Tenants Get 1st Priority After Repairs
The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to require landlords to give tenants of quake-damaged apartments first priority to reoccupy them after repairs, despite a warning from the city attorney that the law may be legally flawed.
The city attorney expressed the only opposition to an ordinance supported by an unusual alliance of apartment owners, tenant representatives and community activists.
“It is the best available compromise that we could come up with on this issue,” said George Mihlsten, a prominent attorney who represents an association of apartment building owners.
The law was designed to prevent landlords from using quake damage to evict the thousands of tenants forced out of about 18,000 damaged apartment units citywide--including about 12,000 in the San Fernando Valley--so they can be replaced by new tenants paying higher rents.
It allows a displaced tenant five days after the completion of repairs to inspect the unit and decide whether to reoccupy it at the same rent. The landlord cannot raise the rent to recoup repair costs without city approval.
But Senior Assistant City Atty. Claudia McGee Henry said the law may be vulnerable to legal challenges by landlords, who may complain because, in most cases, tenants who have found other lodgings they must cancel will not actually move back until the beginning of the next month. That could tie up the unit with no rent coming in for up to 30 days.
“If a court finds that these new restrictions are unnecessary . . . it may simply refuse to enforce them or require the city to pay a successful plaintiff/landlord for lost rentals,” McGee Henry said in a report to the council.
She said the law also is vague about when the landlord must give the former tenant a chance to inspect a unit in a now-damaged building: when the building is declared safe to enter or not until after all cosmetic repairs are completed.
But Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who proposed the ordinance, called McGee Henry’s concerns “overly cautious and bureaucratic,” especially when the city is in a state of emergency and needs to take fast action on the housing problem.
He noted that a similar ordinance adopted in San Francisco after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake was challenged in court but was upheld by a state court of appeal in December, 1993.
Under the City Council’s law, a landlord who refuses to allow a tenant to return to a repaired unit will be guilty of a misdemeanor and be liable for damages to the tenant.
A previous version of the law allowed the landlord to offer the apartment to the tenant before all repairs were completed, thus allowing the landlord to begin collecting rent sooner.
But city officials modified the law to require the landlord to offer the apartment for rent only after the repairs are made, in order to prevent prospective tenants from having to commit themselves to rent apartments with no guarantee that the units will ultimately be restored to livable condition.
