West Hollywood Struggles to Live With Rent Control
Every Wednesday night, landlords and tenants gather in West Hollywood’s City Hall for the city’s Rent Stabilization Commission hearings. A meeting rarely passes without its usual complement of groans and catcalls.
But the open hostility that used to inflame the sessions has subsided as opponents and supporters of the city’s complex rent ordinance struggle to live with rent control.
In the six months that the city has administered its rent law, the Rent Stabilization Department and the Rent Stabilization Commission have had to contend with the growing pains that confront any new administrative entity. Adding to the frustrations resulting from a short-handed staff still learning the Byzantine provisions of the ordinance, the rent administration has also had to satisfy the city’s majority tenant constituency while not permanently alienating its landlord minority.
Flexing Their Muscles
Some of the renters who make up nearly 90% of the city’s population have been quick to flex their new muscles under the law. Yet city officials and tenant advocates worry that more renters have not taken advantage of their rights. They hope that a public education campaign, which will start this week, will heighten awareness of the rent law.
For the time being, landlords have given up overt attempts to scuttle the rent control law. Instead, they are criticizing the city’s administration of the law’s provisions. Leaders of apartment owner groups tick off numerous complaints about the knowledge, flexibility and actions of city rent officials. But they also profess a grudging admiration for their willingness to listen and make accommodations on some policy matters.
“We’ve learned that it’s not easy being fair,” said Adam Moos, the city’s rent stabilization director, who heads a staff of 20 hearing examiners, counselors and clerical workers. “We bend over backwards to listen to everyone and try to accommodate them. But people have to remember that we can only work within the parameters of the law.”
West Hollywood’s rent control law is a rigid one by most standards. It restricts yearly rent increases to 60% of the yearly rise in the consumer price index. It allows 10% rent increases when apartments are vacated, but only once every two years. And it has set up a system of maintenance standards, requiring landlords to repaint apartments every four years and replace drapes and carpets every seven years.
Last October, the city began the administrative process that allows tenants to request rent reductions and landlords to apply for rent increases. Since then, according to Moos, 220 tenants have asked for hearings, almost all of them requests for rent reductions or improved maintenance. And 960 landlords have asked either for vacancy increases or other adjustments.
The many requests, and the expectation that they will increase in the coming year, will most likely force an expansion of the rent control administration.
Moos is preparing a budget that would add 14 more staff members, including a conciliation counselor who could mediate landlord-tenant disputes before they reach the hearing stage. Although this year’s budget figures were unavailable, it cost the city $1.4 million last year to administer rent control (the city’s total expenditures last year topped $17 million).
“We’ve been tremendously busy,” Moos said. “We’re in contact with 1,700 people every month.”
Meetings to Begin
Those contacts may well increase after this week, when the city launches a series of meetings to educate West Hollywood renters about the rent control law. The meetings were prompted by worries that residents had not fully taken advantage of the rent law.
“The city needs to be more aggressive in telling people about their rights,” said Larry Gross, director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, the tenant advocate group that showed strong support in the city’s council election earlier this month. “They need to do everything possible to make sure the law works smoothly and that nobody’s time is wasted.”
Much of the administration’s time in the past six months has been spent investigating, researching and ruling on tenants’ requests for decreases in rent. Those requests, which come in the form of applications for hearings before city examiners, appear to be the result of a new feeling of strength among renters.
“Renters feel more protections under the law and some of them obviously are taking advantage of it,” Gross said.
According to Moos, the typical rent reduction request comes from a tenant who complains about a carpet that “hasn’t been changed in years or an apartment that needs painting.”
The cases are investigated by city rent control counselors. They photograph interiors of apartments, question tenants and landlords and review all appropriate receipts before turning over the evidence to a hearing examiner. The examiner then conducts a hearing, where both landlord and tenant are allowed to present their cases.
Landlord organizers have been critical of the process, arguing that counselors often show bias and give legal advice to tenants and that hearing examiners are inexperienced and sometimes apt to dispense with procedure.
“There have been horror stories from Day 1,” said Craig Mordoh, an attorney employed by the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles. “Recently I had a situation where a landlord and tenant had a minor dispute over a security deposit. When the tenant called up a counselor, the counselor gave the tenant legal advice on how to recover his money and then phoned the landlord and ordered him to provide documentation. That’s way beyond the scope of the law.”
Mordoh and Grafton Tanquary, who heads West Hollywood Concerned Citizens, a landlord activist group, said they have heard or witnessed numerous abuses. Tanquary said that in one case, a hearing examiner granted a rent reduction to a tenant who complained about a faulty refrigerator, even though the tenant was unwilling to defrost it.
