(Added by Ord. No. 187,109, Eff. 8/6/21.)
The City of Los Angeles has an extreme shortage of affordable rental housing.
Housing advocates report that some unscrupulous landlords have been constructively evicting long-term tenants by engaging in harassing conduct in order to coerce vacancies, and thereby charge higher market rate rents.
In 2018, the Housing and Community Investment Department investigated approximately 10,000 tenant complaints of harassment in rent stabilized units concerning illegal rent increases, illegal evictions, failure to post required notifications, non-registration of rental units, illegal tenant buy-out agreements, and denial of relocation assistance.
Other harassing conduct used by residential landlords to cause unlawful evictions include reducing housing services, issuing eviction notices based upon false grounds, and refusing to complete repairs required by law. Habitability and other tenant complaints are often not raised with landlords nor with City inspectors for fear of retaliation.
Tenants living in rental units are especially vulnerable to landlord harassment due to the shortage of other available affordable rental housing and lack of accessible remedies.
Harassment of tenants is severely impacting the City’s most marginalized community members who deserve rental housing stability and security. Now more than ever, the City needs to adopt civil and criminal remedies to address these unlawful harassment practices to help tenants achieve meaningful remedies to deter this bad conduct and to make tenants harmed by such conduct whole.