Gavin Newsom has announced that California will pay off all unpaid rent accrued during the pandemic using a $5.2 billion pot 'on a scale never seen before in the US.'
The Governor, who is facing a recall election expected in the fall, is also likely to extend a ban evictions for unpaid rent beyond June 30 - a pandemic-related order that was meant to be temporary but is proving difficult to undo.
'California is planning rent forgiveness on a scale never seen before in the United States,' Newsom wrote on Twitter Monday night.
The 53-year-old Democrat has been meeting with legislative leaders privately to negotiate the allocation of the state's $260 billion operating budget.
Gavin Newsom talks during a news conference at Universal Studios in Universal City, California on June 15
Landlords and tenants' rights groups are arguing over how long the extension to the eviction ban should last.
'The expectation for people to be up and at 'em and ready to pay rent on July 1 is wholeheartedly unfair,' said Kelli Lloyd, a 43-year-old single mother who says she has not worked consistently since the pandemic began in March 2020.
Lloyd - a member of the advocacy group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment - is supposed to pay $1,924 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom rent-controlled apartment in the Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles.
But she says she's $30,000 behind after not working for most of the last year to care for her two children as day care centers closed and schools halted in-person learning.
That debt will likely be covered by the government. But Lloyd said she recently lost a job at a real estate brokerage and hasn't found another one yet. She's worried she could be evicted if the protections expire.
'Simply because the state has opened back up doesn't mean people have access to their jobs,' she said.
Meanwhile, in the wine country area of Sonoma County, property manager Keith Becker says 14 tenants are more than $100,000 behind in rent payments. It's put financial pressure on the owners, who Becker says have 'resigned themselves to it.'
But they have grown weary of the seemingly endless protections, which he noted were aimed at addressing a public health emergency and not meant to be permanent.
'We should do
