Over the past decade, California cities, counties, and the state government have been changing the job descriptions for thousands of employees — either by removing the requirement for a high school, college or graduate-level degree or by detailing alternative ways that candidates can gain the same skills.

Studies show these changes can benefit workers and employers.

For instance, janitors no longer need a high school degree to work for the state, and staff services analysts, who help administer many of the state’s programs, no longer need a bachelor’s degree.

But while state leaders and scholars agree about the need for more of these changes, they disagree about the best or fastest way to do it.

“Further action is possible,” wrote Gov. Gavin Newsom last year in an executive order about career education. In it, he explicitly asked the California Department of Human Resources to make re-evaluating education requirements a higher priority.

The governor’s order came after at least 15 states had already enacted similar or more aggressive changes to their hiring practices.

Last year, Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Democrat from Orinda, proposed Assembly Bill 1693, which would have put California on par with many other states by making education requirements the exception, rather than the norm, for state employees. “There is no reason for California to have an arbitrary barrier to access these good-paying jobs that benefit our state,” she said.

But earlier this month, that bill died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Another, more limited bill by state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, a Republican from Redlands, was introduced on the same day. Senate Bill 943 would waive bachelor’s degree requirements for certain veterans.

Since 2015, the state’s human resources department has changed the requirements for nearly 170 kinds of jobs, which represent about 27,000 people. Bauer-Kahan’s bill would have forced the state to reevaluate the remaining 2,600 other kinds of state jobs over the next year, which represent roughly 200,000 more people, said Camille Travis, a spokesperson for the state’s human resources department.

She said the state does not know the number of jobs that currently require a degree because most jobs offer multiple ways for candidates to qualify.

“We’re not going to do it overnight,” said Monica Erickson, the department’s chief deputy director. She said that changing the job descriptions can be “extremely complex,” requiring input or approval from other state agencies, the State Personnel Board, and unions, if applicable. A legislative committee analysis of the bill said it would cost more than $1 million to hire the human resources staff to process all the job changes.

Solving a ‘hiring crisis’

Often, degrees are used as a proxy for certain skills, such as communication, teamwork, and computer literacy, according to a 2022 report by the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit research organization. Removing degree requirements widens the pool of potential applicants, making it easier to recruit more diverse talent, the report said.

At the online job site ZipRecruiter, the benefits are already evident, said Julia Pollak, the company’s chief economist. A 2023 ZipRecruiter survey of more than 2,000 employers found that 72% were prioritizing skills over degree and 45% had gotten rid of degree requirements in some roles in the previous year.

Large companies, especially those in the tech sector, have been vocal about the need for skill-based hiring. IBM said it cut bachelor’s degree requirements from more than half of its U.S. job openings in 2021.

For many companies, these changes accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when staffing shortages pushed employers to rethink their requirements.

“You don’t need any legislation to push the private sector to do it, but you do need legislation to allow the public sector to do it,” Pollak said.

Before the pandemic, the state’s job vacancy rate was just under 15%. Now it’s at 20%, Erickson said. The growing vacancy rate was the chief concern behind the bill, Bauer-Kahan said.

One reason for the high vacancy rate: the number of state employees is growing. Since 2019, the state has added roughly 20,000 positions, an increase of more than 8%, according to Travis, a spokesperson for the state’s human resources department. The same challenges exist in county and city governments, which tend to face even higher vacancy rates, according to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

More than three-quarters of jobs with the county of San Diego don’t require a degree, a significant increase since the county started reassessing its jobs in 2022. Riverside County approved a motion to consider alternatives to degrees, although the county was unable to provide data before publication about what changes had been made.

As San Francisco faces an “unprecedented hiring crisis,” a spokesperson for the human resources department, Jack Hebb, said the city has changed the requirements for 267 out of 915 job classifications over the past 10 years. Roughly a quarter of those changes happened after the start of the pandemic, he said.

Filling state government jobs other ways

Erickson said she believes that changing education requirements can promote equity by removing barriers and can “absolutely” help fill vacancies, but that it’s not a panacea. “People look at pay first,” she said. While the state offers better-than-average pay for many jobs, such as custodial work, other positions, such as police officers, pay below the average wage compared to other workers across the state.

The Service Employees International Union, SEIU, is concerned that some employers may change education requirements in order to lower wages, said Sandra Barreiro, a governmental relations advocate for SEIU. While Barreiro didn’t endorse Bauer-Kahan’s bill, the local service workers union that represents public sector employees, SEIU Local 1000, did.

Sara Hinkley, a professor at UC Berkeley and an author of the report on vacancies, said that changing degree requirements is “one small part” of the solution. “It may not meaningfully change who applies and it may not meaningfully change who gets hired, but it’s worth doing if it’s changing the conversation about what these jobs require,” she said.

Last year, a senior researcher at The Burning Glass Institute posted a new finding on LinkedIn regarding the institute’s earlier report. He found that in reality, employers are hiring more people with college degrees, not fewer, even as they remove education requirements from job posts.

“Just changing the language of job postings doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to change who you hire,” said institute president Matt Sigelman. Instead he said the focus should be about analyzing what’s really needed and cited IBM, which aggressively removed degree requirements for most positions, later re-introducing those requirements in a few jobs.

