Sacramento Watch: Your ZIP Code's Eviction Numbers Are Going Public, Eventually

SB 1160 would put California eviction filings into a public spreadsheet broken out by ZIP code. It would also have started in 2028, until an amendment last week pushed every date back five years.

SB 1160 directs the Judicial Council to collect unlawful detainer data from every county court system and publish it publicly, aggregated by the ZIP code of the property. Three data points: cases filed each month, cases resolved by default, stipulated and other pretrial or posttrial judgments, and cases dismissed at the plaintiff's request or by court order. Once a year the Judicial Council formats what it receives into an electronic spreadsheet and posts it on its website.

The timeline is the part that changed, and it changed four days ago. Read a summary written before August 13 and you will see 2027, 2028 and 2029. The amendment adopted that day moved every one of those dates back five years. The current text reads: by July 1, 2032, the Judicial Council assesses which county courts are capable of submitting the data. Beginning January 1, 2033, the counties it identifies as capable start reporting quarterly. On or before January 1, 2034, all county court systems report. Beginning January 1, 2034, and annually after that, the spreadsheet goes public.

The same amendment quietly dropped the requirement that this run through JBSIS, the Judicial Branch Statistical Information System, and replaced it with a generic automated data collection system. And the whole thing is contingent on an appropriation by the Legislature, which means even the 2032 date is a ceiling rather than a promise. A bill that depends on future funding and does not produce a public artifact for eight years is a bill that can be quietly starved.

I am flagging the date change specifically because the automated summaries going around this week still have the old numbers, and a couple have both sets mashed together. If you saw 2028 for this bill, that was the version that died on August 13.

So does an operator care about something that produces nothing until 2034? Not urgently. But it is worth understanding what it is designed to do, because the design tells you where this is heading. Nobody builds a ZIP code level eviction dataset to study court efficiency. ZIP code is a geographic unit that maps onto neighborhoods, income and race. Published filing counts by ZIP become the evidentiary base for the next round of local ordinances, for right to counsel funding arguments, and for tenant organizing that targets specific buildings and specific owners. Los Angeles already went through a version of this fight with its own eviction filing data.

The wrinkle for a rental owner is that filings are a bad proxy for anything and they will be read as a good one. An unlawful detainer filing is not a finding of wrongdoing. In a lot of cases it is the only lawful mechanism available to resolve a nonpayment that has already run months, and a filing that ends in a stipulated payment plan and a tenant who stays is recorded the same way as one that ends in a lockout. The bill does at least separate defaults, stipulations and dismissals, which is more nuance than most published datasets carry. Whether anyone reporting on it preserves that nuance is a different question.

There is nothing to do about this today, and I would be suspicious of anyone selling you a compliance product for it. The honest takeaway is smaller. Your filing pattern is going to be a public number in a public file with your ZIP code attached, and the date that happens is now 2034 rather than 2028. Between now and then, the argument for resolving nonpayment through a payment plan rather than a filing gets slightly stronger every year, not because the law changed but because the record becomes visible.

Not law yet. SB 1160 cleared committee on a 11 to 4 vote on August 13 and sits in the Assembly floor process. The Legislature has until August 31 to pass bills this session.