In the Mount Washington home of Sal Gonzalez and Erica Orosco, cockroaches are skittering out of the shower wall.
For months, Orosco and Gonzalez have pleaded with their landlords to fix dozens of problems in their family’s apartment, including mold, a sagging roof, and holes in the floor.
Then in March, the landlords filed an eviction against the couple, claiming the property’s issues were the family’s fault.
“It’s not like we’re not paying the rent,” Gonzalez says. “That’s not the case.”
But the family lost — because they didn’t respond to their eviction notice in five business days.
How the rules work
Before a tenant is evicted, their landlord has to serve them a notice called an unlawful detainer. Then a clock starts ticking — fast.
California renters have just five business days to file a response in court. If they don’t make the deadline, they can lose their case automatically in what’s called a default judgment.
That’s how Gonzalez and Orosco lost their case earlier this year.
But the couple says they didn’t answer in time because they didn’t know they were being evicted. They say their landlords never served them with any papers. (The landlords did not respond to a request for comment.)
Gonzalez and Orosco are sure they would have won their case if they’d had their day in court.
“I want the chance to fight it because I know I’m going to win,” Gonzalez says. “We’ve been living in hazardous conditions for six years, and it’s not fair.”
Researchers estimate that more than 40% of eviction cases in California are lost this way – in default judgments – because tenants did not respond within five days or didn’t fill out their response correctly.
This five-day rule is the strictest in the country. Almost every other state offers people more time to respond to an eviction than California does.
“In many states, you don’t have to file any paperwork at all,” says UCLA law professor Gary Blasi. “You can just show up and present your case in a hearing. In that case, you can get your day in court, with no possibility you can lose before then. And those are some of the most conservative states there are that have those laws.”
A change coming?
Now a new California Assembly bill wants to give tenants more time to respond to evictions: 10 business days.
But lawmakers have tried to do this before without success.
In 2018, then-assemblymember David Chiu – now San Francisco’s city attorney – introduced a similar bill.
On one of the last days of voting before a key deadline to pass the legislation, Chiu was confident it had the support it needed.
But when the votes were tallied, it was clear his bill was going to fail.
“I remember being blindsided,” says Chiu.
Overnight, special interest groups representing landlords had instructed his colleagues to oppose it, Chiu discovered.
“We immediately started negotiating with the opposition on this, and it was significantly watered down to get it off the assembly floor,” he recalls.
Ultimately, the bill Chiu got lawmakers to accept changed the five-day response period to not include weekends or judicial holidays.
Now it’s unclear whether AB 2347 – the current version of the bill – will meet the same fate.
Landlords are lobbying against it, says Dan Yukelson of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, a landlord trade group.
“Adding an extra five days to an already long eviction process, which can take up to six months to adjudicate, just extends the pain and suffering that landlords go through,” Yukelson says.
Can the landlord lobby block the bill again? Yukelson is feeling moderately optimistic.
“We're not always successful in killing a bill completely,” he says. “We are often successful in getting some amendments that makes the bills a little bit more palatable to our members.”
Currently AB 2347 is in the state senate. Lawmakers have until the end of the month to vote on it.
Back in Mount Washington, Orosco and Gonzalez have some good news: They found a lawyer through the Los Angeles Tenants Union and filed an emergency motion to overturn their eviction. Their landlords never turned up in court to fight back, so the judge ruled in their favor.
The family is relieved. But it’s hard to relax.
“I know we’re at war,” says Gonzalez. “I’m not celebrating yet.”
They’re still determined to make their landlords repair the property.
