Rehabilitating units is essential to preserving Long Beach’s aging housing stock, but advocates say no-fault evictions for remodels are leading to the gentrification of Long Beach.
Tenant rights groups have fought for years to strengthen housing security for some of Long Beach’s most vulnerable residents—renters. Now, they’ve set their focus on a provision in the Tenant Protection Act of 2019—one that allows landlords to issue no-fault eviction notices for the “substantial rehabilitation” of their unit.
“Substantial rehabilitation” is a provision in the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 that allows landlords to evict their tenants for upgrades meant to constitute quality-of-life improvements for dilapidated units.
But some landlords have leveraged the law to remove their tenants for full remodels. Under the Costa Hawkins Act, vacancies give landlords the opportunity to hike up rents to increase their earnings, all the while displacing longtime Long Beach residents.
On May 22, 2019, an apartment complex on Grand Avenue was sold to a new owner. Just months later, they would raise rents by nearly 30% and, in December, serve a flurry of eviction notices to longtime residents.
David Blake, an at-home caregiver for a 65-year-old woman with dementia, received one of those notices. His client had lived in the building for a decade. He saw homeless residents on the street and worried whether she would find the same fate.
“There’s nowhere else for these people to go. We have neighbors here, families with a newborn child. We don’t make a lot of money, that’s why we live in this place in the first place,” he said. “There’s very few affordable places in Long Beach.”
Just months later, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (TPA) would come into effect and retroactively lower her rent and nullify the eviction, preventing her from losing her apartment.
But the law that once saved her from displacement would rear its head again, just 13 days after Los Angeles County identified its first case of COVID-19.
On Feb. 10, 2020, Blake’s client received another eviction notice.
Her affordably-priced unit, and those of her remaining neighbors, were slated for “substantial rehabilitation,” a valid reason for a no-fault eviction under the TPA.
The building owners had not pulled permits to justify the eviction, as required by Long Beach’s local housing ordinance, but plenty of residents in the building left out of fear, “disappeared without a trace,” Blake said.
Blake, on the other hand, had no other option but to fight—for himself and for his client.
“I’m a caregiver for a lady that is not self-directed. She has dementia,” Blake said. “If I wasn’t here, and if I wasn’t fighting, I don’t know what she’d be in right now. But it wouldn’t be a good spot.”
The company that manages Blake’s apartment complex did not respond for comment.
An overview of valid reasons for substantial rehabilitation
The Tenant Protection Act of 2019 came with a sigh of relief for many tenants. The bill includes limits on rent hikes and outlines valid reasons for no-fault evictions, among other protections.
But for tenant advocates Norberto Lopez, Andrew Mandujano and Maria Lopez there is still much work to be done.
Norberto Lopez, Maria Lopez and Mandujano are members of Long Beach’s most prominent tenant rights organizations: Long Beach Residents Empowered (LiBRE) and the Long Beach Tenants Union.
Long before the pandemic began and eviction became a potential reality for hundreds of Long Beach residents, the three worked to close the “loophole” that has been used and, at times, abused, to displace tenants.
Substantial rehabilitation runs the gamut of quality-of-life improvements. A unit may have asbestos, have mold, need infrastructural improvements or require the removal of hazardous materials. Any kind of substantial modification—structural, electrical, plumbing or mechanical—that requires a permit falls under the provision.
When rehabilitation is needed, tenants must relocate so renovations can be completed. Any rehabilitation that takes at least 30 days falls under the provision.
The TPA requires landlords to provide direct payment of one month’s worth of rent or allow the tenant to remain in the unit for one month without payment under these circumstances. If they don’t provide this assistance, the eviction is void.
Since the TPA went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, tenant organizers have found that some landlords interpreted “substantial rehabilitation” as an opportunity—not to improve the living conditions of their units—but to evict their tenants and increase rents.
Cue a surge of illegal eviction notices. Painting exteriors of buildings, changing cabinets, installing new tiles, removing floorboards—all illegal reasons for eviction under the TPA.
In February 2020, advocates won an amendment to Long Beach’s local ordinance. Now, Long Beach landlords must attach building permits and plans to all eviction notices for substantial rehabilitation to prevent owners from using false pretenses to maneuver around the law.
But illegal evictions persist.
To alleviate these illegal evictions, some of which may cause landlords to be sued for both illegal eviction and tenant harassment, tenant organizers want to nip the issue in the bud.
