A major deadline is coming soon for Los Angeles renters, and the city council hopes to be ready for it.

At its meeting on Tuesday, the L.A. City Council tasked city staff with gathering extensive data related to renters and their unpaid rent. This request comes in the wake of the expiration of the COVID-era protections from the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) on February 1, 2024, after which unpaid rent from October 1, 2021, to January 31, 2023, will be due and rents may be increased by up to four percent on properties that are under the RSO.

The data requested will help put specific numbers on the housing crisis by showing the amount of rental debt that will be owed on February 1, as well as the rent that has been paid since March 2020, when emergency COVID relief first started. Estimates for future tenant debt will also be included in the report.

On top of diagnosing the overall rent debt that will be held by Los Angeles renters, the report will also focus on the effectiveness of the city’s low-income housing assistance programs funded by Measure ULA. This data will include the amount of rent covered and uncovered by the ULA programs, as well as a list by council district of all of the applications submitted for ULA programs.

First District Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — who authored the motion alongside 4th District Councilmember Nithiya Raman and 8th District Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson — also made comments on the motion. She noted that there were 74,000 eviction notices issued between February and December this year, most of which were for nonpayment of rent, and the assistance from ULA programs was not nearly enough to help everyone housed.

“As of October, over 24,000 applications for ULA rental assistance were submitted, claiming $380 million in back rent, well over 10 times the amount made available,” Hernandez said. “This tells us that there are thousands of tenants who are at risk of losing their housing if we do not take action to protect our tenants.”

The first period of ULA program applications lasted just under two weeks — from September 19 at 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., October 2. — but the need was made abundantly clear. During its consideration of the motion, the Housing and Homelessness Committee noted that not enough was being done even with programs funded by Measure ULA, Measure HHH, and others despite providing about 20,000 permanent housing placements annually over the past five years.

“While that is evidence of the impact of historic investments made possible by voter-backed measures, the reality facing the city is that every day, renters are falling into homelessness faster than our system can rehouse them,” the committee’s report said of the success of permanent placements.

This is not the first time the city attempted to obtain clear data on aspects of the housing crisis. The council sought information on the impact of overdue rents on small “mom-and-pop” landlords and the programs that could be implemented to help them and an analysis of the amount of rent debt owed to landlords of properties with four units or less. 

A motion was also passed last month to establish an online dashboard to display the number of evictions and reasons for those evictions in the city. Additional analysis of costs and reach of outreach efforts for low-income assistance programs will be conducted as part of the report, and analysis of outreach for a similar deadline that made rents owed from March 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021, due on August 1.

A report on this data is set to be presented to the city council by January 11, 2024, 30 days after the motion was passed.

Photo by SB Arts Media