Pedro Romero Perez, 24, was in the shipping container that served as his and his brother’s home at California Terra Gardens in Half Moon Bay when authorities say Chunli Zhao barged in and opened fire, killing his brother Jose Romero Perez and shooting him five times, including once in the face.

Prosecutors say Zhao killed three other colleagues at the farm on Jan. 23, 2023, after his supervisor demanded he pay a $100 repair bill for damage to his work forklift.

They say he then drove to Concord Farms, a mushroom farm he was fired from in 2015, and shot to death three former co-workers. Zhao pleaded not guilty during his arraignment in February.

The lawsuit by Pedro Romero Perez and another lawsuit by his brother’s wife and children against California Terra Garden, Inc. and Xianmin Guan, one of its owners, say there was a documented history of violence at the farm and that the company failed to take action to protect workers after another shooting at the property involving a then-manager in July 2022.

“All landlords have a duty to protect their tenants from the criminal acts of people who come onto the property,” said Donald Magilligan, an attorney representing Pedro Romero Perez and his brother’s family. “And California Terra Gardens did nothing to protect Pedro or his brother or the other victims of that shooting.”

Guan did not immediately respond to a phone message from The Associated Press seeking comment. A phone number or email couldn’t be found for California Terra Garden.

The complaints say the company knew Zhao had a history of violence. In 2013, a Santa Clara County court issued a temporary restraining order against Zhao after he tried to suffocate his roommate at the farm with a pillow. Two days later, Zhao threatened that same person by saying that he could use a knife to cut his head, according to the complaints.

Zhao told investigators that he slept with the loaded gun under his pillow for two years and that he purchased it because he was being bullied, according to the lawsuits.

The killings shed light on the substandard housing the farms rented to their workers. After the shooting, San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller visited the housing at California Terra Garden, where some of its workers lived with their families, and he described it as “deplorable” and “heartbreaking.”

Muller, who represents Half Moon Bay and other agricultural towns, posted photos on social media showing a shipping container and sheds used as homes.

Pedro Romero Perez migrated to California from Oaxaca, Mexico, and lived and worked at California Terra Garden starting in 2021. His brother Jose later joined him, and they rented a shipping container from the farm that had no running water, no insulation, and no sanitary area to prepare food, according to the lawsuit.

He said at a news conference Friday that he hasn’t been able to work since the shooting and that he and his brother’s family in Mexico are still struggling.

“I had two bullets in my stomach, one in my face, one in my arm and a bullet in my back,” Romero Perez said. “And I’m still healing. I’m still in pain and still trying to get better.”

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California isn’t short on lofty goals: Lawmakers have vowed to zero out the state’s carbon emissions by 2045, build 2.5 million new homes by the end of the decade and swap gas-burning appliances with electric ones in 7 million homes over the next 12 years.

Now California’s chief utility regulator is considering a new rooftop solar policy that a chorus of critics say will make it harder for the state to meet any of those ambitious targets.

On Oct. 12, the California Public Utilities Commission will vote on whether to reduce the payments that owners of solar panel-equipped apartment buildings receive for the electricity they generate on their rooftops. The decision could mirror an overhaul that the commission adopted late last year for sun-powered single-family homes and is part of a larger battle among environmentalists and energy policymakers over the role that individually-owned solar panels should play in the state’s planned divorce from fossil fuel-derived energy.

In both cases, the new rules only apply to new customers.

Supporters of the rule change — the state’s major electric utilities chief among them — argue that the new proposed rates, which vary over the course of a day, better reflect the actual value that rooftop solar panels provide to the electrical grid while offering a fairer shake to customers who don’t have the luxury of living beneath solar panels.

The new pricing system is also designed to encourage property owners to pair solar panels with batteries, which can store up solar energy in the middle of the day when it’s abundant and cheap and dispatch it when the grid needs it most after the sun sets and when the CPUC’s proposed adjusted rates are higher.

