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Over the past year, Bay Area rental prices have plummeted at a historic pace as people fled the ultra-pricey market during the pandemic. But data shows that many didn’t look too far away for their next home.

California’s capital region — the Sacramento area plus Stockton and Modesto — was the biggest draw by far for Bay Area residents in 2020 making inquiries on apartment listings website Zumper.

What’s more, renter interest in San Francisco and the Bay Area has rebounded, showing strong growth after sagging at the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new Zumper report.

The end-of-year review by the San Francisco company looked at trends across the U.S. rental market in this unprecedented year — including the interests and behaviors of typical Bay Area renters as well as price trends.

According to Zumper’s State of the San Francisco Bay Area Renter Report for 2020, which surveyed more than 14,000 of the website’s users, many renters have looked to escape the Bay Area’s expensive rents during the pandemic. Using data from its website, Zumper looked at how many renters were interested in moving out of and into the Bay Area each month for the past year.

Interest in outward migration has followed an upward trend since the start of the year, and in November, the percentage of Bay Area renters searching outside the region reached a high of 41%.

Zumper analyst Neil Gerstein said one trend seen across the nation is that renters leaving expensive markets don’t move far. Looking at messages that Bay Area renters sent to listings outside the Bay Area on the Zumper website, the company found that the Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto area had the most interest by far, accounting for 34% of outbound messages sent from Bay Area renters in 2020.

“The Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto metro area is the closest large metropolitan area, and is significantly cheaper, so it was likely the most logical option for renters who wanted to leave the pricey Bay Area but wanted to stay close,” Gerstein said.

The top five areas of interest to Bay Area renters were all within California. Los Angeles was second with 8.6%, then Sonoma County at 6.8%, followed by Fresno/Visalia at 5.8% and Monterey/Salinas at 4.7%.

A September survey of 825 Bay Area renters by InterQ, commissioned by San Francisco developer Maximus Real Estate Partners, echoed the Zumper report, finding that 31% of Bay Area renters would leave their apartment if they were able to work full-time from home, but 73% would prefer to stay within a 30- to 60-mile radius.

Gerstein said he doesn’t think renter interest in leaving the Bay Area will slow down anytime soon. Still, the Zumper report showed renter interest in moving to the Bay Area is also growing. The inbound message rate from prospective renters outside the region hit its lowest point this year in April, accounting for just over 35% of the Bay Area’s total, but saw a steep increase over the next couple of months, and from October to November was an uptick again.

“Despite a massive outflow of renters, there has also been a significant increase in new renters coming in to replace them, likely because Bay Area rental prices are at historic lows but not enough to stabilize prices yet,” Gerstein said.

The Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto area accounted for nearly the same percentage of inbound messages to Bay Area listings as it did outbound, at 33.4%. Los Angeles followed at 11.3%, then Sonoma County at 11%. Two large cities outside California took the fourth and fifth spots: New York at 10.7% and Philadelphia at 5.2%.

When the pandemic shut down large office buildings in the Bay Area, many renters newly able to work remotely sought larger, cheaper homes while sheltering in place. That spurred an exodus of renters from big cities in the Bay Area, the Zumper report said, causing supply to spike and rent to plunge.

San Francisco, still the country’s most expensive rental market, saw the most significant drop out of all big U.S. cities, down 22.6% from last year to a median one-bedroom price of $2,700. Rents also declined dramatically in other Bay Area markets, including Oakland and San Jose.

“The most interesting change to the Bay Area rental market has been an unprecedented price decline caused by a renter migration out of the area,” Gerstein said. “San Francisco and Oakland rank among the largest price drops in the country throughout 2020.”

Cities outside the Bay Area, including Sacramento and Fresno, saw big growth. Compared with last year, Fresno shot up 15 spots in one-bedroom median price rankings from Zumper’s national rent reports, while Sacramento moved up six spots.

According to the December report, Fresno saw an 18.9% increase in rent prices year-over-year for a one-bedroom, averaging $1,130, and a 15.3% increase year-over-year for a two-bedroom with a median rent of $1,360. Sacramento’s year-over-year increase for a one-bedroom was 15.9% with an average rent of $1,460. The median rent for a two-bedroom was $1,800 with a 24.1% year-over-year increase.