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

National restaurant chain The Cheesecake Factory and some of its contractors have paid $1 million to settle a major California wage theft case, in which state labor officials accused the companies of stiffing hundreds of janitors of overtime pay and breaks.

Janitors at eight Cheesecake Factory restaurants in Orange and San Diego counties were forced to work as many as 10 extra hours a week without being paid overtime, the state’s Labor Commissioner’s Office said in a 2018 citation.

Also see: At Southern California Cheesecake Factories, 559 janitors were cheated out of $4.57 million in wages, labor commissioner charges

“When we were working long nights cleaning the kitchen and the dining room of the restaurant, we knew the employer and the restaurant owner were taking advantage of us,” Naxhili Perez, one of the former San Diego janitors, said in a press release.

The state’s Labor Commissioner’s Office planned to formally announce the settlement and hand out checks to former workers at an event in San Diego on Tuesday. The office is now hoping to get the attention of other ex-employees who may qualify for a payout for unpaid work they did between 2014 and 2017.

The agreement, reached last fall, marks a long-delayed resolution in one of the state’s most significant cases alleging wage theft. To persuade workers to cooperate with the state, the Labor Commissioner’s Office worked with the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a workers’ advocacy center that employs former janitors to investigate conditions in the industry.

Such partnerships are one of the state’s recent strategies to bring wage theft cases against large employers in the hopes of sending a message across their industries. The trust fund’s director at the time of the citations, Lilia García-Brower, is now the state’s labor commissioner.

And the citations were one of the office’s first uses of a 2015 law that holds companies that hire janitorial contractors jointly responsible for workplace violations.

Also see: 3 Thai restaurants in Los Angeles area cited for more than $1 million in wage theft

For years, workers’ advocates have complained that with the rise of contracting and subcontracting in the janitorial industry, it was easy for smaller employers to close up shop, declare bankruptcy or change names when accused of wage theft, while building owners or other companies that hired them escaped liability.

In the Cheesecake Factory case, the company contracted with the national Americlean Janitorial Services Corp. to clean its restaurants. Americlean in turn subcontracted the work in the eight southern California locations to a cleaning company called Magic Touch, according to the state.

Though Magic Touch directly hired the janitors, the state said in 2018 that Cheesecake Factory managers kept workers from going home at the end of their eight-hour, overnight shifts. The managers would inspect the restaurants and assign additional tasks to the janitors before they were allowed to leave, without paying overtime, the labor commissioner said. 

During the state’s investigation, Magic Touch changed its name, but the state said both businesses were liable for back pay. Owner Zulma Villegas filed for bankruptcy in 2021.

Villegas’ attorney Roxana Verano, reached by phone today, declined to comment on her client’s behalf. An attorney for Americlean did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the end, The Cheesecake Factory agreed to pay the bulk of the settlement — $750,000 — while the rest was split between Villegas and Americlean, according to the agreement.

As part of the settlement, none of the companies admitted fault. But both Villegas and Americlean will provide a written apology to workers. Villegas’ apology, included in the settlement, states she “did not fulfill my obligations under the law as an employer, some of which were out of my control,” while Americlean notes it “could have overseen Magic Touch better” and said it no longer provides cleaning services to the restaurant chain.

For the next two years, the restaurant chain has agreed to require any contractors bidding to provide janitorial services at its California restaurants to disclose whether the state has ever found them liable for wage theft. It will also require its current and future California contractors to provide their janitors information on labor laws in English and Spanish, and submit to audits if workers have future complaints, according to the settlement. But the agreement says the apology by Villegas and Americlean won’t be distributed at any Cheesecake Factory restaurants.

A spokesperson for The Cheesecake Factory did not immediately respond to written questions this afternoon.

“It’s a message to all brand names out there,” Yardenna Aaron, executive director of the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, a janitorial workers’ advocacy group, said in a press release. “If you don’t ensure your contractors comply with laws protecting workers, there are very real consequences.”

But the case also shows the hurdles for enforcing California’s strict labor laws in low-wage industries employing mostly immigrant workers.

When the state cited the companies in 2018, it calculated the total amount in unpaid wages and damages owed to more than 500 workers to be nearly $4 million.

The Cheesecake Factory and its contractors appealed, which is common for employers in such citations. For the next two years, the proceedings became mired in evidentiary disputes and scheduling conflicts, appeals documents previously obtained by CalMatters show.

Then the pandemic hit, and the appeal was put on hold until January 2021. Settlement talks were underway by August 2022 and the agreement was signed in September 2023 — for only one-fourth of the initial citation amount.

Now, the state and the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund are looking for the company’s former janitors to receive payments for unpaid work they did as long as nine years ago. They’re in touch with about 60 former workers, the trust fund said in a press release, but believe about 500 more may be eligible.

Janitors who worked at Cheesecake Factory restaurants in Brea, Irvine, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Mission Viejo, Escondido and San Diego between Aug. 31, 2014 and Aug. 31, 2017 are asked to call 619-213-5260.

California will dole out $250 million more in down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers this spring, while making changes to its 1-year-old program aimed at reaching a more diverse group of borrowers across the state.

Last year frenzied homebuyers hoovered up nearly all $300 million budgeted for the California Dream for All loan program in just 11 days. While the new program was wildly popular, some Realtors and lenders reported that clients who received the funds were already far along in the home purchase process, fueling speculation about whether the loans were going to people who already could afford to buy homes.

