At long last, after eleven hundred and twelve days, the L.A. County COVID-19 eviction moratorium has officially expired as of April 1, 2023.  This marks the end of one of the longest-running state pandemic moratoriums, which was nearly extended for another year late last month.  However, the measure to extend L.A.’s moratorium failed to garner a majority of the Board of Supervisors as Supervisors Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger voted against the measure.  While it is expected that evictions will rise in Los Angeles as landlords will be able to initiate eviction proceedings, it is unlikely that the doom-and-gloom predictions of large waves of evictions will ever materialize because the County had already adjusted the moratorium to apply more narrowly than when it was first enacted more than three years ago.

With the expiration of the eviction moratorium, there remains a legal question as to whether or not the temporary deprivation of unlawful detainer rights during the moratoria requires just compensation under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.  On April 5, 2022, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that Minnesota’s state eviction moratorium likely qualified as a taking of private property under the Takings Clause (Heights Apartments, LLC v. Walz).  This ruling was based largely on the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which held that even temporary physical occupations of property qualify as per se takings, which automatically require compensation under the Fifth Amendment.  Before this holding, it was largely assumed by legal scholars that most temporary physical occupations are subject to a balancing test under which the government usually prevails.  But as the Supreme Court explained in Cedar Point: “Whenever a regulation results in a physical appropriation of property, a per se taking has occurred…It is immaterial whether the physical invasion is ‘permanent or temporary,’ ‘intermittent as opposed to continuous,’ or whether the government is directly invading the land or allowing a third party to do so….”

Residential and commercial landlords in Los Angeles should follow these important Takings cases as they may set a precedent applicable to the COVID-19 eviction moratoria, and perhaps other eviction protections that may be enacted in the future.