Newsom orders delay on evictions over coronavirus, while L.A. votes down a blanket ban

Gavin Newsom speaks in front of the hospital ship USNS Mercy that arrived into the Port of Los Angeles on Friday, to provide relief for Southland hospitals overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic. But Newsom’s order doesn’t prevent the legal process of being evicted from ultimately occurring and still requires renters affected by the coronavirus to jump through a number of hoops to qualify for the two-month delay. “Besides the many different requirements that tenants have to come up with to qualify, there’s just general confusion about what the governor did.” Newsom’s order still allows for local governments to pass their own stricter eviction bans, something that has happened already in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and a few dozen other cities and counties across the state. The simplest thing is to have a moratorium in effect, so people do not wind up out on the street.” But such an expansive eviction ban worried other council members, who were uneasy about landlords being unable to toss out tenants involved in illegal activity and about the effect on smaller landlords who need their tenants’ rent to pay their own bills. The California Apartment Assn., the state’s largest landlord group, has asked its members to stop rent increases and evictions, waive late fees and work out payment plans for affected tenants.