The program’s next round keeps the same “shared appreciation” lending model: The state will give first-time homebuyers money toward a down payment — up to 20% of the purchase price or $150,000, whichever is lower — then it will get paid back the loan plus a share of the home’s appreciation whenever it sells again.

This time the California Housing Finance Agency, which administers Dream for All, hopes to head off a mad scramble for the loans by replacing its original first-come, first-serve model with a lottery.

Homebuyers will have until April to find a state-approved lender and start working on an application. A lottery opens in early April, and buyers will have a month to submit their applications. Between 1,700 and 2,000 lottery winners will receive vouchers that they’ll then have 60 days to spend on a home.

More time to prepare

The extra time to prepare should help Californians who may not be sure if they could buy a home without state assistance, said CalHFA spokesperson Eric Johnson.

The program is for people for whom homeownership “may be a dream, but they’ve got the steady income, they’ve got the decent credit score of above 660 and they’re thinking, ‘OK, wow, this could really make the difference,’ ” said Johnson. “This gives them time to get motivated, to find a loan officer. If they need to do a little work on their credit score or change their debt-to-income ratio, they’ve got time to work with one of our loan officers or brokers.”

The agency will set aside a number of vouchers for each region of the state based on its share of the state’s households. That’s to avoid the geographic disparities that emerged in the program’s first round, in which Sacramento County homebuyers disproportionately benefited but those in Los Angeles County, which represents 25% of the state’s population, received just 9% of loans.

California Dream for All “was initially conceived of as focusing on higher-cost parts of the state where it’s especially hard to use existing down payment programs, and that was not exactly an unequivocal success,” said Adam Briones, CEO of California Community Builders, which advocates for closing the racial wealth gap through homeownership and helped draft the research that inspired the program.

The state’s red-hot housing market means some Californians who might otherwise be able to afford mortgage payments must struggle to save enough for a down payment. About 55% of Californians own their homes, the second-lowest homeownership rate of any state, behind New York.

Who will benefit?

Dream for All’s backers had hoped it would especially benefit members of communities that have experienced redlining or low homeownership rates, such as Black and Latino Californians. A CalMatters analysis of Dream for All’s first round found that its beneficiaries included a higher share of people of color than exists among California’s current homeowners, but they were still whiter than the state’s overall population.

California law prohibits state-sponsored affirmative action, which poses a challenge for officials trying to design a program that tackles historical redlining without explicitly addressing race, Briones said.

Dream for All’s new rules include a requirement that at least one homebuyer in each transaction be a first-generation homebuyer, defined as someone who has never owned a home and whose parents also did not own a home, or someone who grew up in foster care. The state also has lowered the income eligibility threshold from 150% of the area median income to 120%, a number that ranges from about $95,000 a year in Fresno County to about $215,000 in Santa Clara County.

The state plans an outreach campaign beginning in February that will focus especially on Southern California and the Central Coast to let potential homebuyers know about the program, Johnson said. It will include flyers in laundromats, text messages and advertisements on Spanish-language radio and in Black newspapers.

How to apply for Dream for All

So far, Dream for All has survived Gov. Newsom’s budget ax, which fell on some of the state’s other housing programs last week. The governor is proposing several clawbacks of unspent funds to solve a budget deficit his office projects will reach $38 billion in 2024-25.

Created in 2022, Dream for All was originally envisioned as a 10-year, $10 billion investment before lawmakers scaled it back last year.

Californians interested in applying for the program can visit the California Dream for All website for updates or join CalHFA’s homebuyer email list.

Johnson had one other piece of advice for wannabe homeowners in the state: “Most importantly, don’t give up hope. There is a possibility of owning your own home in California.”

Just after lifts opened on Wednesday, an avalanche tore through the Palisades Tahoe ski resort, creating a 10-foot-deep debris field that stretched 450 feet long and 150 feet wide. A second one struck in neighboring Alpine Meadows this afternoon, although no one was injured. The US Forest Service and ski resorts take steps to forecast and prevent dangerous slides, and avalanche fatalities at ski resorts remain rare: Before this week, the last one in California was four years ago.

RELATED: Palisades Tahoe avalanche shows that even resort skiing comes with nature’s wild risks

But what can California’s skiers and snowboarders expect as Sierra Nevada snow patterns are becoming unpredictable because of climate change? Experts say understanding the effects on avalanches is tricky: Climate change is not just a matter of warming temperatures but also altered patterns in storms and snow cover.

RELATED: 1 dead, 1 injured following avalanche at ski resort near Lake Tahoe as storm moves in

An array of factors such as wind, rain, previous snowpack and temperatures can all enter into the equation of what causes a mass of snow to slide down a mountain.

“We are humans working in a natural world. And so everybody does the best they can,” said Jim Steenburgh, a University of Utah professor of atmospheric sciences and author of the book “Secrets of the Greatest Snow on Earth.”

The circumstances that lead to avalanches are multifaceted, Steenburgh said: a weak layer in the snowpack, a steep slope and a trigger — usually people on the slope. The frequency of human-triggered avalanches in the future will continue to depend in large part on how many skiers and snowboarders recreate in risky backcountry areas.

