Tight Market Highlights an Eviction Ploy

It’s called “sewer service.” A landlord or process server draws up eviction papers but doesn’t deliver them as the law requires.

The tenant then gets tossed out with little or no notice. The old ploy, a holdover from the days when shady process servers and landlords threw documents in the sewer, has emerged as a major issue in an era of record low vacancy rates and sky-high rents across Southern California.

Complaints about “sewer service” number in the thousands despite court efforts to make the process more efficient. Landlord groups say the problem is exaggerated and is actually just another scheme by tenants to live rent-free.

“The landlord is really a sitting duck,” said Alan Dauger, who owns several apartment buildings in Orange County. “There are so many delaying tactics that these tenants use. And this is just one of them.”

But tenant advocates say it’s abuse by landlords and runs rampant, especially in immigrant and low-income neighborhoods, where tenants have limited means to contest evictions. Some cases end up in court, where tenants try to prove that they did not receive the notices.

One Orange County woman’s eviction order was set aside after she showed documents proving she was in Mexico when a process server claimed delivery.

In another case, Patricia Carballo said she didn’t know she was being evicted from her one-bedroom Anaheim apartment until sheriff’s deputies arrived at her door.

“I didn’t have time to do anything. No time to get clothes. Money. Nothing,” said Carballo, whose former landlord said she had not paid the rent. Carballo recently won a $10,000 settlement against the landlord after a process server admitted that he never delivered the eviction notice.

Evictions almost always succeed and number in the thousands annually, both in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The clock starts when a tenant receives a hand-delivered notice from a process server. Five days later, the door to most legal challenges slams shut. Deputies arrive to carry out the eviction as soon as one week later.

The notices prod tenants to decide whether to challenge in court, move or pay the rent if they owe it.

It’s impossible to know how common “sewer service” cases are because the courts don’t keep records on such eviction challenges. But at the Los Angeles Central Courthouse alone, officials often handle more than a dozen such cases a week.

Landlords usually win. But Irene Garcia Arevalo of South-Central Los Angeles won her case after a judge found that her landlord never filed proof that she had been served.

“I knew I didn’t receive the notice,” said Arevalo. Her landlord accused her of not keeping up with her rent. “I was home when they said they served me.”

In another case, a Los Angeles judge sided with an airline flight attendant who documented that she was airborne when a process server claimed to have served her.

But because most tenants don’t provide such detailed proof, judges usually side with landlords, as in the case of Marie Love.

Love, a 31-year-old mother of three children, said she couldn’t have been served an eviction notice because she had moved out of her apartment after a neighbor was shot in the stomach.

“I was terrified,” she said. “I left to stay one week with my mother. Nobody served me with nothing.”

But the judge, without comment, decided she had been properly served. Love had to come up with $1,471 in back rent within days or face eviction.

*

Apartment owners maintain that they are often the victims in such cases, forced to go to court by people who have already been warned that they owe back rent or are violating their rental contracts.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert L. Hess heard numerous “sewer service” cases in the mid-1990s and said he often referred problem process servers to county officials for possible discipline. He often grilled process servers under oath and once ordered an attorney to stop using a process server who had a history of complaints.

“[Tenants] are entitled to an opportunity to be heard,” Hess said, “and since they only have a limited time to respond, that makes the notice very critical.”

Tenant advocates say shady process servers often submit phony proof to the court that they served their papers. Evictions that can take more than one month if contested by tenants can be done in days if the tenant doesn’t respond by deadline, which triggers a court order.

And even though courts now warn tenants by mail of their legal standing, some say the warnings are often too late. Orange County housing advocates are seeking state legislation requiring courts to speed up notification.

“In this market, housing providers tend to run roughshod over tenants,” said David Levy, an advocate with the Orange County Fair Housing Council. “We want to help the people who never even knew anything was going on until it was too late.”

Carballo, who won the settlement against her former landlord, said she and her two children, as well as her sister and her five children, were suddenly homeless when sheriff’s deputies evicted them.

She has moved to another Anaheim apartment, but the memory still haunts her.

“We were basically thrown in the street,” she said.