“Price growth in Sacramento and Fresno might not be entirely driven by increased migration, but migration is likely the dominant driver here,” Gerstein said. “Increased migration to an area typically has an upwards effect on rental prices because the rate at which people move in typically outpaces the construction or availability of new rental units to house them.”

Dramatic price shifts in individual cities aren’t necessarily felt at the state level. In California, for instance, rental prices have declined significantly throughout 2020 in major Bay Area cities and Los Angeles. But the big increases in places like Sacramento and Fresno have offset that. The result is a slight increase of 1.7% in the one-bedroom median price in California statewide, to $1,983.

Nationally, growth in median one-bedroom apartment rental prices was a modest 0.6%, to $1,224. Montana saw the biggest growth of all states, 36.7%, with a median rent of $950, and New York state saw the largest decline, 20.2%, with a median rent of $2,150.

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Renters-fled-S-F-and-the-Bay-Area-in-2020-15820765.php

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” is a trite cliché, but it’s useful when thinking about differences in housing costs in different parts of the U.S., especially for anyone considering permanent remote work as a way to save money. Places that look relatively cheap at first glance aren’t necessarily more affordable for most people who might want to live there—and some places that seem expensive aren’t as pricey as they look after careful analysis.

Consider the latest data on relative housing costs by metro area, published Tuesday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This isn’t a measure of house prices, which are affected by everything from interest rates to speculative fervor, but a measure of actual housing costs paid by renters as well as an estimate of how much homeowners would pay if they had to rent their current residence. The ranges are vast: at the top is the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing costs are more than twice the U.S. average. On the opposite extreme are the smaller cities of Appalachia, the Deep South, and the Texas-Mexico border, where housing costs are about half the U.S. average.

There are good reasons for these disparities. For starters, the average wage of an employed worker in the SF Bay was about $115,000 last year. That’s almost twice the average wage of employed workers nationally. By contrast, the lowest-income metros offer jobs with average yearly wages under $40,000. In McAllen, Texas, for example—the lowest-cost metro with at least 500,000 people—the cost of housing is barely a quarter of what it is in the SF Bay. Relative to local incomes, however, the difference in housing costs almost vanishes because the difference in wages is so large.

Even after accounting for differences in local wages, however, there are wide variations in housing costs. But here too, there are often simple explanations relating to the amenities—or discomforts—associated with specific locales. It’s surely not a coincidence that America’s most expensive housing relative to local wages is on the Hawaiian island of Maui, or that the cheapest housing is in former coal-mining towns in West Virginia.

Those places are small and perhaps could be considered unrepresentative, but the pattern is still clear when focusing only on metros with at least 500,000 people. The ones where the average wage buys the most housing are often in the industrial heartland of the Great Lakes, and generally in areas that have seen better days. By contrast, the most expensive housing—at least from the perspective of the average worker—is generally near a beach in southern California, Florida, or Hawaii.

Focusing only on the biggest metros doesn’t change this basic narrative. Among the metro areas with at least two million people—and combining the San Francisco and San Jose metros on a population-weighted basis—the average workers’ income buys the most housing in the industrial heartland, while the most expensive housing is in Miami, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Amusingly, considering the recent migration trends, housing-adjusted average wages are almost identical in Austin, Texas, New York, and the SF Bay—and all three are more affordable than Denver or Las Vegas.

These relationships will matter more to the extent that companies expand their remote working opportunities and use them as a way to cut labor costs. Back in May, about a third of employed Americans were working from home, with roughly two-thirds of workers in tech, media, finance, and professional services doing their jobs remotely. Those proportions have dropped somewhat since then, but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has said that he expects half of the company’s employees to be working remotely by the end of the decade, with workers outside of headquarters getting paid commensurately less depending on their local cost of living. Other companies are considering similar options.

While that could be good news for Bay Area workers considering a move to Maui, the case for moving to Vegas or Austin for many professionals could be less compelling than implied by the headlines.

Write to Matthew C. Klein at matthew.klein@barrons.com

Article source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/moving-for-cheaper-housing-wont-necessarily-save-you-money-51608129001

By CBS San Francisco Staff

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Like thousands of other tech workers, William Hauser came to the San Francisco Bay Area from Ohio seeking a bright future in the epicenter of the digital world.