That also means untangling the effects of climate change is especially difficult, or “elusive,” as one team of scientists said.

Still, researchers are making a few predictions. Lower-elevation areas that see less snow in a warmer future may see fewer avalanches, but higher elevations could see more intense storms and the potential effects on avalanches there are uncertain.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2019 that there was medium evidence for less avalanche hazard at lower elevations, and mixed changes at high elevation. Though the report predicted an increase in avalanches involving wet snow, they found “no clear direction of trend for overall avalanche activity.”

Avalanches involving wet snow could increase — as could conditions where scarce snow and cold, clear weather combine to cause persistent weak layers in the snowpack, creating “a major threat to recreationists,” a team of researchers from Switzerland, Italy and the U.S. wrote in a 2021 review paper.

Trauma and injuries could rise as snowpacks dwindle, with less snow to cushion blows from the terrain. And wetter avalanches also could increase buried victims’ risk of suffocation in the higher-density snow.

“There will be a higher risk of disastrous events where poorly managed winter tourism activities, transportation routes, and exploitation of natural resources lead to increases in exposure,” the international study said.

Mixed findings also were reported on other mountain ranges around the planet. Climate warming was linked to an increase in wet snow avalanches in the Western Himalayas — which the researchers said “contradict the intuitive notion that warming results in less snow, and thus lower avalanche activity.”

But three years later, another team found that the number and magnitude of avalanches dropped substantially at low-to-medium elevations of the Vosges Mountains in northeast France as snow became scarce. They predicted that the increases observed in the Alps and Himalayas “will eventually vanish as warming will become more pronounced to reduce snow cover at increasingly higher elevations.”

Mike Reitzell, president of Ski California, a trade association of 36 ski areas in California and Nevada, said ski resorts in avalanche-prone terrain already have programs to reduce the dangers – regardless of the impacts of climate change.

“The slope angles aren’t going to change with climate change,” Reitzell said. “The type of snowpack that there is, whether it’s a wet snow versus a drier snow, those are things they would already be analyzing anyway.”

‘Dangerous avalanche conditions’

Ski resorts have long used explosives and artillery to trigger avalanches and remove the mass of snow before it can produce avalanches dangerous to visitors. “This greatly reduces, but does not eliminate the avalanche threat,” Steenburgh said.

Before the deadly event on Wednesday, the Sierra Avalanche Center forecast a “considerable” risk of avalanches in the Central Sierra Nevada backcountry.

“Dangerous avalanche conditions will continue today. New snow and high winds have loaded existing weak layers in our snowpack. Large avalanches are the main concern today failing well below our recent storm snow. High winds will also continue to create slabs of wind blown snow in exposed areas,” the center reported today.

Palisades Tahoe said the cause of the avalanche was under investigation.

The resort had already seen a smattering of storms in the months before. Then the wind picked up on Monday night, and light snow started Wednesday morning before the avalanche occurred, according to Chris Johnston, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Reno, Nevada. The storm dropped about 14 inches of snow on the resort’s upper mountain area over 24 hours.

The avalanche occurred on a steep, black diamond run made famous during the 1960 Olympics’ alpine skiing events at the resort, which was then called Squaw Valley. While Palisades reopened today, the KT-22 lift where the avalanche occurred and nine other lifts remained closed.

Craig Clements, a San Jose State University chair and professor of meteorology who teaches a mountain meteorology class that covers avalanche mechanics, said conditions were primed for an avalanche because high winds transported snow to form a thick slab atop of weak layers of snow.

“You have a weak shear zone there, and so basically, all that new snow can slide … you just need to trigger it,” Clements said. “And then it will slide downslope — and that is dangerous.”

Vela looked at her wedding photo hanging in their living room. The couple hosted their wedding reception out on the driveway, Vela said, gesturing outside. They raised four children in the duplex near the end of a cul-de-sac in their historically Latino neighborhood.

Their kids enjoyed a quintessential East LA upbringing until one-by-one they left for college, except for Vela’s youngest girl, a high school junior.

Now the family is being evicted so their landlords, who live next door, can move in.

“It feels like someone is taking a part of my story,” Vela said.

Family evictions

Evictions are on the rise nationwide and in California. While most Los Angeles-area evictions happen because tenants struggle to pay rent, even tenants who manage to remain current with rent are at risk of eviction. These “just cause” or “no fault” evictions happen because landlords want to move into their tenants’ units, renovate a unit or leave the rental market.

No-fault evictions are contributing to the displacement of families from their longtime communities, along with other factors such as rising rents, too few affordable units, and expired tenant protections.

“Homeowner move-ins have been bringing about this exodus of Angelenos leaving their communities because they can no longer afford rent,” said Cinthia Gonzalez, an organizer at Eastside Leadership for Equitable and Accountable Development Strategies (LEADS). “It’s a heavy load.”

After state pandemic-era tenant protections expired, average monthly eviction filings surpassed pre-pandemic levels in a dozen of California’s most populous counties, according to court records obtained by CalMatters.

Counties that extended local eviction moratoria saw delayed, but still stark, eviction increases. That was the case for Los Angeles County, which saw a 17% increase in eviction filings the first eight months of 2023, compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Even though there have been state and local efforts to strengthen protections against evictions for “just cause,” those protections didn’t help Vela’s family stay in their longtime home.

