Despite the most encompassing COVID renters' rights, Los Angeles starts the eviction crisis and beats every red state to the deadly punch.

— The upcoming evictions in Los Angeles affect everyone nationwide…

Evictions are moving forward at a rapid pace, and even for many of those who had thought they were safe, the situation is rapidly worsening. Most of these folks had already been suffering from so many of the problems facing Americans due to decades of failed leadership and now they are facing a new problem. Those same families have been faced with the reality that many of their jobs have been destroyed by the incompetent response to the pandemic and now that continued incompetence could lead to their eviction in the coming days…

But for 900 families in Los Angeles, it started as suddenly as the earthquake a few hours earlier on Thursday, July 30th.

— LA has the strongest COVID renter protections in the country.

The current stance of the state of California is that there will be no evictions under any circumstance other than because of the perceived danger to other tenants until at least September 20th, this will most likely be extended, and the City of LA has gone even further so that no one will be evicted until at least 12 months after the Pandemic has ended. This had to include everyone, even those evicted before the pandemic began but had not yet been forced to vacate their property.

The reasoning for this was simple:

If there would be no rent forgiveness or evictions, this meant LA is under a rent moratorium only. The idea so far is that renters would still be liable for the rent, however, they would have up to 12 months after the pandemic to pay it off. This would basically mean that once things reopened fully, called Stage 4 at the moment, there would be a massive game of rotating houses and apartments as renters moved to cancel their former liability, which is really all it would take. This would happen for that entire year as rentals reopen and could be easily done effectively and safely after the Pandemic ends.

But LA has accidentally created a precarious situation until that changes.

There is nothing stopping a new renter from moving into a new rental, paying rent once, and then refusing to pay rent any further before simply moving out when the pandemic ends leaving the landlord without any options to recoup the money short of state or federal assistance.

Consequently, there are few, if any, rentals in Los Angeles available because the risk on their “investment property” is too high. We’re going to come back around to that last idea in a moment, but for now, the reality is that landlords are better off leaving their houses empty and claiming assistance rather than taking the risk of new tenants who might damage the property and I don’t blame them.

This essentially creates an informal rental freeze. Not on rent, but the actual units themselves.

Therefore, protecting anyone who needed to move at all had become essential because the normal social contract of available housing was no longer being fulfilled. Mayor Garcetti was far ahead of any other Mayor in the country when he adopted this proposal. See, Los Angeles is a largely transient city in that many folks who live here are not actually from here. If we force all those folks to leave because of the downturn, there may not be enough workers available to restart the economy properly once things return to relative normalcy.

For a time, this was all working perfectly. The government had been aiding those landlords who found themselves with a majority of tenants who could not pay their rent, and folks began feeling somewhat safe as COVID cases continued to rise around the city and state.

Then at eight-thirty in the morning on Thursday, July 30th, 900 families woke up to a very rude awakening. They were not only going to have to move, they only had FIVE DAYS to do so.

And it wasn’t the city or the state saying it, it’s one lawyer fighting for the right for landlords to evict even though many were being subsidized at the time. Beyond the immediate 900 families in Los Angeles, this could lead to the further eviction of an unfathomable number of families during a worldwide pandemic.

— Let’s take a quick detour and talk about what it takes to move in LA.

Since January, before the pandemic hit, my wife and I had been seeking new housing. We had been in a dispute with our landlord and wanted to move.

As the pandemic began, remember it actually started in late January although the shutdown didn’t happen until much later, we noticed a change in housing availability resulting in a marked increase of scam listings and limited viewings available for actual housing. We visited as many as four houses a day, none of which offered safety precautions with multiple people viewing them with limited to no sanitary conditions fit for a communicable disease.

This meant visiting spaces that folks we would never see or meet had just visited. Simply put, this put us at a high risk of COVID, and we did ultimately catch it at a house showing. We were fortunate enough to be prepared and in relatively good health as well as contracting a lesser strain compared to what is going around currently in many states but others will not be so fortunate.

As fewer and fewer folks were showing rentals, we became more desperate and the risk became higher and higher. Each house or apartment had become a petri dish for COVID growth. Traveling to these open houses was the exact opposite of what we should have been doing, even more so now as America passes 155,000 dead in just a few months.

Now we are learning that the virus can survive in aerosol for 16 hours. This means that anyone who visits a house for an entire 16 hour period after a positive person can still contract it, and there would be limited ways to contact trace it to a source to contain it. It’s really a nightmare situation.