There were obstacles — high rents, an ever skyrocketing cost of living, long hours at work. Then the coronavirus struck. In mid-March, tech giants including Salesforce, Apple, Google and Twitter sent their staffs home to work remotely and smaller firms followed suit. As the lockdown lingered, the luster wore off and Hauser joined the exodus from the Bay Area.

“Honestly, I started being a software engineer, I got into computers, because it’s convenient to be able to work remotely,” Hauser said as he was loading up a U-Haul in his San Francisco neighborhood in the fall. “Now that everyone has been working remote, and policies aren’t cemented at least until next year, there’s no reason to stay here when I could go back to family and work remotely there.”

As the months wore on, moving vans and U-Hauls became a common sight on neighborhood streets as the retreat from San Francisco and the Bay Area gained momentum.

Hauser wasn’t alone. Richard Matsui, CEO of San Francisco-based kWh Analytics, relocated to back to Hawaii.

He grew up in Honolulu. After high school, he left for the U.S. mainland and Asia for educational and career opportunities and never expected to be able to leave the Bay Area and still be able to run the company.

Then the pandemic shut down child care options in San Francisco for his baby born in January. He and his wife planned to come to Honolulu for a month so that his mother could help with the baby. A month turned into two and then six.

“If there’s an opportunity now to take mainland salaries and our mainland jobs and to execute them well from Hawaii, I do think that Hawaii has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to diversify the economy and … take advantage of the fact that our core strength in Hawaii is a tremendously wonderful place to live and to raise kids,” he said.

ALSO READ: 2020 In Review: The Day The Sky Turned Blood Orange; Historic Wildfires Ravage Northern California

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also departed the Silicon Valley, moving to Texas, but he did keep his headquarters in the Bay Area. That wasn’t the case for tech giant Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who both announced moves out of state.

Musk recently compared California’s situation to sports teams.

“They (successful sports teams) do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled, and then they don’t win the championship anymore,” Musk said of California. “(California) has been winning for a long time. And I think they’re taking them for granted a little bit.”

The numbers bore out the trend. An industry survey found that more people were leaving California than moving into state, continuing a trend that coupled with fewer births slowed the growth rate in the nation’s most populous state to a record low amid the pandemic that is reshaping its future.

Officially, California added 21,200 people from July 1, 2019, to July 1, 2020, increasing the state’s population a paltry 0.05% to 39.78 million people — still by far the most of any state.

But the bigger news from the new population estimate was that 135,600 more people left the state than moved here. It’s only the 12th time since 1900 the state has had a net migration loss, and the third largest ever recorded.

The exodus also drove down rents. Analysts at AdvisorSmith found that 10 of the top 25 cities in the U.S. where rents are fell the most, were in the Bay Area.

San Francisco was number 4 in the nation, after Odessa, TX (1); Midland, TX (2); and Williston, North Dakota (3). Other Bay Area communities include Mountain View (5), Sunnyvale (6), Redwood City (8), San Mateo (11), Oakland (15) and San Jose (19).

The range of the drop has varied wildly based on location. In San Francisco, rents have fallen from $2,650 per month to $2,081 since 2019. That’s a 26% drop. In Walnut Creek (76), the rent drop was much less: only a 3.7% drop from $2,574 per month to $2,512.

When it came to those who stayed in the Bay Area, a desire for home ownership — fueled by low interest rates and the need for more space while working remotely — buoyed the real estate market.

According to a California Association of Realtors report, the median price for an existing, single-family home in the Bay Area was $1,060,000 in September, which was down 0.7% from August’s all-time high but up 20.5% from September of last year.

“Buyer demand remains robust,” said Jordan Levine, the association’s deputy chief economist. “We see that in the mortgage applications, we see that in the price numbers for the Bay Area, in the unsold inventory numbers which declined. That is driving this rebound in sales, but it is also making the market more competitive.”

Others planned to stay in California, but relocate outside the Bay Area where home prices were more reasonable. Home sales soared in the Lake Tahoe area.

“We’ve seen a large number of transplants from other areas,” said Rhonda Keen, president of the South Tahoe Association of Relators. “It’s not just tech-workers either. We’re getting all kinds demographics buying homes without even seeing the property.”

