I promise I don’t only write about evictions.

But evictions are a terrible side effect of Costa Mesa’s most existential problem – housing affordability – so it’s worth taking some time thinking about how to address them. I already wrote a bit on the current Staff proposal. So I want to step back a bit now and discuss a structural problem that’s been revealed by these discussions.

But first: a sidetrack into beekeeping.

When I came onto the Animal Services Committee one of my first assigned tasks was to research residential beekeeping ordinances and explore whether Costa Mesa should adopt one. When I looked at ordinances in neighboring cities, there were two clear approaches.

The first, which I’ll call proactive enforcement, had the cities get deep into the business of backyard beekeepers to ensure they maintained constant compliance with city rules. This meant a licensing process, annual re-certification, and periodic inspections.

Other cities took a more hands-off approach, which I would describe as complaint-based enforcement: once a resident had a permit to keep bees on her property, she was free to do what she pleased unless another resident made a complaint. Then, and only then, would the city break out the beekeeping rules and see whether an enforcement action was warranted.

Obviously there are pros and cons to each approach. Proactive enforcement certainly produces better compliance and more consistent behavior from licensees. However, it is incredibly expensive to operate, requiring specialized personnel and significant man hours to carry out routine inspections. Complaint-based enforcement, on the other hand, is much cheaper: the city can sit back and assume all is well unless a complaint is brought forward, and then it only has to muster city resources to address that narrow complaint. The trade-off is that noncompliance tends to be much higher, with only the most severe cases being addressed. Additionally, if there are costs to the person making the complaint – perhaps you don’t want to upset your neighbor by reporting them – then problems may fester and become much more expensive to fix when a complaint is finally initiated.

So, let’s say you’re a city with a big problem and you are trying to choose between proactive enforcement or complaint-based enforcement. How do you decide? Obviously cost might be the limiting factor (and often is – I’m going to write a whole post about that), which would lean towards complaint-based enforcement. But as alluded to above, the upfront “cost savings” of this approach may be illusory if systemic, chronic noncompliance will create bigger, more expensive problems in the future. If that might be the case, spending the money on a proactive enforcement regime would make sense. Another thing you might consider is whether the problem you are trying to solve would ideally first be addressed through self-help versus formal process. And finally, one should consider whether perfect compliance would be a good thing or a bad thing. Noise complaints are a perfect example: if someone is having a loud party next door, the city should want neighbors to politely ask the music be turned down first before calling the cops. But equally, insisting on perfect compliance with the noise ordinance all the time would stifle socializing and all kinds of enjoyable, productive human activity that underpins our quality of life.

When we crafted our own beekeeping ordinance for the Animal Services Committee, we chose complaint-based enforcement for exactly this reason: like noise issues, beekeeping problems should be discussed among neighbors first. And we don’t need beekeepers to perfectly comply; we need them to comply in a manner that doesn’t risk the safety and peace of others. The cost savings of this approach were just the cherry on top.

Where I think cities, including Costa Mesa, start making mistakes is when they skip over debating the manner of enforcement and jump straight to the penalties of enforcement. And this is what brings us back to evictions.

Evictions are bad news. On an individual level, evictions have been shown to be devastating, traumatic events that can be a step on the path to homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and chronic illness. And when waves of evictions occur, not only does that create big problems for city services, it is a loud signal that your housing market is in distress and not functioning properly. So it is totally appropriate for cities to try and regulate how and when those occur.

But it is important to keep in mind that evictions can occur two ways: through a formal process regulated by private leases, state regulation and city ordinance, or an informal process through which a landlord provides no formal notice but nonetheless makes it clear to the tenant that she wants to end the tenancy. For example, the landlord could simply tell the tenant the lease is ending and ask the tenant to move; more often than not, the tenant will simply comply rather than “make trouble” by trying to enforce her rights (if the tenant is even aware of her rights). A more aggressive approach is to change the locks on the unit and hope the tenant gets the message.

Somewhere in between is intentionally allowing the unit to fall into disrepair. The stove stops working and the landlord refuses to fix it. The hot water fails and isn’t restored. The trash starts piling up. Complaints about water leaks and mold are ignored. In this scenario, the landlord is hoping to make life sufficiently miserable for the tenant that she decides to move out on her own, sparing both the messy process of eviction. And it works: as far as I can tell, most experts agree that the number of informal evictions dwarf formal ones, but still have the same awful effects.

This is exactly what many tenants have been complaining about at City Council over the past several months. I have lost count how many tenants have described shocking, degrading conditions they’ve endured in the name of keeping their housing: collapsing ceilings, visible mold, water leaks, lack of hot water for months at a time, inoperable appliances or plumbing, you name it. It seems obvious to me that some landlords are trying a two-step approach to move tenants along: first, trying to informally evict them through intentional neglect, and then resorting to formally evicting on the basis that the now-degraded unit needs a “substantial remodel”. Now, informal evictions like these are illegal, so part of the problem is that tenants will not, or cannot, assert their rights.

But allowing housing conditions to deteriorate in these ways are also gross code violations. So where is code enforcement? Well, unfortunately, code enforcement is stuck in a complaint-based model. Which effectively means that if there is no complaint, there is no violation.

Before we skip ahead to talking about the penalties for wrongful evictions, I think the City needs to take a long, hard look at how we are enforcing our health, safety and building codes in our rental housing. Relying on a complaint-based enforcement system is not working. And it should be pretty obvious why it isn’t working: there is no way for a tenant to make a code enforcement complaint without risking retaliation from the landlord, and that’s a risk many vulnerable residents aren’t willing to take. Worse, even more pressure will be put on our flawed enforcement system if the routes to formal eviction are closed off. Ratcheting up the penalties for no-fault evictions does not remove the underlying conflict between a landlord looking to reset rents and a tenant paying under-market rent. What it does do is encourage the landlord to resolve that conflict through other means, including continuing to rely on informal evictions.