But let’s look at this in a different way, let’s imagine a situation where the variables are perfect... How can we expect 900 families to be evicted in one day with only five days' notice to safely and securely seek out new housing? Never mind that nothing is available or that anyone who would set up a new rental within 5 days would be questionable at best leaving the already most vulnerable at greater risk for COVID and “rental traps.”

But forget all that, how would that be possible even under perfect circumstances?

There is no question that this order if fulfilled, will cause the death of multiple Los Angelenos.

— So, who is this lawyer risking everyone’s lives?

His name is Dennis P. Block.

If you travel to his Yelp you can read review after review calling him a scammer. He is notorious for gobbling up as much money as possible from both sides, and with a long history of evictions in LA, it would seem that being unable to evict renters in a pandemic has left him in a precarious situation. Instead of taking some time off, he has devoted his time to evicting anyone he can to give the impression that evictions are still possible allowing him to gobble up money from desperate people who would be turning to their state and federal government for assistance otherwise.

It’s rare that we get an opportunity like this. Usually, it is a government official enforcing the law, but this is the opposite of that. This is one man who has decided his client's right to capital is more important than people’s safety and has gone far and beyond to decide what the law will be. He shows glee on his twitter feed when 900 families are being served with sudden and unforeseen eviction notices. He’s pushing to have folks suddenly evicted and displacing 900 families at once while creating a mini-crisis that will get people killed because that is the cost of staying in business for him.

If a business is built on blood, maybe it shouldn’t be allowed to exist?

Though the case has been moving through the courts since the pandemic started, there was no court hearing date made publicly available. The tenants were not told about the possibility that something might change in their situations, and there was no opportunity to make a case against him or for themselves. Since this affects 900 families, there is a constitutional right to receive notice of the change in their eviction case because the last eviction had a full hold put on it. This means the tenants must be notified of any court proceedings that could change their case. I admit the laws in California are blurry around pandemics because California was formed post-tuberculosis breakouts, but this must be the situation because the original eviction orders are good for 180 days but they reissued fresh paperwork even though they had not even reached 150 days yet. The reissue of new paperwork means that there was a full stop and restart with the restart being the only notification. This action is a violation of the tenant's rights, even ones having already gone through parts of the eviction process.

There has been little written and limited news on this subject as evictions prepare to start nationwide and the Senate, which has had a bill from the House since May, has decided to take a long weekend with no deal in sight. But make no mistake, this story is a nexus point in the fight to stop evictions nationwide.

— My wife and I are one of those 900 families.

It’s January 2020 and we are in a dispute with our landlord again.

By February we are in court with her, again. Other tenants were suing her as well but we had always chosen this route to settle our differences with her as she would lie, block, or just be generally cruel otherwise. We had already watched her run a deposit scam for a few years while dealing with her slumlord tactics, we knew what we were dealing with.

Backstory, after her husband died she was left with several buildings and no idea how to legally make it work. Her plan was to let anyone move in instantly with a large deposit, if you didn’t stay the whole year she kept it. If you were one day late on rent she would send you an extensive message chain of how she would ruin your life, your credit, and your future if you didn’t move out immediately.

For two years we watched her flip apartments almost monthly, we stopped even trying to meet some of our neighbors because of the frequent turn over some leaving in the middle of the night. We knew that she was verbally harassing those folks who were already desperate in the first place. This is called a Rent Trap, where you take advantage of desperate folks who have no other options.

But when it came to court, you’ll never guess who her lawyer was..?

Mr. Block himself.

And guess who didn’t show up to court? The same Mr. Block.

He left his client stranded and forced her to take on a Hallway Attorney, this is an attorney who just roams the courthouse and picks up everyone’s loose cases, but we came ready for a fight and to push for a jury trial.

The new Attorney was so frustrated with our landlord’s wild and irrelevant demands that he gave us everything we wanted and this included 6 weeks to move. He even gave us an extra 5 days because he said something about moving on a Monday was easier, but we knew he was just sticking it to his new client.

Fast forward a few weeks as COVID wipes out rentals and closes down the city, the Sheriff tells us that we are protected and to settle in. The issue wasn’t that we didn’t have money or bad credit but there was simply nowhere to move to and no one wanted to take on new renters until they saw what was going to happen. There are so many questions right now that renters simply cannot answer in Los Angeles, start with your income… “oh, well I’m on the UI benefits that we don’t even know are going to get extended, and my industry, acting, has been completely wiped out until at least next year” is not a strong start with a new landlord.

