04.17.20 COVID-19 Briefing Live Stream Transcript

The County of Santa Clara
April 17, 2020
Live Stream - Live with the County of Santa Clara
10am PT

Mariel Cabellero: Good morning and welcome to live with the County of Santa Clara. My name is Mariel Cabellero and I'm the Deputy PIO of the Emergency Operations Center today.

We want to let folks know that our panel participants take off their face coverings to allow our ASL translators to follow the conversation more closely but we encourage the public the continue using masks when you leave your home for essential activities.

Today, with me I have Christopher Cheleden, Lead Deputy County Counsel with the County of Santa Clara and Jennifer Loving, Chief Executive Officer of Destination: Home. And we'll be talking about tenant supports for folks who are impacted by COVID-19.

I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Jennifer to talk to us a little bit about what she's seeing on the ground and how COVID-19 is impacting tenants and landlords.

Jennifer Loving: Thank you. You know what's it's hard to overstate what I think many of us and many people that are watching or feeling where this is just so stressful to be at home and not be able to work and earn money for your family.
And you know it's really important that there are resources available.

We're going to talk about the moratorium today, but also the financial assistance that is available and that will be hopefully available as we move forward as well. About three weeks ago, when we saw that that the economy is really going to be shut down, we knew that people that are frankly the most vulnerable in our community we're going to have a really hard time being able to pay their pay their rent and pay their bills. And so, we partnered at Destination: Home with Sacred Heart Community Services to open a COVID Relief Fund and the idea of that fund was to provide some financial assistance for people that just really have lost all of their income all at once.

We provide homelessness prevention services year-round and what we saw though in the first three days of doing this work was so many people applying for this fund that it exhausted the amount of money that we had available. We had over 4,500 applications in just the first three days.


MC: Wow, and so that fund was really decimated in just seconds. And what do you think that people can do to support those who are most vulnerable in our communities when we forward?

JL: I think there's two things. If you applied for this funding, know
that we are going through the applications now. Those 4,500 applications, we're about halfway through processing. It's a lot of work that's being handled
by a lot of different folks that have that have jumped in to help process and so money is being issued every single day. And then we will be allocating an additional amount of money, the first pot of money was $11 million dollars and that's what was really encumbered in just a very short amount of time. We'll be putting in another pot of money so hopefully that we can help more people.
If you're not in need of financial support I think it's really important to know that the situation for people is so dire. They don't have food now, they're struggling now and this pandemic is hitting households differently depending on frankly people's household incomes. And so, you can donate and be able to help your neighbor, help other people in this community meet their basic needs during this time as well.

MC: Chris, can you talk to us a little bit about what the county response has been to support tenants.

CC: Sure, absolutely. So, on March 24th the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors adopted an ordinance and essentially the purpose of the ordinance is to provide relief to tenants who are suffering from a substantial financial income loss as a result of COVID-19. And in terms of the types of things that would constitute a substantial income loss, those would be some of the more obvious things like a loss of a job or a reduction in hours but in addition to the extent people are not able to work because they're taking care of their children or of other family members that would also that could also qualify for protection of the ordinance as well as if people are incurring substantial medical expenses related to COVID-19.

So, to the extent that people fall into that category of really suffering a
substantial financial loss that makes it difficult for them to pay their rent, they would qualify for protection under the ordinance. And the way that the ordinance works, is the ordinance essentially requires, well, first of all it prohibits evictions for people who've suffered a substantial loss as a result of COVID-19 and essentially, currently right now the ordinance took effect on March 24th and it's currently scheduled to expire on May 31st but that is also subject to extension by the Board of Supervisors. And what the ordinance does
is it requires that if a landlord during the period of the ordinance being
in effect, if the landlord seeks to either evict the tenant or even to terminate the tenants lease, even if it's not an eviction, if so for example if the lease was to expire the landlord is required to give notice to the tenant of three things. First, why they're being evicted. Secondly, the fact that the
ordinance exists to give the tenant notice of their rights under the ordinance.
And then third, to provide information to the tenants about possible sources of rent relief and rent assistance that the tenant can be provided.

Similarly, the county has provided a form on the County of Santa Clara office of supporting website for tenants to provide to their landlords to let their
landlords know hey I'm suffering from income loss for this, I think I qualify under the ordinance and I'd like to seek protection of it under the ordinance.
And so, the goal for the county is to encourage communication between the landlord and the tenant so that it doesn't become a very adversarial relationship there.

And so that's essentially how it works. I would note a couple things one is that as currently drafted, the landlord is still entitled to seek the payment of rent although the landlord is not entitled to seek the eviction of the tenant. However, this the ordinance does provide that the tenant has until 120 days after the expiration of the ordinance and we don't know exactly when that can be. That could be a few months from now then plus another 120 days for the for the tenant to come current on their rent as well as during the period of the moratorium and that hundred and twenty-day period the landlord is not authorized to charge either penalties or interest during that period. I should have also noted as well two other things. One, is that the county's ordinance applies both to residential tenants as well as small-business tenants who suffer a substantial loss of income and there's a definition in the ordinance that relates to the Small Business Administration definition of a small business. And then the final thing I would note in terms of this information would be that the County's ordinance does apply countywide so even if you are city may not have enacted its own ordinance the county's ordinance would apply in your city.