But a notably diverse coalition of California interest groups have banded together to argue otherwise. Landlords, tenant rights organizations, affordable housing advocates, environmental nonprofits and the building industry — which rarely all agree — now say that the policy would only “eviscerate” the multifamily solar market.

What’s more, they argue, the proposed change runs counter to a host of ambitious policy goals that California lawmakers have set out to combat climate change, air pollution and the affordable housing crisis.

“This proposed decision seems to go right in the opposite direction,” said Bob Raymer, technical director at the California Building Industry Association, a lobbying group that opposes the regulatory overhaul. “It’s nuts. I’ve been doing this stuff for over 40 years and this one is just baffling.”

Solar policy déjà vu

If this argument sounds familiar, a version has played out in public once before.

In December, the commission cut the payments that homeowners with rooftop solar arrays receive by roughly 75%. The decision came after months of debate, with both sides claiming to speak in the interest of clean energy and economic justice.

Previously, utilities were required to pay homeowners roughly the retail rate for electricity produced by a photovoltaic array and exported back to the grid. Utilities have long chafed at that arrangement, joining organized utility workers and even some environmental groups, in arguing that the more cost-effective way to supercharge clean energy production is to focus on utility-scale (read: big) projects. That’s opposed to the disaggregated fleet of photovoltaic arrays, found disproportionately on the homes of the well-to-do, who were able to skimp on the costs of grid maintenance and upgrades, effectively shunting that onto everyone else’s monthly bills.

The CPUC agreed with that argument and replaced that retail tariff with a much lower, adjustable fee.

That’s more or less what is being considered this time around for apartment building owners, but with one highly contested difference.

Even with these lower payments, single-family homeowners with solar can still boost the benefit of their array by using the electricity they generate on site. Every kilowatt hour “self-consumed” is a kilowatt hour that the homeowner doesn’t have to pay in high retail prices. That can add up to significant savings.

But under the proposed overhaul for apartment dwellers, no such savings would be allowed. All of the electricity generated would count as an “export” to the grid and get compensated at the lower wholesale rate. Likewise, all electricity used by the residents of that apartment building would need to be purchased from the utility at retail. For accounting purposes, there would be no“self-consumption” allowed.

For rooftop solar companies, the lack of a “self-consumption” provision for apartment buildings amounts to an existential threat.

Ivy Energy, a San Diego company that sells software to multifamily landlords hoping to offer their tenants solar power, argued to the CPUC that the rule, if adopted as proposed in August, “would eviscerate the economic value proposition” for multifamily solar “rendering all new projects infeasible and unfinanceable, and effectively result in a collapse of the multifamily solar market.”

Both the state’s major investor-owned utilities and the CPUC say that coming up with a way to account for self-consumption to apartment buildings, where different residents are using different amounts of electricity at different times and would require different levels of compensation, would be a technical nightmare to administer. They argue that it would be costly to build out, raises potential privacy concerns between renters and their landlords and would result in billing so convoluted that no resident could possibly use it to predict the cheapest time to run their dishwasher.

“Illogical and convoluted” is the term used in a joint letter to the CPUC by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

But just because such a system would be hard to implement doesn’t warrant upending the entire industry that has built itself up around the old system, said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar & Storage Association.

She pointed to the single-family solar market as a telling example. Since the new policy went into effect, she said, the number of residential solar projects in the pipeline has dropped at least 40%.

“But we’ve gotten ourselves in this situation where we’re almost touting the single family version” of the policy, she said. “It’s still not going to be a great thing, but at least it’s not sudden death. Which is what this is.”

In opposition: A big tent

As the CPUC mulled the decision over the summer, a disparate collection of interest groups flocked to the rooftop solar industry’s defense, but for different reasons.

Builders oppose anything that makes solar less financially attractive because the California Energy Commission, another state agency, now requires virtually all new residential construction to come equipped with solar panels.

Throwing a wrench into the economics of rooftop solar also complicates the statewide push to go electric, to the chagrin of property owners and the entire electrification industry.