Organizers are asking the City of Long Beach to establish a program to oversee the rehabilitation of rental properties and establish an extended eviction moratorium until such a program is in place.
Is one month’s worth of rent enough for low-income residents to relocate? Maybe, if they can find another affordable unit.
Most of the landlords that Norberto Lopez, Maria Lopez and Mandujano deal with are illegally evicting their tenants.
The residents they assist face alleged verbal abuse, illegal utility shut-offs, mold and vermin infestations. They’ve assisted nearly 120 residents in gathering documentation to fight their evictions in court.
The legally required one-month rental assistance may seem alluring to some. If a resident lives in a market-rate apartment, it’s fairly easy to find another unit to move into.
This isn’t true for very low and low-income residents in Long Beach, a city that faces what officials have deemed a “housing crisis.” There’s just not enough housing to keep up with demand.
“We were not going to find another place for this rent price. So what do we do? I honestly don’t know, what do we do in this situation? Where do we go? Where does she go? Where do I go?,” Blake said of the stresses of finding another apartment in Long Beach.
The State has moved to alleviate this crisis. Each year, California regions undergo a Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) to evaluate the demand for very-low, low and moderate-income housing.
Per the most recent RHNA analysis, which will be approved in October of this year, Long Beach is required to create an additional 26,440 units by 2029 to meet its housing obligations. Of these, 42% will be market-rate.
From 2014 to 2020, 665 units of very-low, low and moderate-income housing were created in Long Beach, according to data from the Development Services Department Planning Bureau.
More than three times as many market-rate units were created in the same period, 3,504 total. Still, the city faces a shortage.
“We're tired of losing our families to these notices. We're tired of losing people to these notices,” Norberto Lopez said.
One resident he worked with in District 2 was served with an eviction notice for substantial rehabilitation. She was offered “cash for keys”—a sum of money from the landlord in exchange for vacating the unit.
Now, she lives in Bakersfield with her four children. She couldn’t find an affordable apartment in Long Beach, an area she loved.
“There was no other option,” he said. “It was either she left or she had an eviction on her record, which would then not allow her to rent here or anywhere else [...] Tenants are put in these situations every day."
Landlords worry that, without the substantial rehabilitation provision, units will fall into disrepair
Fred Sutton represents the California Apartment Association (CAA) as senior vice president of public affairs for Los Angeles County. The CCA website states that the association is “the nation's largest statewide organization representing the rental housing industry.”
According to Sutton, the substantial rehabilitation provision is not a loophole at all.
“It was a design in AB1482 [TPA] to encourage the rehabilitation of aging housing stock,” he said. “Long Beach has incredibly old housing stock, some of which was built back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and these buildings were not built to last like the pyramids.”
If landlords can’t remove their tenants to update their units to meet building codes, he said, Long Beach’s housing stock will “continue to be dilapidated and become nonfunctional.”
Organizers agree that landlords should be able to update their units. But, unlike Sutton, they believe that eviction isn’t a necessary component of that process. Instead, they’re calling for more oversight of the permitting process to stop illegal evictions in their tracks.
"[Substantial rehabilitation] was a design in [the Tenant Protection Act] to encourage the rehabilitation of aging housing stock. Long Beach has incredibly old housing stock, some of which was built back in the '30s and '40s, and these buildings were not built to last like the pyramids."
—Fred Sutton, representative for the California Apartment Association
Sutton said that landlords should have the right to evict tenants if their units need rehabilitation.
“Housing providers are in the business of providing housing,” he said. “If your car's breaking down, what do you do? You go and get it fixed. If your house is having issues, you need to go and get it fixed.”
In a separate interview, Maria Lopez posed the question: Why do tenants have to suffer for the dilapidation of housing stock?
If landlords need to do construction on their units, housing advocates like Lopez ask that landlords be required to pay for relocation and that tenants be allowed to return to their unit after the repairs for the same monthly rent.
“Why would substantial remodel be needed in the first place? If landlords have done their due diligence to upkeep their buildings up to code, right?” Maria Lopez said, citing state habitability laws. “If you got to a point that you need substantial remodel, what haven’t you followed? And so at that point, that's not the tenant’s fault.”