A man who identified himself as one of Vela’s landlords told CalMatters he didn’t want to comment on the matter.

Part of a community

Vela has lived in the same home since she immigrated to the U.S. in 1996.

She met her husband at a party while he was visiting Mexico. Within months they wed and went together to East L.A., where he was already living with his three brothers.

When the brothers came across the duplex unit in the early 1990s, it was dilapidated and littered with trash in a neighborhood with active gangs. The brothers asked the landlord if they could fix it up in exchange for being able to live there. The landlord agreed and charged them $300 monthly.

As the family grew, the home started to feel smaller.

Over the years various landlords neglected the property, Vela said. Walls are chipping, holes where mice have crept in are covered by unsecured wood, and mold grows in the bathroom.

But they were able to remain there long enough to give Vela’s children the stability and joyful upbringing they needed to succeed.

Carolina Correa, 23, graduated from Brown University and landed a job at an environmental justice nonprofit in San Francisco. Diana Correa, 26, graduated from UC Berkeley and is pursuing a master’s degree in history. Jesús Correa, 19, started at UC Merced in the fall.

The youngest, 16-year-old Fabiola Correa, wants to follow in her siblings’ footsteps and become valedictorian or salutatorian at Esteban Torres High School. She’s eyeing UC Berkeley too.

Carolina remembers whispering with her siblings as they lay on bunk beds or on the floor, to not wake her parents in the bedroom. They slept in the living room and another living space in the apartment and had little privacy, but it helped them stay close.

Their father taught them to ride bikes and he’d watch them ride in circles on the dead end street, Carolina said. He hosted carne asada barbecues with family. Block parties with live bands and traditional Mexican food and sweets brought neighbors together. 

“It was really nice to just have that literally right in front of my house, on my street, and to be a part of community in a way that is something so special to East L.A.,” Carolina said.

Displaced neighbors

Tina Rosales, an attorney with the Western Center on Law and Poverty, likened the family’s displacement to other times in history when Latinos were moved from their neighborhoods, including the years before Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

“This is heartbreaking, but it’s not new,” Rosales said. “It’s a trend. As we put more value on homes and people owning property, we tend to displace the communities that have been there forever.”

Rosales is among the attorneys who worked on a tenant protection law recently passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to close loopholes to “just cause” eviction protections. The law requires owners who move out tenants and then move themselves or family members  in to reside there for at least a year. And it will require landlords to pay one month’s rent in relocation assistance.

Tenant advocates pushed for the law because they believe landlords were taking advantage of the rules. Landlords sometimes use owner move-ins as a pretense, Rosales said, when actually they want to put their units back on the market at a higher rent.

“It’s important to balance the interests and needs of both (landlords and tenants) while recognizing that housing is a basic need, and as a society we must prioritize keeping people housed,” said Sen. María Elena Durazo, the Los Angeles Democrat who authored the law. “Market housing is a business, and like in many areas of business, consumer protections are necessary in order to ensure that bad actors out to increase their own profits are not able to take advantage of or abuse the consumer.”

Los Angeles County and city have even stronger just cause protections, but local advocates say even those rules have weak spots.

For instance, in L.A. County landlords or their family members who move into tenants’ units have to live there for three years. If they don’t, the previous tenants have a right to move back in under their original lease terms and rent.

But the law seems to place the burden of keeping track of the landlords on tenants. Javier Beltran, deputy director of the Housing Rights Center in L.A., said he hasn’t heard of a case of a tenant successfully reclaiming their unit because of landlord violations.

“In reality once (tenants) move out, it’s hard to keep up with that particular tenant,” Beltran said. “They probably moved on to a different place, situated themselves and to a certain extent, moved on. It’s hard for them to come back.”

‘Terminated for no fault’

On a recent December morning, Vela sat at her kitchen table with her hands on her temples, a folder filled with papers spread in front of her.

“All of this is so frustrating,” she said with a sigh.

On the table was a scanned copy of the most recent $1,000 rent payment she sent, various phone numbers from housing leads scribbled on a notepad, and her official 60-day eviction notice issued October 23.

“You are hereby notified that effective sixty days from the date of service on you of this notice, the tenancy by which you hold possession of the premises is terminated for No Fault Just Cause…” the letter reads.

She spoke in a whisper and raised the volume of her television so her landlords couldn’t hear her talk about the eviction. They live next door and the walls are thin, she said.

Vela always knew eviction was a possibility. The duplex had been bought and sold multiple times in the last several decades, and each new owner had been willing to keep them as tenants, until now.

Eastside LEADS helped Vela delay her eviction by a year and a half after finding flaws in the landlords’ eviction process. For example, Gonzalez said, the landlords offered less than the required amount for relocation assistance.

But after the organization sent a letter to the landlords, they corrected their mistakes and agreed to pay the $12,688 in relocation assistance the county requires in this case.

Searching for housing

Vela has found searching for housing difficult. She and her husband aren’t fluent in English, they are undocumented and they’ve purchased most of their belongings in cash, which means they don’t have much credit history.

Also the going rents in that neighborhood are sometimes double what they’re paying now, which would be impossible for them to afford on her husband’s meatpacking salary, she said.

At one recent home viewing, Vela brought her daughter Fabiola to translate. The landlord interrogated Fabiola: Did the family have visitors often? Did they party? Were they loud?