“Solar is one of the biggest revenue streams for a landlord asking ‘Why should I invest all this money in a heat hump, a new hot water system?’” said David Chanin, co-founder of FutureFit Partners, a company that helps house and apartment owners make those investments. “Under these new rules I have pretty serious concerns that entire building electrification projects just won’t pencil out anymore.”

And while the overhaul for single-family solar users mostly directly affected homeowners, it’s apartment-dwelling renters who are likely to be most affected by the current decision.

The current system “really is the only mechanism we have for a lot of low-income people living in multifamily housing to get solar and clean energy,” said Andrew Dawson, a lobbyist with the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing. “For electrification purposes, solar is really important to make sure that people’s bills don’t increase significantly.”

Other programs do exist to help lower income Californians go green. The state’s Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing program provides financial incentives for property owners to invest in new panels and is funded under a different formula. But that program’s coverage is patchy across the state, said Dawsom.

Andrea Barnier with Self-Help Enterprises, a low-income housing provider in Visalia, said only 15 of the organization’s 40 multifamily projects will be insulated from the policy change through that state program. For the remaining sites, and all future apartment projects, she called the new rule a potential “deterrent to all-electric design.”

In a filing with the CPUC, the state’s three investor-owned utilities note that multifamily solar is still a relatively rare phenomenon in California. At last count, just 217 residential facilities across the state make use of the program, along with 513 other mixed residential and commercial sites.

But with the state vowing to simultaneously turbocharge apartment construction, electrical vehicle purchases and the jettisoning of gas stoves and hot water heaters, critics say that while supporting distributed solar may not be vital now, it will be in the near-future.

“As climate impacts like rising heat continue to increase, there is an ongoing need for grid independence and alternate energy solutions from batteries during rolling blackouts and emergencies, so this also impacts our ability to develop resilient communities,” said Barnier.

A coming political dust-up?

It may only be a matter of time before this argument gets dragged out of the highly-technical and mostly overlooked corridors of the CPUC and into the broader realm of partisan politics.

In July, the California Democratic Renters Council, a coalition of tenant rights, pro-housing and environmental justice advocacy groups, sent a letter to the CPUC’s five commissioners. It decried the proposed regulatory change that “would force renters to buy all of their power from the utility even when it is generated on their own rooftop” and “discriminate against renters by not giving them the same fair treatment as single-family homeowners.”

Though many observers expect the CPUC to ultimately vote for the overhaul next week, the breadth of the coalition that has mobilized against it might be difficult for other state lawmakers to overlook, said Raymer with the building industry.

“From a political standpoint, if this gets passed the way it’s proposed, I think the Legislature will be right back in 2024 addressing this,” he said.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s top two legislative leaders pledged Monday to pay off 80% of most people’s unpaid rent that has piled up during the coronavirus pandemic — but only if landlords agree to forgive the other 20%.

The proposal, which must be approved by the Legislature, could wipe out potentially billions of dollars in debt hanging over renters in the nation’s most populous state by using federal relief money to compel landlords to forgive debt. It also would extend a law scheduled to expire next Monday that bans landlords from evicting people as long as they pay at least 25% of their rent.

But housing advocates worry the plan gives landlords too much power to decide what happens to their tenants’ debt. If landlords refuse to forgive the debt, the state will only pay 25% of their unpaid rent to ensure their tenants qualify for the law preventing evictions through at least June 30. But there appears to be no recourse for tenants whose landlords don’t take the deal.

“This really sort of puts the ball into the landlords’ court in a way that we’re not quite happy with,” said Cynthia Castillo, policy advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. “It does the urgent work of extending the (eviction) moratorium, which we were very concerned about.”

Landlords aren’t happy with everything in the bill, either. But the California Apartment Association, which represents owners, investors, developers and managers of rental homes and apartment complexes, said the most important part “is the payment of dollars for rent that is owed.”

