And I think it's really breaking open that shame and showing that there are reasons beyond their control,” said Blanco.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay