Crowded Courtrooms Serve as Battleground for L.A.’s Eviction Wars

Every weekday morning Ralph E. Burns, a gruff-voiced, 85-year-old court commissioner, peers down from his bench in the downtown Los Angeles civil court building. Every one of the 160 seats is taken.

Many of the faces that stare back at Burns are blank with confusion, frozen by procedural fear. These are the defendants. Soon Burns will begin ordering each into one of a dozen smaller courtrooms, where each will have a few minutes before a judge. The vast majority will lose.

This is Division 20. This is where you go when you are being evicted.

In the city of Los Angeles alone, nearly 40,000 people are evicted from apartments every year. More than half of those served with eviction papers simply give up and move out. About 40%, though, come to Division 20 and fight.

They meld into a chaotic microcosm of the city. The eviction game is played on an overcrowded field where every language and wardrobe and income and personal problem and excuse collide, where peculiar rules predominate, where justice is as likely to be obtained through a quick hallway chat as decided by a judge.

Most Plead Own Cases

The manner in which this happens is, on its face, bloodless.

The typical trial, usually involving a tenant who has missed one or more monthly rent checks, takes 20 minutes. A small corps of attorneys who specialize in representing landlords drone through the ceremony by rote. The attorneys may work four or five cases in a morning, dashing from courtroom to courtroom. The vast majority of tenants awkwardly plead their own cases.

The volume is overwhelming. More than four out of 10 of all the civil suits filed in the downtown complex are evictions. Because state law requires evictions to come to trial within 20 days, all municipal courtrooms on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the complex are reserved exclusively for evictions between 8:30 and 10 a.m. every day.

By noon, Commissioner Burns, working at a pace that Henry Ford would admire, has sent nearly 90 cases to trial from his “master calendar” eviction court or has disposed of them himself. A year ago he was doing 75 a day.

The process grinds so inexorably that there is relatively little attention paid to why the rent was not. It is too obvious to mention: Rents have far outpaced wages, particularly on the low end of the scale. The rent for the average apartment in Los Angeles has more than doubled in the last eight years, from $250 to almost $600.

On Brink of Homelessness

The cheap units most in demand are the most scarce because developers are demolishing so many of them, often replacing them with units that rent at two or three times the cost. Low-wage tenants who once could find another place after eviction now live on the brink of homelessness. Hence a trip to Division 20 is more nerve-racking than it used to be.

“Sure, I know I’m responsible for a lot of homeless people who were evicted,” says Burns, who came out of retirement 16 years ago and vows earnestly to continue working until he dies. (He was sidelined by a mild stroke two weeks ago but is expected to return to work Monday.) “But we don’t have the low-cost housing. Rents are very high. What can you do when the landlord has to get his rent?”

What usually happens is what happened to a welfare mother named Sheila Trimble.

Trimble, a heavyset woman with two children, allegedly missed a $166 rent payment last December for her federally subsidized apartment in South Los Angeles.

Landlords have wildly varying policies for handling these situations. Some give months of grace. Others, particularly those who employ management companies, may post a legal threat of eviction the day after the rent is due. The company that managed Trimble’s building--a shabby, tan stucco structure at 83rd and Main streets, surrounded by a thick black wrought-iron fence and facing a graffiti-infested, abandoned cafe--waited three weeks. Then it put the notice on her door: Pay in 10 days or you will be evicted.

Eviction Damages Record

Trimble, who had lived in the apartment for a year, did not pay. Like everyone, she had an excuse. She had already paid, she said, but her management company had changed resident managers and the old one forgot to tell the new one.

The management company was not convinced. It filed suit to evict. Trimble received a notice in the mail that her case was coming to trial. This was more than a small problem. It could well haunt her for years. Having an eviction on your record makes it difficult to qualify for another subsidized apartment. Landlords subscribe to a private service that uses court data to publish a directory of “problem” tenants.