“Without this money, many landlords are at risk of losing their rental units,” said Debra Carlton, the association’s executive vice president of state public affairs.

The plan would cover unpaid rent between April 2020 and March 2021. Landlords would get more money to cover 25% of rent due from April to June.

California has lost 1.4 million jobs over the past year because of the pandemic, according to the state’s latest employment survey. It’s processed more than 19 million claims for unemployment insurance, paying out more than $114 billion in benefits.

But it’s been difficult to track how that economic turmoil has affected housing. In October, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimated that California renters had compiled $1.7 billion in unpaid rent. This month, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said the increase and extension of federal unemployment benefits had reduced that to $400 million, accounting for just 2% of all renters.

California housing advocates dispute that figure, with the Bay Area Equity Atlas and Housing NOW! California estimating as many as 1.1 million households were behind on their rent in December, facing an estimated $3.6 billion in debt.

Meanwhile, a survey by the State Water Resources Control Board found 1.6 million residential water customers, or 12% of all households, haven’t paid their bills, creating a debt of $1 billion.

The proposal announced Monday is California’s first major attempt at paying back those debts. The state would pay for the program by using $2.6 billion in federal rent relief money from the most recent coronavirus rescue package. About $1.5 billion goes to the state, while the other $1.1 billion goes to cities and counties with populations of at least 200,000.

The state can’t tell cities and counties how to spend that money. But the legislation would give them an incentive to send it back to the state and let them operate the program. California hopes some smaller cities and counties will choose that option because they don’t have experience with complex federal spending requirements.

The agreement is between Newsom, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins — all Democrats. The state Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, is scheduled to vote on the bill Thursday,

In a statement, the three leaders said the proposal “maintains California’s COVID eviction protections as the strongest statewide rules in the nation.”

Assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat from San Francisco, said it was “troubling” that the amount of debt renters will have paid off is “determined solely by the cooperation of their landlord.” But he praised the proposal for extending “critical eviction protections through the end of June.”

“I expect there will be a need to revisit this legislation to address gaps and provide relief to additional tenants,” Chiu said.

The federal money can only be spent on households whose income is 80% or less of the area median income. It prioritizes relief for households at 50% or less of the median income and those unemployed for at least three months.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat and chairman of the Senate Housing Committee, fears the proposal will leave some tenants out. He also worried the Newsom administration might bungle distribution of the money, “given California’s logistical problems during the pandemic” with unemployment benefits and vaccines.

But Wiener said the state “must pass this proposal by the end of the week to avoid mass evictions.”

“This proposal is a step toward the critical goals of housing stability and economic and health recovery,” he said.

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He says government stimulus benefits allowed his hard-hit tenants to continue to pay the rent. But now that the aid has expired, with Congress unlikely to pass a new package before Election Day, they are falling behind. Heading into a New England winter, Elia is worried about such expenses as heat and snowplowing in addition to the regular year-round costs, like fixing appliances and leaky faucets.

Elia wonders how much longer his lenders will cut him slack. “We still have a mortgage. We still have expenses on these properties,” he said. “But there comes a point where we will exhaust whatever reserves we have. At some point, we will fall behind on our payments.

They can’t expect landlords to provide subsidized housing.” The stakes are particularly high for small landlords, whether they own commercial properties, such as storefronts, or residential properties such as apartments. Many are borrowing money from relatives or dipping into their personal savings to meet their mortgage payments.

The big residential and commercial landlords have more options. For instance, the nation’s biggest mall owner, Simon Property Group, is in talks to buy J.C. Penney, a move that would prevent the department store chain from going under and causing Simon to lose one of its biggest tenants.

At the same time, Simon is suing the Gap for $107 million in back rent. Michael Hamilton, a Los Angeles-based real estate partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, said he expects to see more retail and other commercial landlords going to court to collect back rent as they get squeezed between lenders and tenants. Residential landlords are also fighting back against a Trump administration eviction moratorium that protects certain tenants through the end of 2020.

