California Legislature Doubles Renters’ Unlawful Detainer Response Time From Five to Ten Days
Signed into law in September, AB 2347 amended the CA CCP 1167, extending the time renters have to respond to an Unlawful Detainer filed against them from five to ten days.
The justifications for this extension are the false assertions that renters are caught by surprise and unprepared by this action and have little access to legal assistance.
In reality, landlords are well aware that the filing of an Unlawful Detainer is the very last option in their efforts to enforce repeated lease violations, regain possession of their own property, or to collect unpaid rent. There are many time-consuming legal hoops that landlords must comply with prior to this last resort option. There is nothing speedy about this process!
Because renters generally have easy access to free legal assistance, increasingly paid for by property taxes (which obviously includes landlords), landlords are forced to spend thousands of dollars of their own money on attorneys in order to reclaim their property due to documented defaults and violations of their contracts by the renters.
While these free tenant attorneys deliberately create numerous delays in these cases, often stretching on for many months, renters are paying no rent, so landlords have the double financial burden of paying attorneys’ fees while receiving no revenue for their units.
This is just one more example of the false propaganda that renters are the innocent, defenseless victims of heartless, dishonest and greedy landlords.
Additionally, this is one more puff of the smoke that obscures the fact that the government wants no part of solving California’s housing crisis – instead, once again painting private housing providers as the culprits when in actuality private housing providers are responsible for housing millions of Californians while the government does little to solve this problem.