The Alameda County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed new rental protections on Tuesday that require “just cause” grounds for evictions, provide an additional month for relocation payments and cover a broader set of rental homes in unincorporated communities.
The ordinance will go into effect March 6 – more than six years after the supervisors’ first discussion of tenant protections for the unincorporated county. But the unanimous vote obscures the division the ordinance had to overcome at the Board of Supervisors.
“I’m not happy with this ordinance. I am going to be supporting it, but it’s nowhere near what we initially discussed when I joined this board,” said Supervisor Elisa Marquez, who replaced former Supervisor Richard Valley in 2023 after his passing. “There are members up here who have deliberately delayed this… it should not take this long to make a policy decision.”
Unincorporated county rental protections have faced numerous obstacles during the slow march toward their adoption. Recent years have elicited severe shocks to renter-landlord relationships: A three-year-long eviction moratorium, skyrocketing home insurance premiums and a historic period of high inflation — all of which have complicated the process.
Several unincorporated county tenants have described their hardships to the Board as the debate progressed. One of them, Elena Torres, is a former resident of Cherryland who was evicted from her home in early January after an extensive legal battle with her landlord over living conditions.
Torres and other tenants who partnered with My Eden Voice, an East Bay renter advocacy organization, celebrated the new protections for renters even if the new ordinance did not include the most far-reaching protections they sought. My Eden Voice community organizer Kristen Hackett said the newly adopted ordinance was a step in the right direction, but left work on the table.
“My Eden Voice was pushing for just cause protections for all that started on day one… but the protections don’t start until one year,” Hackett said, detailing what she described as a major concession for tenants. “We see it as a strong foundation for our work. When we started this discussion in 2018, there was no real community driving this issue.”
Supervisor Nate Miley, who had voted against previous iterations of the ordinance, said it was unfortunate that the rental protections had taken six years to adopt, but he stressed the need for government to balance the concerns of both landlords and tenants. He defended the adopted ordinance, however, saying a farther-reaching ordinance could cause more harm than good.
“I will not do anything that will harm either side,” Miley said. “When you hurt small landlords, and you drive small property owners out of the market, you’re only causing more vacancies and homelessness.”
Though Torres was evicted and forced to live in her car before the ordinance was adopted, she told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that it was their responsibility to ensure “basic human dignity” to all residents of Alameda County. Hackett said tenant leaders like Torres deserve the most credit for seeing the ordinance through to the end.
“A lot of respect has to go to the tenant leaders who have been showing up to every meeting for the last 6 years,” Hackett said. “We see it as an achievement of our tenant leaders. Our folks did everything they could.”