Vela left feeling dejected and worried about Fabiola.

Carolina has been trying to help from the Bay Area, where she lives. After work or on her breaks, she finds housing leads and makes phone calls on behalf of her parents. She adds herself and her boyfriend as co-signers, hoping that’ll increase her parents’ chances.

“I’ve submitted applications for them to move into places and then burst into tears afterward,” Carolina said. “I want them to get into these places so bad, but because I’m not there I can’t facilitate further. I do what I can and so does my older sister, but it’s difficult.”

Diana, the oldest, feels guilty she hasn’t been able to help as much as she’d like.

“(I was) really angry with myself and with the timing,” Diana said, adding that if the landlords had waited five more years, she could finish her master’s program,  start working and pool her money with her siblings to buy their parents a house. “I was like, damn, I’m not ready.”

Recently she created a GoFundMe page hoping friends and community members will help defray the cost of storage units and moving trucks.

Harder to thrive

Vela said she is coming to grips with the fact that their only option may be to leave East L.A., and maybe Los Angeles altogether. With no immediate home to go to, Vela thought about moving in with her sister in San Bernardino County temporarily while her husband stays in his brother’s El Sereno apartment, closer to his work.

The lack of affordable housing for very poor residents is a major factor in the state’s rising homelessness problem.

Margot Kushel, director of UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said even if this family isn’t immediately homeless after vacating their home, they could be at risk for homelessness in the future.

Kushel’s research on homelessness in California revealed 49% of those without a home had been “non-leaseholders,” usually people staying with friends or family until it isn’t possible anymore. Those living arrangements often are precarious and lead families on a path toward homelessness, Kushel said.

She listed other challenges contributing to people’s vulnerability to homelessness: high deposit fees, moving costs, the impact of moving on peoples’ jobs and personal stability.

A recent law passed to limit what California landlords can charge for security deposits won’t be in effect until next summer,  too late for Vela.

Evictions and potential homelessness impact entire families, Kushel said, risking people’s ability to graduate from college or high school and to build wealth in the future.

“Housing is really at the root of thriving,” Kushel said.

Mixed emotions

The solution is to build more affordable housing far faster than Los Angeles is currently doing, said Stuart Gabriel, a real estate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Most investment in housing creation is driven by profit and built by the private sector.

Not everyone purchases property to make a profit, he said. “It’s a very complicated and nuanced story and doesn’t lend itself to easy culprits and easy answers,” he said.

Vela’s family recognizes their landlords probably just want more space for their family. She said the landlords are two siblings who live with their elderly mother.The family has conflicting feelings about the landlords and their family’s situation.

“It’s complicated for us because they do have a case and we don’t anymore,” Diana said. “I get it. You bought a house. But at the same time you knew we were here.”

Vela’s husband said he’s grateful for the time they were allowed to stay.

“It just so happened that someone bought the house and now we have to leave. But without resentment or anger,” Jesús Correa Cabrera said. “We’ll close the door behind us and say ‘thank you very much.’ And life goes on.”

Within days the family slowly disassembled their East L.A home, packing belongings they’ve accumulated over several decades into black trash bags and cardboard boxes.

Diana, Carolina and young Jesús’s high school class photos, Fabiola’s shelves of books, the quinceañera and wedding photographs, were all taken down.

As Christmas neared, they summoned a sense of hope for the future.

“I feel sad, kind of stressed for my family,” Fabiola said as she sorted a drawer of colored pencils and pens. “But at the same time I feel like we’re going to get out of this and maybe start a new time of our lives. A new beginning.”

The day before the family was preparing to move out, they heard they were approved for an apartment in El Monte, a one-bedroom  for $1,700 a month, plus utilities and rental insurance.

It’s far from their community, smaller, and too expensive f

Californians in two industries are set to get new minimum wages just for them next year, and that could lead to pay bumps for other workers, too.

Gov. Gavin Newsom this year signed two union-backed bills that will boost fast-food and health care workers’ minimum wages.

California-based fast-food workers for chains with 60 or more locations around the nation will earn at least $20 an hour beginning in April, $4 higher than the overall state minimum wage of $16 that will be effective Jan. 1.

In June, health care workers will earn a minimum of $18, $21 or $23 an hour, depending on what type of facility employs them and where they work.

The industry-specific wage increases reflect a shift in unions’ strategies at the Capitol. After the Great Recession, labor groups led campaigns that resulted in then-Gov. Jerry Brown signing a law in 2016 that put California on a path to a $15 minimum wage. That law included inflation adjustments, which is why the minimum wage is higher today.

The two new laws are expected to trigger pay increases for about 900,000 Californians, some of whom are earning more than minimum wage today.

They are going into effect in a competitive labor market that has seen employers, especially small businesses, struggling to hire and retain workers. California’s unemployment rate is at 4.8%, which is higher compared with the federal unemployment rate of 3.7% but is near a historic low.

The new fast-food minimum wage could push up pay for other restaurant and food workers, experts say.

In a tight labor market, “other food-services companies will likely have to increase wages in order to retain workers in a sector in which chronic understaffing, and the stress and burnout that causes among remaining staff, is already a problem,” said John Logan, professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University.

Others say the industry-specific minimum wage could have ripple effects in other industries.

