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Orozco, Norma From:Nathaniel Greensides <mynci90@gmail.com> Sent:Tuesday, July 06, 2021 2:57 PM To:eComment Subject:Non-Agenda Item City Council Meeting July 6 2021 Evicting Santa Ana’s residents’ affordability and community stability No incentives exist for landlords to act in good faith nor does recourse exist for landlords who utilize shoddy tactics to get tenants to leave. Improperly served notices don’t necessarily result in the court (en)forcing a landlord to actually learn and follow the law. Even when an eviction notice is legally posted and served to tenants, the eviction case filed in court can allege something completely unrelated to the notice served. Unless a tenant knows how to navigate the processes of our court system, there exists no mechanism to put Landlords and their eviction attorneys in their place. Landlords and their attorneys are literally bankrolling off of fear and ignorance. These eviction attorneys are happy to take payment from landlords who hardly check (if at all) what exactly an eviction attorney is filing on the Landlord’s behalf. The Landlord’s attorney has no incentive to file a case on actual grounds – eviction attorneys are literally profiting off of both tenant and Landlord (LL) ignorance (i.e. defendant failure to respond to the court filed complaint within 5 days of being served). Currently, as of July 2021 anyway, hardly any tenant attorneys exist in Santa Ana and OC at large. Of the tenant attorneys that do exist, those who are willing to take on a case on a tenant’s behalf are currently only doing so for easy wins – banking on the LL’s ignorance of current inability to evict based on nonpayment of rent. Currently, courts are NOT processing UDs based on pandemic related non-payment of rent given that the federal and state governments have attempted to alleviate the issue of non-payment of rent during the pandemic with programs that are hardly distributing any money to both tenants and LLs at all. Thus we have this system wherein LLs and their attorneys serve eviction notices with fake reasons – supposed “substantial repairs”, breaking specific and arbitrary portions of the lease such as regarding keeping the grass green (one particular case I worked on with a tenant is particularly egregious because the grass has been dead for over two years due to the landlord failed to pay the landscaping company… the landlord of this single family home which is being rented to a family of six is only pursuing the eviction now because they want to sell the home), and asinine procedural loopholes (such as claiming the eviction is based on the tenants not having provided a COVID-19 declaration while simultaneously making no note whatsoever regarding the eviction notice due to supposed “substantial repairs” which was provided as evidence or worse, in retaliation for simply requesting proof). After the notice – with fake cause – expires, the landlord proceeds with filing a case in court. But like I said, courts aren’t even bothering to proceed with cases relating to pandemic related non-payment of rent, especially with the protections relating to such having been extended to the end of September 2021. Of course, the court clerk is happy to take anyform so long as the basic info is filled and court filing fee is included. The clerk doesn’t and isn’t required to check that the listed reason for filing the eviction with the court matches actually the evidence attached. The LL can thus state on the court eviction form some reason not even related to the notice or non-payment of rent, and the tenant is now even more afraid of becoming homeless. At this point, the tenant and their family either have already moved after simply having received a notice with a fake reason, or they now are too intimidated to attempt to navigate court systems of law. Seeing as virtually no tenant attorneys exist, and those tenant attorneys which do exist aren’t taking complicated cases, and seeing as a tenant has absolutely nowhere else to move to because the rent is way too high and the financial costs of moving definitely isn’t zero dollars – the social costs are even more heavy upon families whose children must now suddenly change their school in the middle of the school year – the tenant navigates self-filing a response, and either finds a way to pay the court fees 1