So wearing a white T-shirt and green slacks, Trimble drove downtown with a friend to plead for a chance to stay. Burns assigned her case to Judge Barbara Ann Meiers. A young property manager named Mark Teodo, wearing an attractive sports jacket, briefly recited the history.

Meiers asked Trimble if she had a receipt proving she had paid rent. Trimble said no, but said a neighbor could vouch that she had paid.

Then Meiers asked the question judges always ask.

Few Emotional Outbursts

“How are you prepared to pay?” she said.

“I’m not,” Trimble said quietly. Perhaps she could do odd jobs to raise the money, she added.

Meiers ruled in favor of the landlord, and Trimble was forced to move in with her sister. She was luckier than many. Advocates for low-income tenants estimate that one-third of those who are evicted experience at least one night of homelessness before they find shelter.

By various estimates, as many as 90% of all evictions are the result of simple non-payment. There is the single woman who says her disability check didn’t arrive. There is the college student who says he lost his part-time job.

There are rarely any emotional outbursts. The scene is too intimidating. Throughout the morning in Burns’ courtroom a bailiff commands the masses to be quiet and orders relatives, friends and witnesses to go back outside. There are not enough seats. Burns presides impatiently. An anxious tenant would not suspect that the commissioner once refused to be the honored guest at a banquet of landlord attorneys unless lawyers from the federally funded Eviction Defense Center also were invited.

Angry, Often Irrational

“Stand when your case is called and identify yourself,” Burns barks. “All right, where’s Saticoy Apartments versus Ana Supayas? Mayer Management versus Conti? Kushner versus Cardena?

The tenants rise nervously from the back of the room. A few landlords are here too. Their attorneys sit on a row of chairs against a wall near Burns’ bench.

“All right,” Burns commands, “Saticoy versus Supayas go to Division 12, sixth floor. Mayer versus Conti, go to Division 26, right down the hall here. . . .”

Slowly, the room is cleared. The parties trickle out, each conscious of the other’s existence, wary of the other’s intentions, jaded by history, locked in one of life’s eternal conflicts, tenant versus landlord. It colors the eviction game an angry and often irrational red. Indeed, it colors the day-to-day judgment of many of Los Angeles’ estimated 1.8 million renters and 100,000 landlords, even when they’re not directly involved in combat.

With absolutely no prompting, both sides trot out wheelbarrows of nastiness they have absorbed, enough to righteously convince anyone that their side is the eternal victim. Tenant advocates decry landlords who file bad-faith eviction suits against one renter numerous times in an attempt to free the unit from rent control. Landlords curse tenants who routinely skip the rent, live rent-free for months while stalling the eviction process in court and finally leave, finding another apartment where they play the same game.

Propaganda has long replaced dialogue.

“I don’t think it’s the poor, those without jobs, the downtrodden, who get evicted,” says Dennis Block, who runs Katz & Block, the self-proclaimed McDonald’s of eviction law firms, which offers landlords a $200-a-year retainer that includes one eviction and unlimited phone advice as long as calls are less than four minutes. “I think it’s the people who have different priorities about how they handle their lives, be it (buying) drugs or a leather jacket.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Dennis,” snaps Roberto Aldape, one of three attorneys who work for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles’ Eviction Defense Center, which receives 7,000 requests for assistance each year from low-income tenants. “If some mother couldn’t pay the rent because she had to take her baby to the doctor for rat bites the kid got in her apartment, Dennis would say, ‘That’s what you get for having a pet.’ ”

Legally, renters have no right of property. The formal title of the most common type of eviction is “unlawful detainer”--a lawsuit filed by the landlord claiming that the tenant is unlawfully detaining him from the rightful use of his property. But emotions transcend law. Your apartment is your home, whether you own it or not. As a result, eviction is as combative a legal arena as divorce, except that, as one veteran eviction lawyer notes wryly, “there is no love lost here because there was none to start with.”

Certainly, there was none lost between a tenant named Susan Jackson and an apartment manager named Charles Snow.

