Los Angeles City Council Acts to Protect Long-Term and Elderly Tenants from Fake Owner-Move-In Evictions
On June 9, 2009, the City Council passed an amendment to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance that limits which tenants can be evicted for owner-move-ins. Previously, many elderly, long-term tenants could be evicted when an owner wanted to move into his rental unit. While there's nothing particularly wrong with that in general, many real estate speculators purchased properties at a discount and then started evicting all the long-term and elderly tenants under the guise that they, and their family members, were moving in. Until this week, the new owner had an unlimited amount of time to move in, and only had to stay six months. Naturally, some owners did this (or pretended to) just to get rid of below-market-paying tenants.

NOW, elderly, long-term and terminally ill tenants cannot be evicted for owner-move-ins, and to evict someone for owner move-in, the owner has to move in within three months and stay in the unit for 24 months. In other words, the owner has to really want to live in the place--not just camp there for a few months so he can raise the rent to market. KUDOS.

Important New Federal Protections for All Tenants are Here Now!
On the national front, if you are a tenant (not prior owner) in a home that is foreclosed upon, the new owner must give you NINETY (90) days' notice to move before it can proceed to evict you.

And You Think YOUR Landlord is Bad...
Congratulations to KTTV Fox11 for writing maybe the best landlord-tenant headline ever: "Landlord Wants Rent After Massacre." It seems that the Broadcreast Foothill Apartment Homes in Covina is seeking $2,821.23 from the estate of Alice Ortiz because after Mrs. Ortiz, along with her son, and other members of her family, were murdered on Christmas Eve by a deranged Santa Claus, she had the nerve to stay dead and not pay her rent for January. According to the management company, this oversight by the late Mrs. Ortiz constituted "insufficient notice to vacate."

Tenant in Foreclosed Home? If You Live in Los Angeles, Stay Put!
In December (2008), the Los Angeles City Council enacted a new law to protect tenants in foreclosed properties. If your house/building was foreclosed upon after December 17, 2008, the landlord must show good cause to evict you. That means, the bank cannot just give you a 30 or 60 day notice to quit--it can only evict you for not paying rent, or for some other good reason (like, for example, you're operating a meth lab in the house). Note that this only applies to TENANTS in foreclosed homes--not the former owners.

So, if you are a renter and a broker comes to your home and tells you you "have to leave" and they will give you $2,000.00 for the keys, do not believe the broker. Many brokers in Los Angeles seem to be doing this, even though they know of the new law. The companies that these brokers work for may soon find themselves on the wrong end of a class action lawsuit if some smart tenant's rights attorney can find the time to sue them. In the meantime, DO NOT MOVE. Check with an attorney to make sure the eviction notice is legal before you start packing up.

Suicide is Not a Good Soloution to the Problem of Eviction.
There has been a lot of news lately about people killing themselves because of finances and/or because they are being evicted from their homes of many years. It is well established that eviction is a stress-inducing event, along with having financial difficulties [Holmes-Rahe Life Social Readjustment Rating Scale, 1967]. If you are thinking of killing yourself because of finances or eviciton, please call the Los Angeles County Suicide Hotline at (877) 7CRISIS [that's (877) 727-4747]. There are suicide hotlines throughout the state of California, too. Click here.

How Not to Run an Apartment Building.
On January 18, 2008, a Los Angeles jury socked a Burbank, CA landlord and property management company for $10.8 million dollars for hiring a felon and registered sex offender to be a maintenance man in the apartment building. Apparently, in 2004, the "Super" raped and killed one of the tenants of the building, and then stuffed her body into a car trunk and left the car in Chinatown. Then, in 2005, he was also convicted of sexual battery and burglary involving another tenant in the same building (the Scott Villa Courtyard Apartments). Had the management company done a proper background check, they would have found that the maintenance man had been convicted of sexual battery in 1996 and burglary in 1999. I'm all for giving second chances to convicted felons who have served their time, but maybe it's not such a good idea for a property management company to give sex offenders and burglars keys to everyone's apartments.