Keith Miller owns three Subway sandwich shops in Northern California and is spokesperson for the American Association of Franchisees & Dealers, which opposed the fast-food worker legislation. The law passed with support from major fast-food chains, which gained assurances that unions would drop an initiative that would have made the chains liable for their franchises’ labor violations.

Under the law, Miller said, franchisors like McDonald’s or Subway avoid responsibility but franchisees like him will bear the costs of paying higher wages.

Miller questioned why fast-food workers were singled out as needing a minimum-wage increase, and added that it could affect industries such as retail. He said retail workers might switch over to fast food if they can make more money there, or retailers might need to raise their workers’ wages.

“It’s kind of a fallacy that this impacts only fast-food workers,” Miller said. “It kind of creates a market rate. In effect, the minimum wage for a lot of people will be $20.”

Upcoming minimum wage measures

California voters in November will see a ballot initiative that would raise the state minimum wage to $18 an hour. It’s backed by billionaire Joe Sanberg.

Workers in other industries, meanwhile, are fighting for higher minimum wages, too. In Los Angeles, a proposed ordinance would institute a $25 minimum wage for workers in the tourism industry before the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, which would rise to $30 an hour by 2028.

Jovan Houston, an airport security worker at Los Angeles International Airport, said she has been working there for six years and makes $19.78 an hour. She said a boost in wages would be “extremely” helpful for her and her 13-year-old son. They live with her niece and her four kids because rent is so expensive, Houston said.

“It’s cramped, but I can’t afford to move,” she said, adding that she has coworkers “who work two or three days to survive. They’re sleeping in the back on their breaks because they’re tired.”

Even as she fights for the Los Angeles ordinance that would raise her wages, Houston thinks it’s possible that her company would cut workers if forced to pay them more.

“They might eliminate workers,” Houston said. “I’m definitely worried about that.”

The effects of higher minimum wages

The costs and potential consequences of the higher minimum wages worry some people, including economists and the governor, while others see upsides.

Economist Christopher Thornberg, one of the founding partners of the International Republican Institute’s Beacon Project, said that in a competitive market, increasing minimum wages for the lowest-paid workers will lead to higher prices for consumers. For example, McDonald’s and Chipotle executives have said they plan to raise prices next year to offset increased labor costs.

But Michael Reich, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, said the effect of increased wages on product costs is relatively low and is usually seen in labor-intensive industries like dining and fast food. Reich said that when wages rise 10%, costs in the restaurant industry go up by about 2% to 3% and usually just on a one-time basis instead of a yearly increase.

Reich said raising wages for workers can lead to their upward mobility. Any negative effects such as higher costs for consumers or contribution to inflation are negligible, he and other economists say.

By increasing minimum wages for the lowest-paid workers, “you raise the standard of living,” Reich said. “That is quite significant.”

In addition, securing minimum wages for certain groups could eventually be used as a model to benefit other types of workers, such as gig workers who don’t currently have employee status, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who has written books about labor history.

“One could see a wage commission… for the Uber world that can establish certain kinds of criteria, which would have the effect of a minimum wage,” Lichtenstein said.

Meanwhile, the new minimum wage for health care workers is expected to cost $4 billion in the first year — half from California’s general fund and half from federal funds — during a time when it is facing a gaping budget deficit. So the governor reportedly is seeking changes, though it is unclear what form they will take.

What’s next for California labor?

Worker advocates and labor leaders are cheering their victories on wages as they strive to improve workers’ lives in other ways.

The unions that advocated for the fast-food and health care minimum wages say their list of priorities is long and includes other concerns such as how artificial intelligence will affect work, housing costs, worker classification and more.

“We can talk about leave, minimum wage, etc., but it doesn’t matter if we’re replacing people with robots in the workplace,” said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the California Labor Federation.

Isabel Urbano, a spokesperson for the Service Employees International Union, which campaigned for the fast-food bill and played a critical role in championing the minimum wage increase Gov. Brown signed in 2016, said: “The wage increase won’t mean anything if we don’t stabilize schedules and have predictable hours.”

Lisa Fu, executive director of the worker-advocacy group California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, said “what’s happening in the state and around the country with the labor movement has been really really inspiring for us,” though she said her organization’s main goal is to educate nail-salon workers and businesses about labor laws. Fu said there is “widespread” misclassification of such workers as independent contractors who are not entitled to sick pay, breaks and more.

While she said a minimum wage is one concern, “understanding of labor laws is the first step” in an industry that is primarily made up of Vietnamese immigrants. The median hourly wage for nail-salon workers in the state, including tips, is $10.94 an hour, she said, citing American Community Survey data.

Gonzalez Fletcher said labor is more focused on pushing for improvements in contracts, which she said tends to help raise wages of nonunion workers, too. But she said she continues to support any efforts to raise the state minimum wage. “The only way to keep up with inflation is to increase wages,” she said.

When California lawmakers passed a rent cap four years ago to protect tenants from large and frequent rent hikes, they exempted hundreds of thousands of units reserved for some of the state’s poorest renters.

Low-income housing, after all, is usually built with public subsidies that already impose rent ceilings on developers and property owners. Some are already managed or overseen by local public housing agencies.

