Why insurance matters to renters, landlords and California

August 7, 2026 By Levi Sumagaysay Leave a Comment

A year and a half after the Eaton Fire, Gil Barel is still waiting to move back into the Pasadena home she has rented for nearly a decade.

Her complex did not burn down, but smoke engulfed it for days during the January 2025 fire. Barel wants to make sure it’s safe for her and her two children, one who’s college-age and one who’s 12, to move back. A test she ordered found toxic materials; now she’s waiting for the result of more testing her landlord is required to do because of a new California law.

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Her landlord got the unit cleaned in March, but then Barel found various belongings under the sofa and behind other furniture, which indicated to her the cleaning was superficial. She said it was also obvious the floors and walls were not properly cleaned.

“The issue is that I have no control,” Barel said. “It really depends on the conversation between my landlord and their insurance company. If the landlord does the minimum, or if they don’t feel the need to fight or be insistent on certain things, then it’s not going to happen.”

Her story is one of many that illustrate why the health of California’s property insurance market — availability of affordable policies, and insurers that pay claims promptly and fairly — matters not just to homeowners but also to renters, who make up about 44% of the state’s residents. Insurance affects the cost of rent, housing supply and the ability of communities to recover from disaster.

In November, Californians will elect the state’s next insurance commissioner, a position that will play an important role in the recovery from last year’s Los Angeles County fires and the state of the insurance market.

Barel has her own renters insurance, for which she pays $114 a year with a multi-policy discount, she said. So far, her insurer has paid her several thousand dollars since the fire: $6,000 for loss-of-use coverage, which helps for additional living expenses when a renter is displaced, and $2,100 for some of her personal belongings.

She just finished an inventory, which she will send to her insurer to claim more of her $35,000 maximum benefit for personal belongings.

“I was stuck for a long time,” Barel said. “It’s extremely overwhelming. There are a lot of personal things. These are our stories. This is our life.”

Her renters insurance did not cover the industrial hygienist testing that she ordered for her unit, which found high levels of lithium, chromium and other heavy metals, likely a byproduct of the smoke and fire residue, according to a report she shared with CalMatters. Because the blaze occurred in the wildland-urban interface, the “smoke frequently contains a broader and more toxic mixture of particulates and chemical by-products,” the report said. The industrial hygienist recommended additional testing and cleaning.

Now, after she got the city of Pasadena involved to help pressure her landlord to do more, she’s hoping she’ll soon be able to move out of the Lincoln Heights back house she has been living in since the fire. FEMA has paid for that, but the aid is set to expire in October so she’s getting worried. She has continued to pay rent for her apartment all this time, she said.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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California lawmakers side with landlords to kill renter eviction relief

July 4, 2025 By Ryan Sabalow 3 Comments

by Ryan Sabalow

Welcome to CalMatters, the only nonprofit newsroom devoted solely to covering issues that affect all Californians. Sign up for WhatMatters to receive the latest news and commentary on the most important issues in the Golden State.

Sen. Aisha Wahab implored her colleagues to think of hospitalized patients and struggling families as she pitched a proposal to give tenants a full two weeks to pay their past due rent before their landlords could start the eviction process.

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“This is a very small ask from the state of California,” Wahab, a Democrat representing the Fremont area, recently told her fellow lawmakers. “(It’s) very small to allow people 14 days to either ask for family members and loved ones to give them money to stay housed, to ask their cities or any of the other nonprofits that help people with rental assistance stay housed, or to even be able to wait for their check.”

Despite Wahab’s pleas, her Senate Bill 436 failed to advance out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee last week.

It was the latest example of progressive Democrats’ struggles to add protections for California’s 17 million renters, despite lawmakers otherwise taking aggressive steps this year to address the state’s housing and homelessness crises.

Just this week, after a decade of failed efforts, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to reform the state’s signature environmental law to stop activists from using it to block housing construction. The proposal easily passed the Senate and Assembly, despite angering the state’s influential environmental groups.

But when it comes to giving tenants more power and easing some of the nation’s highest rents, California voters and the 120 senators and Assembly members who represent them have largely balked.

Last fall, California voters decisively shot down a rent-control initiative that would have allowed local governments to block landlords from raising rents. A more aggressive rent-control measure never received a hearing this spring in the Assembly Judiciary Committee, even though it was authored by San Jose Assemblymember Ash Kalra, the committee chair.

Another bill to limit fees landlords can charge tenants on top of monthly rent was held until at least next year, despite the author being San Francisco Assemblymember Matt Haney, the chair of the Assembly Housing Committee.

The stalled bills were a remarkable display of how difficult it is for lawmakers to pass rental protection measures since committee chairs usually are influential. Wahab chairs the Senate Housing Committee. 