Mordoh said he has seen hearing examiners, stumped by the rent law, interrupt meetings to consult with an assistant city attorney or other officials. And in one case, Mordoh said, a hearing examiner would not let him represent a client until he agreed to sign a sworn statement that he was the landlord’s attorney.
“These are just clear abuses,” Mordoh said.
Tried to Be Scrupulous
City officials reply that they have tried to be scrupulous in defining the roles of counselors and hearing examiners.
“We’re real clear on telling counselors not to dispense legal advice,” Moos said. “But I think landlords sometimes miss the fact that there’s a fine line between outlining peoples’ rights as tenants and giving legal advice.”
Richard Muller, who as senior hearing examiner heads a staff of two permanent examiners and six examiners working under contract, said his department is neutral in the assistance it provides.
“When tenants bring cases, we make every effort to assist them and make sure their evidence is proper,” he said. “We do the same for landlords when they have a rent increase case. I think some landlords who are sitting and watching at the rent decrease hearings mistake that even-handedness for a bias toward tenants. That’s not the case.”
Miller added that Mordoh’s complaint about having to sign a sworn statement to represent his client was unwarranted. Miller said sworn statements have been the department’s standard policy in rent registration cases.
He added that he has reviewed all cases handled by hearing examiners and has found them properly managed. “There are a few cases where we might have asked a few more questions to make things clearer,” he said. “I think we’re improving as we go along.”
Painstaking Efforts
Moos said he and other rent officials have made painstaking efforts to give landlords a say in rent-control policy decisions. “When we put together our registration forms, we called Grafton and the other landlord leaders in and asked them to make sure the forms were clear and fair to them,” Moos said. “We try to include them as often as we can.”
Landlord leaders do admit that city rent officials have kept lines of communication open and are willing to consider landlords complaints, even if the officials rarely accede to them. “They’re trying to do a solid, professional job,” Tanquary said. “If you have a gripe, they listen. But we just don’t agree with what they do a lot of the time, and we think they operate a lot from inexperience.”
Tanquary and other landlord leaders give higher marks to the five members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Commission, which has heard 40 appeals of hearing examiners’ decisions since last October.
“I think all the members are conscientious and fair--but within their particular biases,” Tanquary said.
Landlords objected last year when the City Council picked the five commissioners and failed to appoint a landlord. Apartment owners contended that without a landlord on the board, there would be no one, as Tanquary said, “who has any sense what it takes to own a building.”
But commissioner Douglas Routh noted that one commissioner, Ruth Williams, once managed an apartment building, and that several others have run businesses of their own. “We’re not complete neophytes,” he said.
Unexpected Compliments
Surprisingly, landlords have even privately complimented Routh and Babette Lang, another commission member, for their attempts at fairness. Routh and Lang are both members of the Coalition for Economic Survival.
Landlords have also credited the commission with allowing ample time to discuss their cases. Although the rent law allows the commission to rule without hearing any further testimony, the panel usually allows landlords and tenants to raise new points in their hearings.
“I think we’ve been pretty good about giving everybody a hearing,” Routh said. “The rent board in Santa Monica often just makes a ruling without any more discussion. I don’t see us getting that businesslike for quite a while.”
When it comes to actual cases, the commission has had a harder time convincing landlords of its good intentions. Out of 32 rent reduction cases described by Muller, 15 have been outright victories for tenants and 10 have been modified victories (in which tenants do not win all of their requests). Tenants were denied reductions in seven of the cases, Muller said.
Mixed Nature
Despite the mixed nature of the decisions, landlords insist that figures show a “stacked deck,” as Tanquary complained. “In all the hearings I’ve attended, I’ve only seen one instance where the commission overruled the staff,” Tanquary said.
Moos and other city officials insist that the majority of rulings favoring tenants merely reflects the rent law’s toughness when applied to apartment owners who try to take advantage of renters. As long as the law retains its basic components, rent officials do not expect any major changes in the way it is administered.
“We can do little things to make life easier for apartment owners,” Moos said. “But unless the law changes, they have to abide with what we have.”
What the Rent Law Says
It restricts yearly rent increases to 60% of the yearly rise in the consumer price index.
It allows 10% rent increases when apartments are vacated, but only once every two years.
It establishes a system of apartment standards.
Last October, the city began the administrative process that allows tenants to request rent reductions and landlords to apply for rent increases.