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/12/30/2020-review-thousands-leave-sanfrancisco-bay-area/

Business leaders fear tech giant Oracle’s recent announcement that it is leaving the Bay Area for Austin, Texas, will lead to more exits unless some fundamental political and economic changes are made to keep the region attractive and competitive.

“This is something that we have been warning people about for several years. California is not business friendly, we should be honest about it,” said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the UC Berkeley Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.

Bay Area Council President Jim Wunderman said the talk on the street is that other exits are already in the works.

“From consulting companies to tax lawyers to bankers and commercial real estate firms, every person I talk with who provides services to big Bay Area corporations are telling me that their clients are strategizing about leaving the Bay Area,” Wunderman said.

Charles Schwab, McKesson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have all exited the high-cost, high-tax, high-regulation Bay Area for a less-expensive, less-regulated and business-friendlier political climate. All of them rode off to Texas.

Other companies, including Apple and Dropbox, are keeping their headquarters in the Bay Area, but expanding their workforce elsewhere.

But as the exodus unfolds no one seems to be batting an eye. Especially those in power. Especially in San Francisco.

“We have some people saying ‘goodbye and good riddance’ but it’s going to have real impact,” Wunderman said.

If anything, the pace of the departures appears to be increasing.

“We have doubled the real estate transfer tax and we have a tax for when the CEO of companies makes too much money,” Rosen said in citing two San Francisco examples of what he sees as the anti-business attitude. The CEO tax kicks in when a top executive makes 100 times or more than the company’s employees’ median salary.

San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney, who authored the CEO tax that passed at the ballot last month, said most see the taxes as fair and beneficial.

“Most businesses don’t pay their CEOs 100 times what they pay their median workers, and most businesses want to see our city invest more in solving drug addiction and mental illness,” Haney said. “Painting this as an anti-business measure is totally inaccurate, and that’s why it had widespread support across the entire city, garnering nearly two-thirds of the vote. The overpaid executive tax isn’t anti-business. It’s pro-worker, pro-investment in our health system, and anti rampant, spiraling inequity.”

And it’s not as if there is much political fallout when significant businesses like Oracle or Schwab pull up stakes.

“There is a portion of San Francisco residents — maybe even a majority — who are happy to see this happen, but in the end they could wind up killing the goose that lays the golden egg,” Rosen said.

And it’s not just taxes and regulation. The 10-month shutdown of downtown San Francisco has shown business leaders that workers can plug in from anywhere and still get the job done.

“Those ‘second-tier cities’ — as we call them — like Austin, Denver or places in South Florida, are looking a lot more attractive these days,” Wunderman said. “The cost of housing is a huge factor in determining where talent chooses to live and in an era where remote work is becoming an alternative. This is really affecting the Bay Area’s competitiveness.

“But the will to clear the path for major housing construction has yet to become present in state law or local decision processes, quite the contrary,” Wunderman said of the slow pace of housing production in California.

And it’s not just tech giants like Oracle and HP that see California losing its luster. Regular people feeling the pain are looking elsewhere as well.

A recent online survey of 2,325 California residents, taken between Nov. 4 and Nov. 23 by the Public Policy Institute of California, found 26% of residents have seriously considered moving out of state and that 58% say that the American Dream is harder to achieve in California than elsewhere in the United States.

“It cuts across all demographic and regional lines. People are really worried,” Public Policy Institute of California CEO Mark Baldassare said.

He’s back: The revolving door down at the jail in San Francisco just keeps turning.

In a column earlier this month about the 33% rise in vehicle thefts this year, we wrote about how often as not the suspects are released within one day, pending trial.

“In one sample, we have this guy who has been arrested 13 times in the last 15 months,” said Cmdr. Raj Vaswani of the San Francisco Police Department’s investigative division.

No sooner did the guy get out of jail than he was arrested for the 14th time on Dec. 10 after police spotted him riding a stolen motorcycle on McAllister and Leavenworth streets.

Once again he was booked into County Jail.

Well, on Sunday, according to Tenderloin police officers, our hot motorcycle rider was spotted on another stolen motorcycle again and busted for felony vehicle theft.

It was his 15th arrest for vehicle theft in 18 months and his third vehicle theft arrest in 20 days.