Not all landlords have an opportunity to rehabilitate their units. They may not have had an opportunity to substantially remodel old piping or electrical, especially in cases where tenants remain in a unit for 20 to 30 years.
Maria Lopez contends that landlords should still be responsible for relocation.
“They’re the ones looking to make an investment, make a profit,” she said. “And then have those tenants come back to live in dignified housing.”
Why don't tenants just sue their landlords for illegal eviction?
When asked about these illegal evictions, Sutton responded frankly.
“It's illegal to illegally evict somebody. It's illegal to threaten or harass anybody. And we certainly condemn any type of harassment,” he said. “There should, there will be repercussions for that, and that housing provider will be held accountable.”
Maria Lopez said the issue isn’t so cut and dry.
Eviction hearings take place in civil court and residents only receive right-to-counsel in criminal hearings. Tenants have to front the cost if they want to sue their landlords.
In many cases, tenants simply can’t afford it.
In Long Beach, over 60% of residents are renters. Of these, over half are rent-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent.
One-quarter of jobs in the city are low-wage jobs, but only about one in 10 rental housing units are affordable to low-wage workers, an Equitable Growth Profile of Long Beach states.
If tenants choose to take their landlords to court, they have to pay for their lawyers on their own dime or rely on free services like those offered by the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.
In addition to legal costs, Maria Lopez also highlighted an unequal power dynamic that dissuades tenants from seeking justice in the first place.
“To just sue your landlord, that’s a very privileged statement,” she said. “Let's talk about the fear that's already in our communities, about deportations, about police brutality. These things carry throughout these structures of power, right? And one of those is the courts.”
She recently took a course on court interpretation and was shocked that, on one of her first days, a resident was left without a translator because they were being used in another courtroom.
According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, 1 in 40 tenants who appear in court without legal representation lose their cases. The same dataset suggests that 1 in 17 renter households faced evictions between 2000 and 2016.
"To just sue your landlord, that's a very privileged statement. Let's talk about the fear that's already in our communities, about deportations, about police brutality. These things carry throughout these structures of power, right? And one of those is the courts."
—Maria Lopez, organizer with Long Beach Tenants Union
So landlords and advocates are faced at a crossroads. Advocates believe tenants are entitled to rental assistance and a guaranteed return to their pre-rehabilitation rental price. Sutton, who represents apartment owners, said relocation is too costly, especially when compounded with the price of rehabilitation.
“If you’re going to be doing the electrical and plumbing, you’re going to have to just redo everything and bring it up to today’s standards and codes, basically bring it up to basically a brand new property,” Sutton said of upgrades beyond those that fall under the substantial rehabilitation provision.
This kind of construction can take weeks, if not months, to complete, making them a valid reason for no-fault eviction under the TPA.
“It's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rehabilitate this property,” Sutton said. “On top of it, permanently housing individuals in hotels and things of that nature... I mean, you're adding thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of that project and any future resident that's going to be going there.”
Requiring landlords to temporarily relocate their tenants is, according to Sutton, “a surefire way to make Long Beach less affordable and more expensive for those that want to live here.”
The million, or rather hundred-thousand-dollar question, is: Should rehabilitation and relocation be assumed as an essential cost of owning a rental unit?
Both groups insist that they don’t want illegal evictions to take place, but advocates are increasingly concerned with the displacement that comes along with evictions—especially no-fault evictions under the substantial remodel provision.
Neither can agree with who should foot the bill to relocate tenants beyond the required one month of rental assistance. Greater oversight of the permitting process may stop illegal evictions in their tracks, but no program exists in Long Beach.
If the Long Beach City Council wants to create an oversight body for substantial rehabilitation permits, time is running out. California’s statewide eviction moratorium will expire on June 30.
For residents facing illegal evictions
“The clear message for tenants who receive an eviction notice: Reach out for help,” Norberto Lopez said. “Do not vacate your unit. You’re not alone in this. Maybe a few years ago, you were. There’s a movement that’s been brewing for a couple years now. People are fighting back, fighting for more tenant protections. We need you to join the movement.”
He continued: “You’re not alone anymore. There are a lot of people behind you. There are more advocates coming and the more educated you are on your rights, the more prepared you are to fight back.”
If you are facing an illegal eviction, you can contact the Long Beach Tenants Union at lbtenantsunion@gmail.com or Long Beach Residents Empowered at contact.lbre@gmail.com.
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