Mayra Granillo has lived in the same apartment in Hollywood for 32 years. But at about the time she fell ill in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and was forced to stay home for a month, she was fired from one of her two jobs. She returned to her second job, only to have her employer cut her hours from full to part-time.
Today, the 56-year-old dishwasher owes about $4,000 in rent and doesn’t know if her landlord will evict her if she doesn’t repay the money soon that she owes from the early part of the pandemic.
“I’m afraid. You never know,” she said.
Granillo was among about 100 people who gathered outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 25, for a rally organized by the Keep LA Housed Coalition. They called upon Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmembers to cancel rent debts or provide protections for tenants who cannot meet the city’s Aug. 1 deadline to pay rent they owe from the first 18 months of the pandemic.
Early this year, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a sweeping package of tenant protections to lessen the impact of ending the pandemic-related moratorium on evictions. Among other things, the council established a grace period: tenants would have until Aug. 1 to repay the debts they incurred between March 1, 2020 and Sept. 1, 2021. And they have until Feb. 1, 2024 to repay rent they owe from Oct. 1, 2021 to Feb. 1, 2023.
But tenant rights advocates say many Angelenos haven’t completely recovered from the pandemic. Those struggles, coupled with inflation and L.A.’s continuing high cost of living, make it nearly impossible for many to pay off their debts, advocates say.
They fear that if no further actions are taken to prevent landlords from evicting tenants come Aug. 1, eviction filings will only soar – resulting in more people living on the streets at a time when the city’s homeless population is at an all-time high.
“We’re never going to address that crisis of homelessness…
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