Renter’s Rights

Nithya promoting the historic right-to-counsel program in the city

This spring, working hand in hand with tenants rights organizations, my staff and I developed, fought for, and secured the most sweeping expansion of renter protections for Angelenos in forty years.

Here’s some of what we’ve done:

• Passed universal just cause protections so that more than 400,000 additional households in LA cannot be evicted without reason. Los Angeles is the largest city in America to pass these protections!

• Passed a rent debt threshold for eviction, so that tenants cannot be evicted if they owe less than one month’s fair market rent for their unit.

• Mandated relocation assistance for tenants who are forced to move because of an excessive rent hike to discourage rent gouging.

• Required landlords to report all eviction filings to the City of Los Angeles – the first time we have had access to this information. Thanks to this new data, the city is now able to proactively offer resources to people who are facing the most severe housing insecurity.

• Strengthened LA’s new Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance and helped secure new funding to help the ordinance be better enforced.

• Knocked on doors and sent texts to thousands of renters in the district to inform them of available emergency financial assistance.

• Helped hundreds of Council District 4 renters facing rent hikes, evictions, or habitability issues in their homes through the work of caseworkers on our staff specially trained on renter issues.

According to experts, the package of tenant protections that passed under our office’s leadership helped ensure that the end of COVID related tenant protections did not become an “evictions tsunami” as many had feared.

However, LA still has a long way to go to become a place where people of all incomes can feel stable in their communities. Last year I was appointed the Chair of the Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. In this role, creating a sustainable rental ecosystem in Los Angeles is a huge part of my daily work, and I see so much opportunity to improve LA’s policymaking in the years ahead.

If I’m elected to a second term, here’s what I believe we can accomplish together:

• Give renters facing eviction a right to a lawyer in eviction court: Currently, renters facing eviction don’t have a right to an attorney, which means they often go unrepresented in eviction court. Right to Counsel would change that, offering renters facing eviction legal support if needed. When this policy was passed in New York, 84% of tenants represented by Right to Counsel lawyers were able to remain in their homes.

  We’ve already been moving the Right to Counsel forward through the legislative process, and are pushing to have it fully implemented in 2024.

• Ensure that protecting renters and preventing homelessness becomes part of the core mission of the City and its Housing Department. Making bureaucracies work better may not generate headlines, but it is an essential change that is needed for renters in LA. This work has already started: for the first time in decades, thanks to the work of our office, the Housing Department is sending out proactive notifications to every tenant in the city about their rights and resources, as well as every time a tenant receives an eviction notice. Ensuring that the Housing Department is adequately staffed to respond to queries from tenants and landlords in a timely fashion and that inspectors are able to visit sites is an essential part of keeping tenants safely housed.

  Other homelessness prevention work is currently spread out across departments in the City of Los Angeles, including the Housing Department and the Community Investment in Families Department, as well as at the County. We are now working on bringing the City’s work under one roof, holding departments accountable for outcomes, and developing better cooperation with the County.

• Provide tenants the opportunity to purchase their buildings when they are up for sale: One of the conditions that most often leads to renter displacement is the sale of a building. Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA/COPA) programs provide renters or qualified organizations advance notice when property owners intend to sell their building, offering them the right of first refusal to purchase the building and maintain their housing.

  Washington DC’s TOPA ordinance has helped preserve more than 3,500 affordable units since 2002. San Francisco implemented a COPA ordinance in 2019, and similar efforts are in the works in cities throughout California.

• Provide tenants transparency on utility costs. Landlords charge tenants directly for utility costs in many buildings. However, many buildings do not have individual meters available for units and utilize third party billing services that calculate bills for individual units based on a formula. This means that tenants have no pathway to disputing problematic bills, and sometimes makes it impossible for low-income renters to take advantage of programs to reduce their utility costs. Creating greater transparency on how bills are calculated and offering pathways to dispute bills can make things easier for tenants already facing sky-high rents. I’ve passed legislation to study new ways to build this transparency, and hope to implement concrete policies in a second term.

• Create a Public Eviction Filing Dashboard: For decades, Los Angeles’s rental market has operated mostly in the dark, with landlords required to provide very little data on rental increases or eviction filings. Fortunately, as part of our expansion of renter protections in 2023, landlords are now obligated to share de-identified eviction filings with the Los Angeles Housing Department – creating opportunities to intervene against illegal evictions and support vulnerable renters more effectively.

  A public Eviction Filing Dashboard (with individual information obscured of course) would help us build more effective policy to increase housing stability and take preventative measures to keep people from falling into homelessness. We’ve already begun the process to build this dashboard, and are working to see the process through in the next year.

Historically, the only thing that has led to increased housing affordability in Los Angeles is a major economic downturn. We can’t keep telling renters to hope for a recession if they want to stay housed.

With proactive policy, we can build a more sustainable housing ecosystem that reduces rent burdens and increases housing stability while keeping Los Angeles a thriving, desirable city where people want to spend their lives and careers. Protecting renters as we build many more units of housing in LA, especially deeply affordable housing, is one of the most urgent projects in Los Angeles right now.

I hope you’ll join us in that work.