A New Eviction Moratorium |
A New Eviction Moratorium
Long after the end of COVID, some local jurisdictions are still sticking it to mom-and-pop landlords.
Wayne Rowland | May 26, 2026
There’s an eviction moratorium operating in parts of California right now. It applies to thousands of rental units. It protects tenants who have stopped paying rent. And it has been put in place without a single emergency declaration, without a legislative vote, and without any of the public scrutiny that formal policy is supposed to require.
It is not only property owners who are bearing the cost of misguided housing policies. It is the cities that enacted them. It is the state that is looking the other way. And it is the public revenues that fund schools, roads, and services, all draining away with each month of unpaid rent.
A System Built on One Assumption
California’s unlawful detainer framework rests on a foundational premise that is not complicated: When a renter fails to pay rent, the rental owner has a right to act. Not immediately (the law requires a three-day notice to pay rent or quit), but promptly, and through a summary court process designed to resolve these disputes quickly.
That system is now being dismantled. At the state level, any change would require a vote and invite scrutiny. Instead, this is happening at the local level, through ordinances written in deliberately technical language, by city councils that understand exactly what they are doing and are counting on nobody noticing.
The playbook is worth understanding in detail. It is sophisticated, intentional, and most importantly replicable. Cities cannot directly override California’s unlawful detainer process. That is state law, and the state has made clear that eviction procedure is its domain. But pre-emption doctrine draws a distinction between procedure — how an eviction works — and also in substance, when an eviction is permissible. The former is clearly controlled by the state. The latter is where things get conveniently murky, and where local governments have learned to exploit the resulting ambiguity with precision.
A city cannot simply require rental owners to wait 60 days before filing for eviction. That would read as procedural interference and invite a pre-emption challenge. But a city can prohibit eviction for nonpayment until unpaid rent exceeds a specified threshold — say, one or more........