At least 26 lawsuits have been filed by property owners around the country in places such as Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio, many of them claiming the moratorium unfairly strains landlords’ finances and violates their rights. Apartment dwellers and other residential tenants in the U.S. owe roughly $25 billion in back rent, and that will reach nearly $70 billion by year’s end, according to an estimate in August by Moody’s Analytics. An estimated 30 million to 40 million people in the U.S. could be at risk of eviction in the next several months, according to an August report by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization. Jessica Elizabeth Michelle, 37, a single mother with a 7-month-old baby, represents a growing number of renters who are afraid of being homeless once the moratorium on evictions ends.

The San Francisco resident saw her income of $6,000 a month as an event planner evaporate when COVID-19 hit. Supplemental aid from the federal government and the city helped her pay her monthly rent of $2,400 through September. But all that has dried up, except for the unemployment checks that total less than $2,000 a month. For her October rent, she handed $1,000 to her landlord.

She said her landlord has been supportive but has made it clear he has bills to pay, too. “I never had an issue of paying rent up until now. I cry all night long. It’s terrifying,” Michelle said. “I don’t know what to do. My career was ripped out from under me. It’s gotten to the point of where it’s like, ‘Am I going to be homeless?’ I have no idea.’” Some landlords are trying to work with their commercial or residential tenants, giving them a break on the rent or more flexible lease terms. But the crisis is costing them. Analytics firm Trepp, which tracks a type of real estate loan taken out by owners of commercial properties such as offices, apartments, hotels and shopping centers, found that hotels have a nearly 23% rate of delinquency, or 30 days overdue, on their loans, while the retail industry has a 14.9% delinquency rate as of August.

The apartment rental market has so far navigated the crisis well, with a delinquency rate of 3%, according to Trepp. That’s in part because of the eviction moratorium, along with extra unemployment benefits from Washington that have since expired. “There are bad actors, but the majority of landlords are struggling and are trying to work with a bad situation,” said Andreanecia M. Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, a public-private partnership that pushes for more affordable housing in the New Orleans area. Morris, who works with both landlords and tenants, said that government money wasn’t adequate to help tenants pay their rent, particularly in expensive cities. She is calling for comprehensive rental assistance.

She fears that residential landlords will see their properties foreclosed on next year, and the holdings will be bought by big corporations, which are not as invested in the neighborhoods. Gary Zaremba, who owns and and manages 350 apartment units spread out over 100 buildings in Dayton, Ohio, said he has been working with struggling tenants — many of them hourly workers in restaurants and stores — and directs them to social service agencies for additional help. But he is nervous about what’s next, especially with winter approaching and the prospect of restaurants shutting down and putting his tenants out of work.

He has a small mortgage on the buildings he owns but still has to pay property taxes and fix things like broken windows or leaky plumbing. “As a landlord, I have to navigate a global pandemic on my own,” Zaremba said, “and it’s confusing.”

-By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO AP Retail Writer

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For Landlords/Homeowners, it has become more and more difficult to collect rent. For tenants that don’t pay rent, it is just a matter of time before they are evicted. But, if there happens to be a moratorium on evictions, tenants know they have the upperhand.

Landlords can work with struggling tenants. Even corporations may struggle to pay rent on their offices. No one wants to evict if it is possible to avoid that. It is better to negotiate a middle ground, assuming the tenant is worth keeping and has a history of paying on time. Of course, a pandemic can turn the economy on its head. Although that is a worse case scenario, tenants can go through financial difficulty at any time.

But what happens if you are a landlord and you have spoken with your tenant and there is no compromise? Or, what if your agreement hinges on the tenants’ financial situation improving, and it doesn’t? Is it time to evict?

The cost of an eviction is a factor in evicting. But, add to that the cost of lost rent and the time spent going through the correct process. At some point everything becomes too much for a landlord to handle. If an eviction drags out and there is no rent collection, the cost may be too high to continue.

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