‘Tenant Never Wins’

Jackson, a 34-year-old mother of three who works as a secretary for an automotive repair company, was leaning against a wall in the hallway of the court building one morning a couple months ago. She looked tired. She had just signed her name to a court judgment that gave her a month to move out of the three-bedroom apartment in Hollywood that had been her home for nine years.

“I don’t care what it is, the tenant never wins,” she said sourly. “I had no idea so many people were getting evicted. I walked in (Burns’ master calendar court) and said, ‘Oy vay.’ They tell you take a seat, be quiet, no talking. I felt guilty and I hadn’t done anything.”

That wasn’t the way Charles Snow saw it.

Snow said the owner of the Deccan Villas apartment building, Chilumula Reddy, decided to evict Jackson after a friend of hers trashed Jackson’s $1,090-a-month apartment.

“He had a nervous breakdown,” Jackson said of her friend. “I fixed everything up and paid for it.”

Reddy’s eviction filing, which gave Jackson 30 days to move out, claimed that she was a nuisance.

“The manager wanted me out,” Jackson said. “He doesn’t like kids. This was a great opportunity.”

Upset by the eviction notice, Jackson skipped the next month’s rent payment. Landlord Reddy then served her with a pay-in-three-days-or-leave notice.

Jackson then did what many tenants do. She started buying time. She had no lawyer but she had received many solicitations. Tenant service companies, which develop business by checking court records for eviction filings and offer techniques to stall eviction for up to six months, mailed her literature. She hired one of them.

One of the most popular strategies that tenant service companies use is the filing of a claim that another tenant in the unit was not properly notified of the eviction suit. Such claims are granted only about 2% of the time in court but they generally delay eviction for several weeks. A Glendale man recently pleaded no contest to four felony counts stemming from accusations that his company used this technique to stall at least 40 evictions, costing the landlords more than $150,000 in uncollected rent and legal expenses.

Rent Left Unpaid

The tenant service companies are routinely vilified by lawyers on both sides of the eviction war for misleading tenants, including sometimes filing bankruptcy petitions without the client’s knowledge. But Jackson said the advice she received was helpful. It allowed her to delay her move-out day more than four months from the date she received her first eviction papers. During that time she paid no rent. She found another apartment in what she considered a nicer area.

Left hanging was the court judgment Jackson signed, in which she agreed to move by a stipulated date and to pay a negotiated amount of back rent, $2,907.

As is the case with many evicted tenants, Jackson did not pay the money.

“They can find me,” she said defiantly a week after moving.

Charles Snow tried to find her. The day Jackson moved he got in his car and followed her moving van, but he got lost in traffic.

‘Decontrol’ Sometimes the Goal

“Nobody seems to know where she moved,” Snow said.

While the vast majority of evictions result from non-payment, legal-aid attorneys who represent tenants contend that a significant number of evictions filed as failure-to-pay and nuisance cases are bad-faith attempts by landlords to rid themselves of tenants who are either troublesome or paying lower-than-market rents because of rent control.

These tenant advocates contend that landlords grow itchy to evict long-term tenants because under the city of Los Angeles’ rent control law, an apartment unit’s rent can only be raised a few percentage points a year until a tenant leaves. Then, when it is vacated, the apartment is “decontrolled,” and the rent can be raised as high as the market will bear.

“Decontrol is very bad,” said Commissioner Burns. “It is an incentive for the landlord to try to get the tenant out by hook or crook . . . voluntarily or through eviction. . . . I’d rather see it eliminated.”

Burns, who has presided over eviction court for seven years, said he has seen “a lot” of non-payment cases that involved “various subterfuges to get tenants out. . . .”

Refused to Accept Payment

Margarita Turcio and her family recently ran into what they considered to be an example.

