Oakland landlords looking to collect rent may have to wait a bit longer. The threshold amounts to demand rent has been raised.

Rental property owners in Oakland can't seem to get a break. Since the city's eviction moratorium expired, landlords and their agents have been besieged with new regulations, and it doesn't get any better.

Landlords now have a higher threshold to reach before demanding rent through a 3-day notice; before serving the notice, the tenant must owe at least one month of rent at the "fair market rate," as determined by HUD.

HUD has updated this figure and ratcheted it up for 2024, as this chart illustrates.

Download the chart »

 

What this means is that tenants must pile up rent debt to a certain amount, before the landlord can formally demand the rent debt due. 

As a hypothetical, a tenant who resides in a one-bedroom apartment and is obligated to pay $1,600 fails to pay rent for March. Can you serve a 3-day Notice to Pay Rent or Quit? No.

The tenant would need to owe at least $2,131 before the matter can be escalated. In this scenario, the landlord would have to wait until April if the rent is unpaid because the tenant doesn't owe enough money.

The lot of landlords accepting Section 8 housing vouchers is much worse if you do the math. Given the minuscule share of rent the tenant has to pay, it could take many months to reach the level of arrears required to serve a formal notice.

This is ludicrous and upends decades of landlord-tenant law, but we have to deal with it. Bornstein Law is in the trenches managing landlord-tenant relationships and resolving disputes. '

We are not in the business of challenging the constitutionality of ordinances, but if that is within the wheelhouse of colleagues who are reading this and wish to take up this fight for landlords, we would welcome and support it.