The important part of this story is that our particular problem is a by-product of this exact lawyer’s own shady business maneuvers.

It was because he didn’t show up that we got the extra time that put us in the window of not being able to move. This is a problem that he created himself and as a prominent eviction attorney, I am sure that our landlord is not the only client he is trying to make up for. Now he is going through extraordinary lengths to keep his scam alive so that folks will continue giving him money for anything he can get them to and evictions are his primary source, even though the reality is that no more evictions will be posted in Los Angeles for at least another 18 months.

Everything he has built is built on blood and I’ve heard the wild promises he makes to my landlord so that she will keep giving him money. She barely understands the business and it’s obvious that he’s taking advantage of her.

— But what about my landlord you may ask? Surely she deserves the benefits of her rental properties?

We were already in a dispute over a variety of slumlord issues but during COVID it really comes down to three issues.

#1) She is already having tenants pay her in cash so she can claim her building is half empty and be reimbursed for the loss. This is probably why folks who just read the numbers think there are plenty of places for folks to move but the reality is that landlords are double-dipping all over the city and if more folks knew about why their landlords were asking them to pay in cash then they would be ringing the alarm bells too.

#2) Rental properties are actually known as “investment properties’’ and investments come with risks. Normally housing is one of the safest investments because the risks are basically five things, natural disaster, your tenant losing their income or just generally being a destructive jerk, a housing crash because of balloon payments (2008), or a worldwide pandemic that shuts down the world. Those losses are part of the investment risks and this is already a multi-unit building, not a sole dwelling… so it’s a much less significant loss… if she weren’t double-dipping on government assistance.

#3) She is operating a 16 unit building and by law, she is supposed to have one unit available for a live-in Manager, she skirts this issue by having two addresses but when we were recently surveyed the city said the second address technically didn’t exist. So, she should be eating the loss on one unit but she is circumventing the law to avoid it.

Mr. Block said that folks like us were taking advantage of the situation but the truth is the landlords are the ones taking advantage of the crisis and the reason we saw the massive GDP loss, the greatest since we have been tracking it, is because landlords are gobbling up every dollar that we need to spend to prop up the economy. They are literally destroying the American recovery and making this crisis worse because the only way to save the country is currency distribution directly through the people and if that money continues to get soaked up by millionaires then we aren’t going to get anywhere.

The fault of course doesn’t truly fall on her or them. The fault falls on the Federal government who has failed the entire world by not ensuring that every American had the ability to survive through this catastrophic and mostly unavoidable situation. Yes, we could have made it less bad but it was happening either way.

— The fabric that holds it all together.

In the order for our society to function certain ideals must be maintained. This idea falls into something called the “Social Contract”. The social contract is the reason that citizens don’t riot all the time.

Part of that social contract is that there needs to be available work, housing, education, parks, law enforcement, etc. These things function on a series of sliding scales so one can compensate for the other, but if any falls out completely or they all collectively fall beneath a certain level then the social contract is in violation.

This silent agreement is the only thing that keeps the system functional. It exists between the “establishment” (whoever controls resources) and the “working class” (those that maintain and distribute those same resources). The rioting and protesting we have seen lately is because the social contract has been broken by police and government representatives all over the nation.

A pandemic is an example of a time, like war, where we have to suspend aspects of the social contract, and that is a two-way street. Too many of the sliding scales have dipped below acceptable levels and this means that the federal government must suspend certain aspects of that contract.

However, pointing back to the “investment property” concept, it’s really important we discuss the order of operations of rights because the right of the tenant for housing is greater than the right of the landlord to make a profit which is why we have the eviction process to protect both the renter and the landlord in the proper order but it prioritizes the renter in most states. But, in a pandemic, the right to profit from housing must be suspended because it is secondary to the right to the pursuit of happiness as is in the constitution.

The Federal or State governments can choose to support the landlord's losses but this would be again secondary to protecting the health of a renter in a worldwide public health crisis because all investments come with risks. It is not the government's job to prop up investment risks, though it would be acceptable in many cases, however, it is the job of the government to prop up the citizen through any crisis.

To take it beyond just housing, in a pandemic all basic needs must be available so we can get over the outbreak more quickly and stem the loss of life. Inevitably the answer is giving folks enough to stay home for 3–4 months (Relief) with another 3–6 months of financial recovery (Stimulus).