Some cities like San Jose have enacted their own ordinance and so you should first consult with your city's ordinance but then to the extent that the county's ordinance provides greater protection for tenants then the county's ordinance would apply. So, I would just note that this information is available on the Office of Supportive Housing of the County of Santa Clara website relating to anti-eviction.  I think if you google anti-eviction County of Santa Clara Office of Supportive Housing, you should be able to find it. And on that page, you will find the notice that the landlord's required to give a form for the tenant to fill out, and in addition there's translations of all of the information in Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese, and as well as English. So that would be a really good resource for people.

JL: I think that it's so important that if you're not sure, hearing that the County of Santa Clara has provided these temporary protections to you as a tenant, if you can't pay your rent, you know you are being protected right now. And the information that Chris is giving us I think is so important and I also think that fell longer that the that this goes on people will be concerned about whether or not they'll be able to pay their rent when the moratorium lifts.

And I think the moratorium is great and I also think we're also going to have to look at what rental relief from the state legislature from federal stimulus
how we are going to be able to further protect people because it will be very hard to come up with rent after this crisis is over. So, I hope that this is
the beginning of the protections that that we're offering but that we're all
going to be working together to make sure that people do not lose their home for no fault of their own.

MC: Absolutely, and we want to remind folks that the county has services related to mediation and conflict resolution for landlords and tenants who may be having difficulty figuring this out and working through a solution that is mutually beneficial to everyone. You know we're very cognizant that we have a lot of smaller landlords as well as large apartment complexes and that everyone is impacted by this crisis. And the county also is partnering with a lot of with Bay Area legal aid and lots of legal services to provide support to tenants. And we encourage folks to take a look at those federal and state resources that are available to get support financial to address your rent needs.

Jenn, we know that eviction is still possible in the future and so what do
you think that folks can do moving forward? How do we advocate to ensure that people have stable housing moving forward and what are we really seeing also related to homelessness prevention?

JL: You know in a lot of ways, this pandemic has really just exposed the inequities that exist in this country and also in this valley how many people really are living not just paycheck to paycheck but are paying 60, 70, 80, 90, percent of their income towards rent every single month and are doing this heroic job of keeping their families housed and it's because they're working two, three, four jobs, because they have gig jobs on top of their regular income streams and this has really exposed that this is this doesn't work this doesn't work.

For people who are the most vulnerable, this doesn't work for the people who are frankly right now risking their lives every single day delivering food or dropping off meals or doing the things right now that we're relying on through
this pandemic. And so, what I think this opportunity gives us is how do we look at solutions that are good for everyone meaning of course rent needs to be paid but we need to think about how we can get that income and where we're passing that responsibility because right now we have
this responsibility I think to think about how we are doing business here differently.

MC: Great, and we do want to remind folks that the state just enacted relief for undocumented residents and that we now have more support for gig workers and for self-employed folks and for payment plans for small businesses. So, for that information we encourage you to go to COVID19.ca.gov.

I think unless does anyone have anything else they'd like to add about this topic?

JL: I would just say that if you are struggling to be able to pay your bills or to pay your rent right now, go to the Sacred Heart Community Services website
sacredheartcs.org and there's an interest list where you can add your name.

We have 14,000 families who have already put their names on this list in just three weeks for financial assistance but we will be expanding that pot of resources and the coming weeks.

CC: I would just like to add as well that during this crisis the county continues to move forward on its ambitious efforts to create affordable housing units as a result of the affordable housing bond that the voters passed in 2016. And I work on those types of projects and I know that we've had a number of units come online even in the last few months. So, I just want to let people know that we still are actively working on that problem and I should have mentioned at the beginning that part of why this is so difficult, as Jen pointed out, is that we were already before COVID-19 facing such a significant housing crisis in Northern California and this has only exacerbated that.

But I did want to let people know that the county continues to move forward working with our nonprofit partners to try to develop additional capacity and
additional housing. In addition, the county also through its Office of Emergency Services and through the Office of Supportive Housing is
contracting for a lot of interim supply for homeless people during this process
and that includes things like hotels and other temporary facilities so I don't
want to give the impression that the eviction moratorium is all that the county is doing we are trying to do things on many different levels during this time period.

JL: I think the response has been really pretty amazing. The team that has been working on that housing homelessness response has opened hundreds of hotel rooms, has opened up new mass shelters following social distancing guidelines and was working with the county health professionals through the Valley Homeless Healthcare team on medically triaging anyone who's going positive already in the quarantine.

MC: Before we sign off today I want to give everyone a situational update related to COVID-19.

As of 5:00 p.m. on April 16th, we had one1870 cases within the county of Santa Clara. That's a 2% increase over the previous day and we're sad to report 4 new
deaths related to COVID-19 bringing the total to 73. Our hearts go out to those folks who have lost loved ones.

As we've heard today there this is impacting us on so many levels and impacting our community so we want to remind you to be kind stay safe stay home and you're saving lives. Thank you so much.

CC: Thank you very much.