But California also has more than 350,000 privately owned low-income housing units — built with the help of federal tax credits — exempted from the state’s rent cap. Residents of some of those units have seen their rents soar despite being the exact demographic the law sought to protect.

The 2019 law, known as the Tenant Protection Act, prohibits landlords from increasing rents more than a certain amount — 10% this year, though usually it’s less — and more than once a year.

It’s meant to guarantee some level of stability for tenants, proponents say. Without it, low-income renters like Miguel Contreras are seeing higher increases.

The 53-year-old mechanic got a shock when he opened a letter from his landlord this spring that said rent would rise to $2,138 from $1,828 — an increase of 17%. The two-bedroom apartment in San Jose where he lives was financed in 2006 with low-income housing tax credits and reserved for renters who must make less than the local average. There’s a rent ceiling, but the apartment isn’t otherwise subject to state or local caps on how fast the rent can grow.

Contreras said he’s lived in that apartment for more than two decades, and most of the time got modest rent increases of about $50 a year. But the past two years, the hikes have been higher.

When the latest increase kicked in this past July, Contreras was paying 25% more than he was just 13 months earlier, according to documents he shared with CalMatters. The rent eats up more than half of what Contreras earns each month, he said. He picks up extra work on Sundays, missing church with his family.

“It’s hard to live in this apartment, it’s supposed to be affordable,” Contreras said through a Spanish interpreter. “But it’s hard to move out because when you look for another apartment in the San Jose area, it’s very expensive and it seems the owner is trying to raise the rent to be the same like other apartments that are not affordable.”

With the help of the Regional Tenant Organizing Network, an activist group, Contreras and residents of several other low-income housing buildings owned by the same company drove to their landlord’s office in Newport Beach to protest the rent increases, among other complaints.

The company, KDF Communities, has seven apartment buildings in the San Jose area and 40 across California. They closed their offices, and declined in an email to meet with the tenants, said James Huynh, an organizing network spokesperson. Mayra Peterson, a KDF executive, declined to comment when reached by phone by CalMatters.

Rent cap concerns

Not all private-market tenants are subject to the state’s rent cap.

To ease concerns that the regulations would burden small or mom-and-pop landlords, lawmakers carved out exemptions for single-family homes and apartment buildings with only two units if the landlord lives in the other. Situations in which someone rents a room in a landlord’s home are also exempt.

Also exempted are deed-restricted affordable housing or housing that receives any kind of government funding to house low-income tenants.

“The thinking was, if they’re already rent-restricted it might not make sense to add another layer of complexity to it,” said David Chiu, the former Assemblymember who authored the 2019 law and current San Francisco city attorney. “This was a heavily negotiated bill.”

The exemption for tax credit-funded properties in particular has fueled a quiet but complex policy debate over whether to further regulate rents.

Factors including inflation, rising insurance costs and the fact that many tenants were unable to pay rent during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to particularly high rent increases in low-income housing the past two years, said advocates for tenants as well as for nonprofit and for-profit low-income housing developers.

In many cases affordable housing is subject already to federal restrictions on rent by preventing tenants from being charged more than 30% of their income. But in tax credit-funded units, restrictions on rent are tied not to the tenant’s individual income but to the local median income, a figure calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development each year.

In wealthy areas or times of high inflation, such as the past two years when median incomes have risen, that can create especially high rent ceilings, said Marcos Segura, a staff attorney at the California-based National Housing Law Project.

And where state or local rent caps don’t apply, there are few other limits on rents in these affordable housing units, Segura said. As long as the rent stays below the federal ceiling, it can be hiked at whatever percentage and however many times a year a property owner chooses.

But advocates who tried to further regulate low-income housing this year say the solution won’t be as simple as adding a rent cap.

Anti-poverty groups this year sponsored Assembly Bill 846, which would have imposed such a restriction. It ran aground early in the legislative session over concerns, raised mostly by nonprofit affordable housing developers, that a blanket cap would make it hard for them to keep their properties afloat.

Marina Wiant, vice president of government affairs for the California Housing Consortium, which represents both nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing developers, said property owners need to raise rents sometimes to cover operating costs and repairs. The recent growth in median incomes, Wiant said, came after years of stagnation during which affordable housing landlords were able to raise rents little or not at all.

Many low-income housing tenants were unable to pay rent during the pandemic, putting nonprofit developers in difficult financial positions, she said. Last year, the accounting firm Novogradac published a report that found operating costs for tax credit-funded units in California rose 26% between 2018 and 2021 while rental income only rose 11%.

Many affordable housing landlords work with tenants to try to keep rents low, raising rents on those who can afford a hike instead. Owners, she said, are worried a blanket cap will remove that flexibility.

“We are really trying to navigate, what could be something that helps residents not get hit with large rent increases at one time?” she said. “But that (also) doesn’t fully challenge a property owner from being able to raise rents consistent with the regulations that already exist. And it’s really hard to legislate a solution like that.”

Tenant advocates want to bring the bill back next year, but said they’re sympathetic to the concerns.

“We don’t have an interest in affordable housing developers not being able to maintain the financial viability of their properties,” said Anya Lawler, a policy advocate for one of the bill’s sponsors, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.

Nine other states—  including New Jersey, Wisconsin, Montana and Oregon — do cap rents on low-income housing tax credit-funded properties. Some limit increases to once per year; others cap annual increases at 5%.