• Rental payments and Mortgages must be suspended.
• Credit cards and debt payments should all be put on hold if they cannot be paid.
• Water, Power, and Gas should all be subsidized by the government.
• Medicare should be opened up to all and Cobra should be subsidized until it is free to the consumer.
• Personal Federal Tax Liability should be reduced to zero.
• Food stamps should be made more available, it is a food subsidy after all to protect the industry.
• Everyone should be told to stay home.
• We should have UI benefits that promote folks staying home, greater than $600 a week. Spending is already depressed, we need to lift that.
• Hazard pay for those who have to work should be equal to the added UI benefits.

This list is simply Relief orientated and there is an entirely separate list for the Stimulus aspect of this action.

The hard reality is that the American Government has been so quick to protect capitalism that it skipped the “Relief” step and went right to the “Stimulus” section with disastrous and deadly results. Simply put, they are prioritizing propping up investments instead of citizens when the citizen is the better investment.

Millions are out of work with entire industries wiped out because the federal government propped up the stock market and banks and forgot about middle America, they forgot about Main Street. Millions of Americans face eviction with no sign of hope in sight because they didn’t take care of renters. Millions of Americans are going hungry because there are not enough resources being distributed effectively. We have the resources, they are simply not being distributed properly.

I remember a not too distant time when being American meant something.

And this lawyer wants to push 900 families who were safe into the street? This is simply villainous and going backward anyway you spin it. We have so far to go to stop this crisis and we should be expanding these protections, not reducing them.

If Dennis Block is allowed to get away with this nefarious plan, this doesn’t just put these roughly 900 families at risk, it puts all families facing eviction at risk all over the country. What good is fighting for protections from your government if one individual can come in and have it swept away from all of you? If this Lawyer is not stopped right here, right now then others will think that they can do the same all over the country.

An action to stop the evictions can come in a few forms. The Governor can stop it by Tuesday morning. The state legislature can fix it on Monday. Someone can challenge it in federal court. Filing an injunction would stop it for the time being, or the Sheriff or emergency manager could choose not to enforce it.

But none of these folks, except the Sheriff, has adopted renter protections that would match the rights these 900 of the hardest-hit families just lost.

The bottom line on all of this is that until the rent moratorium is lifted, which will not be anytime soon, the city of Los Angeles cannot evict anyone because the social contract for available housing is not being fulfilled due to landlords not being comfortable taking on new tenants in most circumstances and a rent freeze, which is inevitable, will only exacerbate the issue.

In the meantime, all we can do is create social pressure and hope the Governor's previous order supersedes whatever the judge decided. Since Block was only suing the City, it does nothing for the state order that extends until September 20th but it’s unclear if the Sheriff will honor that.

Saying “create social pressure” means folks from all over the country calling his offices, visiting his yelp, social media, and anything else that he uses as a portal to speak to the public and let him know how you feel about him throwing 900 families on the street because he would throw your family out if he could. When we are done with that, calling the Mayor’s and Governor’s office needs to be added to the list.

There is no way to put it other than this: The capitalists are at war with the working class and if capitalists aren’t going to protect our families then why should we protect theirs? Because that is also part of the social contract.

If we let them push back at our safest locations then that is us losing at the front lines and we need to get this one under control before it becomes hundreds of front lines all over the country and Millions of people without homes who now will be at high risk for COVID.

Here is every communication portal I could easily find… If you scroll through his yelp reviews it also looks like he has a bit of a racism issue, and by that, he appears to be a racist too.

**FULL DISCLAIMER** We have continued seeking new housing and there is no way I can see us managing setting up new housing and a move that quickly.

Dennis Block Contacts

Twitter https://twitter.com/DennisBlock

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dennisblock/

FB Page https://www.facebook.com/evict123

Website https://www.evict123.com/covid-letter

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-block-79948012/

Yelp https://www.yelp.com/biz/dennis-p-block-and-associates-valley-village?osq=dennis+block

Mayor of LA Contact: https://www.lamayor.org/contact-us-0

Governor of CA contact: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/

We need to get this done and rotate to activism surrounding the $600 UI.

My next piece will be an argument for an expansion of UI benefits and the inclusion of hazard pay.

Stay safe until we meet again.

If you or anyone you know is having trouble with rent or is being harassed by a landlord, please call or have them call a local rental advocacy group.

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