Her measure, which would have extended the start of the past due eviction process from three days to two weeks, is the latest setback for the Legislature’s 10-person legislative Renters’ Caucus, which counts Wahab and Haney as members.

Renter protections divide Democrats

What makes the death of Wahab’s bill especially unusual is that it happened during a committee hearing in public view and featured Democrats joining Republicans to shoot it down. As CalMatters reported, most legislation killed in the California Legislature dies quietly behind the scenes, without a vote. It’s also rare for Democrats to vote “no” on a fellow Democrat’s bill.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee’s debate highlighted the tensions between the Democratic supermajority’s progressive and more moderate members on rental protections.

Click here to read the full article at CalMatters

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Why Is A Tenant Protection Bill Failing In The California Legislature, Again?

February 11, 2022 By Manuela Tobias 1 Comment

Tenant advocates, racial equity groups, YIMBYs and even some of their usual opponents wanted to see the bill pass.

The cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles — which rarely see eye to eye on housing issues — as well as every Democrat on the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee had signed on.

So why did Assembly Bill 854, which would have curbed an owner’s ability to evict their tenants using the Ellis Act in rent-controlled jurisdictions, die without even a floor vote in the Democratic-supermajority Assembly?

Proponents of the longtime progressive priority — which promised to preserve the stock of affordable apartments amid a historic shortage — point to an aggressive campaign mounted by the deep-pocketed real estate industry.

“It’s insane to see so many groups working really hard on this and then still for it to not be enough because the opposition’s influence on our legislature is so immense,” said Sarah Abdeshahian, an advocate at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which co-sponsored the bill.

But just as a diverse group of advocates coalesced to support the bill, thousands of property owners — even those outside unincorporated Los Angeles County and 20 rent-stabilized cities directly affected — opposed it, united by a sense that the state is chipping away at their rights, just as COVID-19 has decimated their business.

“‘It may not be in my area, but it could be, next time,’” Sanjay Wagle, senior vice president of  governmental affairs at the California Association of Realtors, said his members told him. “I think there’s a growing sense of sort of commonality of interest, which may not have existed before, between the Fresno property owner and the San Francisco property owner.”

Assemblymember Alex Lee, the Democrat from San Jose who authored the bill, says the legislation would have passed out of the Assembly and over to the state Senate but for the recent departures of four Democrats: Lorena Gonzalez from San Diego, Ed Chau from Monterey Park, David Chiu from San Francisco and Jim Frazier from Fairfield.

Lee is still weighing whether to reintroduce “substantially the same bill” next year or this legislative cycle — an option left on the table by having avoided a losing floor vote. Similar bills have been introduced, unsuccessfully, at least three times before.

“All those things are on the table luckily, and that’s something we’re still working out with our coalition, given the volatility of resignations,” Lee said. “That’s always our wild card.”

“This issue has been around for years and I understand the vote got very close, with significant new support for many corners,” said Chiu, former chairperson of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Community, who co-authored the bill last year and is now San Francisco city attorney. “And so I’m hopeful that there will be a real conversation about this in the coming months.”

Protecting small landlords — or big business?

The bill took aim at the Ellis Act, a 1985 state law that allows owners of rent-controlled properties to evict their tenants if they take all the units of a building off the rental market – a path that could otherwise be blocked by local governments guarding the precious stock of affordable units. Once off the market, those apartments can be sold as condos or demolished to make way for new homes.

More than 27,000 rent-controlled units have been removed in Los Angeles since 2001 using the Ellis Act, while San Francisco has lost about 5,000 units since then. And they’re sorely needed: the California Housing Partnership estimates 1.2 million low-income renter households don’t have access to an affordable home, and building a new government-subsidized unit costs an average of $500,000.

Lee’s bill mandated a five-year holding period before evicting tenants — an attempt to allow struggling property owners to go out of business, as had been the law’s original intent, while preventing speculators from buying up cheap properties and flipping them overnight. The bill also restricted the use of such evictions to one building per owner per decade.

That would significantly curb Ellis Act evictions, as three-quarters of evictions in Los Angeles between 2016 and 2019 occurred within five years of purchase, according to a recent analysis by Alexander Ferrer, policy and research analyst at SAJE in Los Angeles. But because of a glaring lack of transparency around who owns buildings in California, the effect on mom-and-pop landlords — a group the Legislature holds dearly — is difficult to determine.

In an opposition letter to lawmakers, the California Association of Realtors asserted that the bill would devastate “Struggling Small Property Owners Who Are Seniors or Individuals of Color.”

“I think it’s concern-mongering for a problem that we don’t know exists,” Ferrer said, citing the lack of demographic data on property owners. Wagle cited anecdotal evidence from their members.

Click here to read the full article at CalMatters

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