Santa Monica Stands Up for Renters, So Why Won't LA?

Santa Monica’s City Attorney recently won judgments against two landlords who failed to pay required temporary relocation fees to three displaced households.

In one case, a family of five was displaced when “unpermitted construction rendered their unit uninhabitable.” The other case concerns “two tenants whose units were deemed uninhabitable due to red-tagged heaters” (state law requires landlords to provide heat, and Santa Monica ordinance requires that the heaters be both permanently installed and maintained safely - portable space heaters won’t cut it here).

Compare and contrast that with Los Angeles.

One of the biggest landlords in the city was the subject of a class action suit in 2022. Some 19,000 (!) former tenants accused his company of illegally withholding security deposits. State law requires landlords to disclose all charges for cleaning and repairs, to provide copies of bills or invoices, and to return deposits (or whatever is left of them after cleaning and repair) within 21 calendar days. My former boss followed this law VERY strictly, and always sent a check right away.

In theory, Los Angeles has some of the strongest renter protections on the books. In practice, good luck getting the city to enforce them - or to do anything about blight.

Habitability issues can be brought to LADBS’ attention, but don’t forget the Lourine Court saga, in which the complex was brought out of REAP despite tenants reporting that repairs were NEVER performed. The whole point of REAP is to compel landlords to repair derelict properties, but in the case of Lourine Court, it failed miserably.

Even if your landlords have all been good, responsible people (and I’ve been lucky in this area myself), there are enough bad ones that the city passed TAHO, or the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, in 2021. When this article was published two months ago, a whopping 23,326 harassment complaints had been filed since 2021.

How many harassment complaints have resulted in charges? TWO. That’s IT.

It seems to me that Los Angeles is leaving a lot of money on the table by its routine failure to hold bad property owners accountable. Think of all the fines that aren’t being collected for mistreatment of tenants, for negligence, or for letting intruders damage and burn vacant buildings. Now think about how the city could invest that money back into things that benefit the community (infrastructure repair and more crosswalks would be a good start).

It also seems to me that the city would be cleaner (i.e. less fire ash and less illegal dumping) and safer (i.e. fewer preventable structure fires and fewer issues with squatters) with increased enforcement.

On that note, please read this article by Sam Quinones, who did a deeper dive on the preventable St. Andrews Place fire that displaced the Galicia family and killed three of their six dogs. The Galicias and their neighbors repeatedly asked for help that never, ever came. How many more times will this exact situation unfold before something is done?

Santa Monica does have its own issues, but it expects property owners to be responsible and it acts accordingly. LA could, and should, choose to follow Santa Monica’s lead.

Not all that long ago, a friend of mine wondered about whether Angelenos need to take the city to court to compel enforcement of existing laws. As heartbreaking as it is, I’m increasingly sure that the answer is “probably”.

And even then - even if Angelenos won a landmark court order in their favor - I’m still not sure the city would bother to do its job. (In the unlikely event that anyone from City Hall ever reads this, PLEASE prove me wrong.)