The Turcio family was facing eviction from its $298-a-month one-bedroom apartment near 12th Street and Olympic Boulevard, just west of downtown. Landlord Joe Gaeta’s eviction suit claimed the family had not paid rent for six months. The family claimed that Gaeta had simply refused to accept payment.

The stakes were high for both sides. The Turcios were paying artificially low rent because they’d lived here 10 years. Once the Turcios’ apartment was decontrolled, Gaeta would probably be able to rent it for an additional $100 a month. The Turcios would have to compete for a shrinking number of low-cost apartments.

As Margarita Turcio told it in a courtroom hallway interview, speaking in Spanish through a son who interpreted, she had mailed a money order to Gaeta each month by certified mail.

According to legal-aid attorney Roberto Aldape, who represented the family, the landlord had engaged in a cynical ruse, refusing to accept rent so that he could file for eviction months later.

As tenant advocates describe this scenario, the landlord anticipates that by the time the case finally goes to trial there will be no written record of the tenant’s attempts to pay or the manager’s refusal to accept, and that the determining factor in the judge’s mind will be whether the tenant can pay the back rent.

Most of the time, in a world in which 20% of all renters spend half or more of their income on rent, the tenant will not have the money.

“Typically the lower-middle-class or upper working-class guy or woman does not have the foresight or even the ability to consciously put away the monthly rent in an account,” said landlord attorney Laurence H. Lishner, who represented Gaeta in the case but declined to respond to Aldape’s contention that Gaeta had engaged in a bad-faith eviction suit.

“Most of these tenants are living day to day anyway, paycheck to paycheck. If they’ve got it now they pay the rent; if they don’t, they don’t. If the landlord refuses to accept the rent and the car needs to be fixed, they’re not going to put (the rent money) away. That does create pressure,” Lishner said.

Margarita Turcio’s case never got to trial.

‘Affirmative Defense’

The morning it was scheduled for a hearing, the attorneys conferred in the crowded, noisy hallway outside Division 20. Unlike most tenants, Margarita Turcio had saved her receipts and her money. She had also filed what is called an “affirmative defense” against the eviction, claiming that damp walls and poor heat and plumbing made the apartment unlivable--saying, in effect, that the landlord had not fulfilled his obligation to provide habitable quarters.

Gaeta agreed to drop the eviction suit and accept the back rent.

Many eviction disputes, particularly in poor neighborhoods, boil down to a tenant’s plea that a judge deny an eviction and instead order a landlord to repair the unit. Landlord attorneys sneer at this defense as a tenant’s afterthought. Tenant advocates consider it a valuable tool against slumlords. Judges wrestle uncomfortably with it, examining photographs and inspection records.

A couple of months ago an attorney who represents both landlords and tenants breathed a sigh of relief after his landlord client won an eviction against a South-Central Los Angeles couple.

The landlord, who had tried twice unsuccessfully in the past to evict the tenants, said they had failed to pay the $216 rent promptly. The tenants claimed that they had mailed the check. The tenants said they hadn’t been properly served with eviction papers. The landlord produced a witness who said they had. The tenants showed city inspection reports of defective conditions--peeling paint, inoperable light switches, broken windows. The landlord said he had fixed them.

Allegation of Bias

In a ruling that left one of the tenants sobbing uncontrollably in the hallway, the judge sided with the landlord.

“If it was in front of another judge, I would have lost the case,” said the attorney, who spoke on the condition that details of the case be kept vague enough so that the judge would not be able to identify him.

Experience teaches landlord and tenant attorneys which municipal judges tend to be sympathetic to their sides. They are allowed to automatically reject, on an allegation of bias, the first judge that Burns assigns to their case.

However, among attorneys who regularly work Division 20, this step is not usually necessary. Burns anticipates it. He often avoids assigning the cases of “regular” landlord attorneys to strongly pro-tenant judges, and makes similar allowances for regular tenant attorneys. Clients without attorneys are sent--unwittingly--to those judges who are regarded as biased by the regular attorneys. It is all part of making the trains run on time.