"The Ellis Act gives rental property owners in rent control jurisdictions the right to exit the rental housing market but also places reasonable conditions and restrictions on landlords in order to avoid unscrupulous use of the bill simply to evict tenants and re-rent one or more units for more money. These conditions include a requirement to notify tenants 120 days prior to withdrawing a unit (or 1 year for tenants who are disabled or over the age of 62. The Act also restricts when owners can re-enter the market, what price they can re-rent units at when they re-enter, and requires that all units in a building be removed simultaneously. As the housing crisis has driven up the market rate for rental units, some landlords have increasingly subverted the intent of the Ellis Act by withdrawing individual units from the rental market, then returning them in a piecemeal manner to avoid the Ellis Act’s restrictions and to evade rent control. In the Los Angeles area alone, over 20,000 rent-stabilized units have been removed from the rental market since 2001, with tens of thousands of tenants evicted in the process.
AB 1399 prohibits this conduct by establishing that there can only be one withdrawal date for a property and by clarifying that the date on which the accommodations are deemed to have been withdrawn from the rental market is the date on which the final tenancy among all tenants are terminated. AB 1399’s reforms mandate that wrongfully evicted tenants be offered the opportunity to re-rent their former unit."
For further details about the changes to the law, please click here.
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