LA City Council tweaks new renter protections and delays full enactment
The Los Angeles City Council proposed minor tweaks to new renter protections, involving evictions for not paying rent and relocation assistance for tenants, in a Friday, Jan. 27 meeting, setting back the enactment of these city laws by at least a week.
Last week, the city council attracted national attention for its bold new renter protections intended to stave off an eviction tsunami after pandemic era renter protections expire on Feb. 1.
And while all the new protections were celebrated widely by tenants rights advocates – and mourned by many landlords – only two were immediately enacted on Jan. 20.
The first enacted protection expands to an additional 400,000 units the requirement that landlords must show just cause for evicting tenants. The other one enacted last week says that landlords cannot evict tenants for non-authorized roommates or pets adopted during the pandemic — until Jan. 30, 2024.
Two additional renter protections were approved last week, but were returned to the city council for a second reading on Friday.
The first of the two still-to-be-enacted tenant protections says that renters must be behind by at least one full month of rent before a landlord can pursue a non-payment eviction against them.
The second law, still not enacted, requires that landlords who raise rent by more than 10% must provide tenants with a rental relocation payment. This will only apply to an estimated 84,000 households, said Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival Larry Gross, because the rest of the rental units in L.A. are protected from such hikes through rent stabilization protections, or via state bill AB 1482.
During Friday’s meeting L.A. ouncilmembers proposed minor tweaks to both protections and, as a result, they must come before the council again next week, for a final vote.
This means that not all of the proposed renter protections will be in place when the city’s COVID era tenant protections expire.
However, tenants need not panic because L.A. residents will still be covered by L.A.County’s eviction moratorium, which the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently voted to extend until March, 2023.
In tweaking the new citywide tenant protections, the city council added severance clauses which say that if a lawsuit invalidates any language in the package of protections, the rest of the protections in the ordinance remain legally valid.
Councilmembers also clarified that if a landlord seeks more than a 10% rent hike, which would require them to pay relocation costs for the tenant, the relocation payment applies to a tenant’s contracted monthly rental rate and not to any discounted monthly rents offered.
Gross, of Coalition for Economic Survival, was pleased by the outcome of Friday’s meeting at which the city council voted in favor of the amended ordinances.
“I think it’s a tremendous victory for tenants,” he said.
The amended ordinance regarding non-payment of rent evictions passed 9-2 among the members present, with Councilmembers Traci Park and John Lee voting no. The amended relocation assistance payment ordinance passed 9-4 among those present with Park, Lee, Councilmember Monica Rodriguez and Council President Paul Krekorian voting no.
While all councilmemembers have said they support expanding tenant protections, some feel the new rules did not properly account for the financial burden faced by landlords following an almost three year eviction moratorium.
“I believe that this body understands the importance of supporting our mom and pop housing providers, many of whom struggled with expenses during the pandemic,” said Park. “Unfortunately, however, their needs were not included in what came out of the committee and what we have in front of us today is not a balanced policy.”
Tenants remain liable for back rent owed to their landlords.
Under the new protections, tenants have until Aug. 1 to pay back rent accumulated between March 1, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021, and they have until Feb. 1, 2024 to pay back rent accumulated between Oct. 1, 2021 and Jan. 31, 2023.
This news was much less pleasing to Gross.
“We’re still on the road to the economic train wreck,” said Gross, “because, the fact is that tenants have acquired so much debt over this period of time.”