San Francisco landlord-tenant relationships have been anything but predictable in the last year. Governor Newsom enacted Executive Order N-28-20 on March 16, 2020, which suspends certain state laws to open the field for local regulation on evictions. Mayor Breed declared a local state of emergency on February 25, 2020 (with several dozen supplements through the rest of the year) seeking to curtain efforts to recover possession of rental units, other than for health and safety reasons or pursuant to the Ellis Act (which the City can’t prohibit). The California Judicial Council even stepped in (arguably in excess of its authority or even any authority that Gov. Newsom could delegate under the Emergency Services Act) to prohibit the issuing of summonses in residential eviction lawsuits through August of 2020.
California enacted AB 3088 on September 1, 2021, as a comprehensive scheme to address the patchwork efforts of the different branches and different levels of government. It prohibited cities from adopting, extending, renewing local regulations protecting tenants from evictions, imposing its own.
Not to be deterred, the Board of Supervisors passed Ordinance 216-20 (known colloquially as “Preston 2” following the supervisor’s previous legislation prohibiting evictions for non-payment of rent at the local level). Ordinance 216-20 prevents landlords from recovering possession of a rental unit “on or before March 31, 2021 unless necessary due to violence, threats of violence, or health and safety issues”. The restriction even applies to owners who rent out individual rooms in their homes. Deferential to (some of) AB 3088, the ordinance acknowledges that it does not apply to “evictions due to unpaid rent or any other unpaid financial obligation of a tenant under the tenancy that came due between March 1, 2020 and January 31, 2021” or evictions under the Ellis Act, but it otherwise fails to address the comprehensive prohibition on local eviction regulations imposed by AB 3088.