The suspect was once again booked into County Jail, and the motorcycle returned to a very grateful owner.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Phil Matier appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KGO-TV morning and evening news and can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call 415-777-8815, or email pmatier@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @philmatier

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/As-corporate-tech-titans-exit-California-15823339.php

In Bay Area cities like San Francisco, rent is dropping by record numbers, yet in other cities, people still struggle to pay rent. Not everyone is enjoying the benefits of the emerging “renter’s market.”

There’s the story of remote tech workers seeking cheaper and more spacious housing away from the once-bustling cities where the pandemic has now slowed activities.

College students, who would usually live around campus in cities like Berkeley, are moving back in with their parents.

Crystal Chen is marketing manager at Zumper, an online rental platform. “I was born and raised in San Francisco and it’s crazy to see,” Chen said. “All I’ve seen is rents go up and up. This is the first time I’ve ever seen rents go down this much.”

Chen said that some of the largest declines are in the tech-heavy Peninsula and the South Bay, in cities like Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Santa Clara.

“We’ve seen the pandemic shift the demand for rentals away from really expensive markets toward more affordable cities,” Chen said.

Zumper’s rental report for the San Francisco Bay Area metro showed that some of the cities with the most expensive rent — San Francisco, Mountain View, Cupertino, Palo Alto and Menlo Park — have seen huge declines compared to the same time last year.

Rents have been steadily declining in major cities during the pandemic. It’s a classic market economy: people are moving out, demand decreases, and rents go down. San Francisco joins other metropolitan hubs around the country where people are opting out of city life in search of suburban comforts.

“It seems like there’s an exodus of a significant portion of the population in big cities,” Chen said.

“If you’re going to be stuck at home all day you don’t want to be stuck in a shoebox.”

In other Bay Area cities, there’s the story of working-class people who cannot afford their rent despite the “renter’s market” that is creating vacancies and discounted rent.

In some places, people leave because they cannot afford their rent. Justin Accola, senior property manager with Altos Realty Advisors, said in an October interview that they were seeing double the number of vacancies.

Altos manages a range of properties in the Bay Area, from apartment complexes to single-family homes. Accola noticed that the vacancies are concentrated in tech-heavy cities, but said, “In East Palo Alto and unincorporated Menlo Park, the turnover rate has been super quiet over there.”

He’s also noticed more people moving in with family members, adding roommates to their lease, or downsizing to save costs.

In order to keep good tenants, Accola said landlords have been working with tenants by connecting them to rent relief resources, setting up payment plans, accepting portions of rent and sometimes even forgiving the difference that tenants can’t pay.

But not all landlords are willing to decrease their rent.

“A lot of owners aren’t doing that because they think it’s going to be harder to bring it back up if said tenants fall under a rent control category,” Accola said.

The Bay Area Equity Atlas, an online repository of data focused on inequality metrics in the region, found that 48 percent of San Mateo County renters are rent-burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent) and Latinx families — like Orellana’s — are especially at risk of being rent-burdened and economically insecure.

“We get our food at food banks and we live off of what we can get because the economic situation right now is very difficult for us,” Orellana said.

“In this country people do not talk about poverty, but right now there is very extreme poverty in this time of crisis.”

The pandemic has been especially difficult for undocumented communities, who are ineligible for federal assistance such as the stimulus check or unemployment benefits.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Tenant Relief Act, officially known as California’s Assembly Bill 3088, at the end of August to protect renters like Orellana. The act prohibits residential evictions through January 2021 if renters cannot pay rent due to the pandemic. But they must pay 25 percent of their rent for September 2020 through January 2021.

Starting in February, landlords could collect owed rent through small claims court. Evictions may not be able to proceed, but tenants will still owe rent.

Orellana said she received rental assistance from the San Mateo nonprofit Samaritan House, which will cover 25 percent of her rent from October through December.

Her sister is back to work, but with fewer hours and reduced salary.

Some things are looking up, but the future still looks grim as Orellana wonders how they will repay the thousands of dollars of unpaid rent. “It’s a very uncertain future and one of more poverty that we’ll be living in,” Orellana said.

Even when the pandemic ends, she said, “You won’t immediately see jobs going back to hire employees like before. When the economy starts to go up it’s going to be very gradually, very slowly.”

East Palo Alto, like San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, saw some of its highest unemployment rates in years, but it appears that rents in East Palo Alto have not declined as much as in San Francisco, according to anecdotal evidence.

