Burbank! Come to an emergency City Hall meeting on 10/29 to deal with the city's eviction crisis!

On Jan 1, 2020, AB1482 comes into effect, capping rents at their rates as of March 15, 2019 plus an above-inflation; in response, the state's greediest landlords are evicting their tenants, either by raising their rents to levels they can't afford to pay between now and Jan 1, forcing them out, or by staging "no cause" evictions in cities that permit them. If those tenants are gone on Jan 1, the landlords can set a new rent floor that ignores the rates as of last March.

California's largest landlords are private equity firms that took advantage of the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 crisis to acquire thousands and thousands of homes, where they have slashed maintenance and jacked up rents, creating a new epidemic of homelessness.

The other large cohort of California landlords are Real Estate Investment Trusts that are the primary vehicle for offshore oligarchs who want to launder their money.

Burbank -- where I live -- has lax and difficult-to-invoke protections for tenants, permitting landlords to stage "no-cause evictions" for tenants regardless of whether they pay their rent on time and look after their homes. At a City Hall meeting on the issue that I attended last week, I ran into one of my daughter's babysitters and her neighbors: their apartment building had changed hands and the next day, the new landlord -- an anonymous LLC -- had served every single tenant with eviction notices, including families with small children (one mother showed me an envelope addressed to her young son that had personally notified him that he was being evicted). Read the rest