photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
Housing attorney Margaret DeMatteo, flanked by community leaders, speaks outside the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors chambers in Santa Rosa, on December 5, 2023, calling for greater protections for renters in unincorporated areas throughout the county.

Sonoma County supervisors took another look at adding a variety of protections for renters in unincorporated areas Tuesday morning.

Once again they discussed, and once again they delayed.

With a host of options on the table, but no definitive direction, the board pushed to a later date a decision on adopting "just cause" renter protections like those temporarily enacted during the Covid pandemic.

The supervisors opted to wait for community outreach events - likely to come next July - before adopting any permanent rules.

That's a wait Sonoma County Legal Aid housing attorney Margaret DeMatteo said only burdens vulnerable renters.

"I don't deny that we need community engagement," DeMatteo said. "My concern is that we're gonna have to keep asking tenants and community orgs to keep coming back and keep showing up. People have jobs, when we already have data showing that the eviction moratorium was successful."

As DeMatteo noted, evictions dropped sharply during the pandemic eviction moratorium.

Landlords throughout the state decried that mandated halt, but unlawful detainers, the legal term for a court-ordered eviction, fell from 900 in 2019 to just over 300 evictions per year in 2020 and '21 in Sonoma County.

Supervisor Chris Coursey said those numbers matter.

"During the pandemic when we had "just cause" evictions didn't go away," Coursey said. "There were still more than 30% of the pre-pandemic totals were happening. So the tool wasn't taken away from landlords to evict. They were just forced to have a just cause."

Advocates like DeMatteo are calling for “just cause” protections against displacement for things like “renovictions." That's when a property owner evicts tenants to renovate and re-rent a unit at a higher rate.

She also wants protections to close loopholes which exempt single family homes and units designated “affordable” by deed, from receiving renter protections.

"Just cause" protections still allow evictions for violations like criminal activity or material breach of a lease agreement.

Laurie Weed, who had rented for seven years in rural Sebastopol, said the protections are desperately needed to protect renters liker her in unincorporated areas.

"I was handed a 60 day eviction notice," Weed said. "The reason was that the landlady had decided to sell and because she lived on the same property, it was exempt from tenant protections. That meant I got no compensation. I got no more than 60 days. I could not extend that. I could not negotiate with the new property owner. I had no rights whatsoever and we were turned out on the street. My rent is now 20% more for a smaller place than I was paying last year, and I was lucky to get that and I know it."

Close to four in ten housing units in Sonoma County are rented. According to county staff, over half of Sonoma County renters are rent burdened, that means they're spending more than 30% of their income on rent.

While no decision was taken, supervisors also debated adding emergency protections that would kick in during a disaster declaration for emergencies like floods or fires.

Supervisor James Gore, who represents the largest unincorporated community in the county, Larkfield, was absent from Tuesday's meeting. Realtor and landlord representatives were also absent from the discussion.