Zumper has limited data and listings for some cities like East Palo Alto.

That said, its latest rent report showed that East Palo Alto’s rent hadn’t changed compared to last year, and had dropped just 4 percent compared to the previous month.

Abisai Moreno, program counselor with East Palo Alto’s Rent Stabilization Program, said that earlier in the pandemic she even received calls about tenants getting invalid rent increases or receiving eviction threats, which she has had to rectify with landlords.

“For the most part they (landlords) ended up complying because they have to,” Moreno said.

While she received some calls from landlords concerned about rent, Moreno said, “they weren’t desperate calls like the ones I get from tenants.”

She’s taken a lot of calls where she’s just had to let the tenant vent and validate their experience.

“I had a call about a family who was renting a garage, and they were being charged $2,500. They had a family of three and were unable to pay their rent,” Moreno said. “There’s a desperation with people that are getting taken advantage of, even during this time.”

“Despite the moratorium, tenants are still very much stressed out and afraid they’re going to lose their housing,” Moreno said.

The Bay Area Equity Atlas warned that up to 7,900 households in San Mateo County could be at risk for eviction or homelessness if renter protections were to end.

Wayne Rowland, board president of the East Bay Rental Housing Association (EBRHA) said that landlords are more likely to want to work with tenants. “The rental property owner has only one customer: the renters,” Rowland said. The EBRHA provides education and advice to property owners and managers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

Even without the moratorium, Rowland said property owners may not have opted to evict tenants in the first place and were probably preparing to work with tenants. “If everybody’s out of work and you evict a tenant so that you can get another tenant who’s also out of work, that makes no sense,” Rowland said. He favors rent relief over the eviction moratorium. “(The eviction moratorium) is OK for something that’s temporary, but we’re talking about almost a year. That’s got to be financially exhausting for anyone who relies on the income stream of properties,” Rowland said.

During city and county meetings over the last several months, landlords and property owners have spoken up about the financial difficulties of lost rent. They worry about not being able to pay their mortgage, or losing their properties. Mom and pop landlords may lose out on rent that makes up their main source of income.

In July, UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals surveyed 380 property owners and managers from various states (including 22 percent from California). Most responded that rent collections were down compared to the prior quarter and 1 in 4 had borrowed funds to cover operating costs. In San Mateo County, the Board of Supervisors responded by allocating $2 million of federal coronavirus relief funds toward a small property owner relief fund. Eligible property owners who lost rent during the pandemic could receive grants of up to $6,000.

Some landlords also face tenants who take advantage of the eviction moratorium to avoid paying rent, even if they’re financially able. In emails to the Law Offices of Todd Rothbard — a team of Bay Area evictions attorneys — property managers and landlords wrote about tenants who refused to pay rent and abused the eviction moratorium.

One property manager of a single-family home said that in April, their tenant — who they said was a young Facebook engineer — refused to pay rent because he thought the rent was too high. “I think he is abusing the system by using COVID-19 eviction restriction as an opportunity to extract rent concession from the landlord,” the manager wrote.

Todd Rothbard said that his office had seen a sharp decrease in evictions actions, from 300 to 400 a month before the pandemic to less than 100 a month. Rothbard does not support the statewide moratorium. “Let the market proceed,” Rothbard said. “There will not be an avalanche of evictions. Most landlords don’t want vacancies. Now you have a situation where Legislature is encouraging people not to pay rent. They’re creating a backlog that’s going to explode.”

Thomas Bannon, CEO of the California Apartment Association, supported the moratorium but thinks it’s time for the moratorium to be lifted.

“I think how it’s been handled so far is not going to encourage people and capital to go into the rental housing industry,” Bannon said. “That’s a problem because we haven’t been successful in public housing serving everybody.”

He said that the California Apartment Association encouraged its members to work with tenants instead of evicting them. Now he’s worried about the consequences if the federal government does not provide rent relief. “You’ve got to figure out a way that the landlord can either be made whole or pretty close to it. If not, they will probably sell their single-family rental units and walk away,” Bannon said. If single-family homes go from being a rental property to the housing market, somebody wins, Bannon said, “But the people that lose are the renters who have a difficult time paying,” he said.

Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. —Republication, Rebroadcast, or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.

Article source: https://patch.com/california/san-francisco/rents-decline-san-francisco-bay-area