Landlord/Tenant Mediation in Berkeley

Landlord/tenant mediation is a difficult thing to pull off anywhere in California, but it can be especially difficult in Berkeley, due to the confluence of laws, ordinances, and ongoing legal cases about Berkeley’s ongoing moratorium. This post will explore some of the unique challenges in Berkeley, and explain what we can do to help.

First, if you’ve looked around for legal counsel in and around Berkeley, you’ll have noticed there aren’t a ton of options to work on a problem before a lawsuit is filed. There are a lot of people who do wrongful eviction cases, but that' doesn’t help a tenant who’s still in place. There’s the Rent Board, though the process of petitions and similar can be slow and only somewhat coordinated with the relevant local agencies, like code enforcement. Landlords are often hesitant to get too involved with the Board, given the impression that they’re more tenant-friendly and that it’s possible that unrelated code issues will come up incidentally, whereas tenants can find that the scheduling the Board needs to do can be too slow to suit their needs.

There really isn’t a great venue in which a landlord and a tenant can talk together, with a neutral who also knows the lay of the land. This is particularly important in Berkeley, because there are a lot of rules that are counter-intuitive, and the market for housing around here is fairly unforgiving.

When we do landlord/tenant mediation for Berkeley cases, we start with an orientation, in which both parties can learn how the laws and ordinances here work, and get a solid, realistic view of the process, if the dispute were to go to court. We do this because we find that, very often, people’s notion of how the legal process works, particularly for landlord/tenant, isn’t very accurate. Some people think that they can ask a judge to evict a problem tenant, when in fact Berkeley presently has a moratorium on nearly all evictions, and Alameda Co. is absurdly busy, so in fact something would have to go dramatically wrong in a case before a property owner could talk directly to a judge. Tenants sometimes think that Berkeley protects all tenancies; this is not nearly as true as it sounds, and moreover, disputes between tenants and landlords can often give rise to things like civil harassment cases, entirely outside landlord/tenant law.

Knowing what the situation in Berkeley actually is, including getting a realistic assessment of which agencies are likely to get involved in a case, makes negotiation much easier. For example, if a tenant wants better insulation during cold weather, the landlord may assume it would be fairly easy to get a contractor to put in double paned windows, and so may agree to do so to avoid a suit. However, many places in Berkeley have historical-building protection, and the small number of registered contractors here are often very hesitant to agree to jobs on protected buildings, so the landlord may have just made an impossible promise. Similarly, it often happens that landlords and tenants agree that the tenant will do work on a unit both parties know isn’t up to code; this is actually a huge headache for both parties, if it goes to court.

So, the extra utility of a mediation for landlord/tenant disputes in Berkeley is that we know how things work here, including how long things can take and how much they cost, and that we can talk to both sides. As a lawyer I’d be restricted to telling one side about the pitfalls and special, uncommonly known tricks they can use to help their case, and unfortunately I need to tell a client whether they can use a somewhat broken and inefficient system to their advantage. As a mediator, I can tell both parties what would happen if they chose to go to court, and I can work with both parties to help them settle their issues instead. Mediation doesn’t prevent you from being able to go to court, of course, but it does stand a fantastic chance of helping you resolve your dispute more cheaply, and much more quickly.

I’ve handled buy-outs, evictions, complicated evictions, wrongful eviction suits, and so on, as well as the sort of cases out of Berkeley that involve restraining orders, criminal charges, and probate complications. We’ve done day-of mediations in court as well as the sort of days-long, scheduled well in advance mediations with multiple attorneys. We can help you resolve your dispute with a minimum of stress, and a minimum of expense. If this sounds good, consider contacting us today.