Betty Ordaz, 55, isn’t sure where to go next.
She sat in the driver’s seat of her packed SUV, parked near a North Hollywood street corner where the sound of low-flying airplanes landing at Hollywood Burbank Airport echoed.
There she was. Her landlord’s earlier tongue-lashing calling her “lazy” reverberated in her head, even as supportive neighbors looked on Wednesday morning. They were there waiting for the Sheriff’s Department to serve an eviction order at her home of four years.
Ordaz is one of almost 1,000 Los Angeles County tenants facing a renewed threat of eviction in the coming weeks while tens of thousands of other renters in the region with unpaid rent are still protected under eviction moratoriums being extended at city and county levels.
Ordaz falls into a category of tenants who are being “legally evicted” because her case pre-dates the COVID-19 shockwave of layoffs, business closures, infection and death that have gripped the region since mid-March.
L.A. County sheriff’s deputies had a backlog of 996 pre-COVID eviction orders at the time lockouts for all tenants were halted in mid-March so residents could shelter in place, a sheriff’s sergeant said in May.
This week, landlord and tenant attorneys said, the Sheriff’s Department is ending its freeze on enforcing those pre-COVID evictions. The head of a Los Angeles landlord group said he confirmed the decision to resume lockouts with a deputy in the sheriff’s Courts Division.
The Sheriff’s Department issued a short statement saying the evictions “currently highlighted” are the result of court actions that occurred before the pandemic. The statement said further none of the evictions being enforced are “COVID-19 related.”
The L.A. County decision follows actions taken already in Orange and San Bernardino counties.
Orange County deputies began to clear up a 180-case backlog at the end of May as California began reopening businesses. San Bernardino County deputies began to enforce 257 pre-COVID eviction judgments at the end of June. So far, San Bernardino County processed 174 lockouts, a spokeswoman said.
Riverside County officials said they cleared their backlog of pre-COVID move-out orders before the freeze began.
One in six Southern California tenants failed to pay their June rent on time, a U.S. Census survey found. But they’ve been protected by local and state eviction bans.
Los Angeles County’s moratorium has been extended to Sept. 30. A state Judicial Council order — now facing a possible review — stopped courts throughout the state from processing eviction cases.
But the pre-COVID cases are not subject to local and state eviction moratoriums because they pre-date those bans and because the Judicial Council oversees state courts, not local sheriff’s departments, attorneys said.
Tenants rights advocates oppose the L.A. County sheriff’s decision, saying it will expose residents to the coronavirus.
Landlords and landlord groups disagreed, saying many property owners have endured months without collecting rent, creating a hardship for smaller landlords who rely on rent to pay mortgages and expenses and provide retirement income.
Fred Sutton, Los Angeles spokesman for the California Apartment Association, argued these particular evictions, while “frozen in time,” have nothing to do with the coronavirus.
“I don’t necessarily see how you’re exposing people to COVID-19,” Sutton said. “They are for non-payment of rent or breach of lease that happened before (the pandemic hit) and should have been completed.”
Eviction attorney Dennis Block said the Sheriff’s Department posted five-day notices to vacate on 13 properties owned by his clients and carried out lockouts on six of them. He estimated that those landlords lost from $10,000 to $22,000 per unit.
“The loss to landlords is insane,” Block said. “The financial burdens of the pandemic are being put … on the shoulders of landlords.”
Craig Mordoh, a landlord attorney and general counsel for the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, questioned the ability of Sheriff Alex Villanueva to “unilaterally” halt the pre-COVID eviction orders in the first place.
“I was unaware that the sheriff has the authority to ignore a lawful (court) order,” Mordoh said. “I think that resuming these (evictions) is long past due.”
Elena Popp, executive director of the L.A.-based Eviction Defense Network, said tenants rights groups heard from 11 renters who received five-day notices to vacate last week.
“How do they expect people to shelter in place if they have no place to shelter?” said Popp, who filed a motion to halt Ordaz’s eviction. A judge denied the motion Tuesday.
Popp said Ordaz has a compromised immune system that makes her susceptible to COVID-19. She may end up living in her car with two adult children and a 2-year-old child, she said.
On Wednesday, a coalition of tenants rights groups — from the Los Angeles Tenants Union to Streetwatch L.A. — gathered with neighbors in support of Ordaz, waiting for deputies to arrive.
Tenants rights supporters barricaded the driveway of Ordaz’s duplex with furniture to try to block sheriff’s deputies from entering the home.
“Sending her out on the street is as good as a death sentence,” said D.C. Harris, an L.A. Tenants Union member supporting the protest. “If the cops and the courts aren’t going to protect people, we’re going to step up to make sure people can stay in their homes.”
The deputies posted a five-day notice to vacate on Thursday, giving Ordaz until Tuesday to leave if she didn’t want deputies to lock her out of her home. They hadn’t come by Wednesday, but it could be any day. Ordaz, on Wednesday, had many of her prized possessions already packed.
“All I asked for was a little time to pack four years of my life in four days,” she said, unsure of where she’ll end up next.
Ordaz said things went awry at the beginning of the year when she got sick. Already suffering from severe asthma, she was given 30 days to move out.
“I was just trying to take care of my own health,” she said.
But her landlord, Inez Morin, who lives next door, said the rent hadn’t paid since Nov. 1, prompting the order from a judge for her to move out by March 25th. But by then, the pandemic hit, and Ordaz — a caregiver by trade — was unemployed.
Landlords became unwilling to rent, and at that point, she said, she was just “praying for a place to go.”
She got a reprieve when the Sheriff’s Department stopped all lockouts.
“They don’t feel it’s incorrect that they haven’t paid rent since Nov. 1,” the landlord Morin said of Ordaz and her family.
With signs of protest outside the gated property — “Sin Trabajo No Hay Renta” (without work, there is no rent), “Food Not Rent” — the neighborhood was yet another flashpoint in a pandemic that has hit communities of color the worst and amplified existing disparities in housing and healthcare.
In California, more than 8 million unemployment claims have been filed since mid-March. L.A. County’s unemployment rate topped out at 19.5% in June, according to state figures. More than 957,000 Angelinos were unemployed that month or four times the number (227,700) a year earlier. Particularly hard hit were the leisure and hospitality industries, as well as retail and transportation.
Nationally, close to 1.2 million laid-off Americans applied for state unemployment benefits last week, as the pandemic pushed companies to cut employees, just as $600 weekly federal jobless payment expired. It was reportedly the 20th straight week that at least 1 million people have sought jobless aid.
The coalition of tenant advocates pointed to Ordaz as a new wave of evicted people that is coming if federal, local and state housing assistance doesn’t flow deeply into communities to help people pay the rent. The city of Los Angeles offered $2,000 in emergency rent assistance for local tenants, enough for 50,000 households. More than 200,000 applied.
In effect, said organizer Carla Orendorff, “We’re stepping into a new world,” where the system “has failed people like Betty.”
Another organizer, also working with the groups, put it another way — in terms of another crisis plaguing the region.
“You’re going to have streets full of homeless people,” said Carlos Marroquin. “Do we want that?”
