LA's Patchwork Of Renter Protections Has Landlords, Tenants Both Unhappy

The effects of pandemic-era regulations aimed at helping Los Angeles tenants not only hang over the market but are coming to a head, tenant advocates and multifamily experts say.

Renters who were given a reprieve from paying rent due to the pandemic are now required to begin paying that back rent. There are six months left of a rent freeze on rent-stabilized units — the majority of units in the city — put in place during the pandemic. Both tenants and landlords say these factors are putting additional pressure on them after more than three years of challenges.

For those on the ownership side, the cumulative effect of new regulations enacted with the goal of keeping tenants housed has been powerful, Kidder Mathews Senior Associate David Evans said. 

“Los Angeles is really becoming a toxic and challenging space to navigate, unfortunately, and it's a disadvantage to the property owners who have often owned these buildings for years and who in many cases are renting [their units at] below market-rate rents,” Evans said. 

Evans, who works mostly in the South Los Angeles area, said the increase in regulations since the start of the pandemic has, counterintuitively, created more difficulties for tenants because it has pushed landlords and property management companies to be “more stringent” about who they rent to, making it harder for people with less-than-stellar credit or gaps in employment histories to find housing.

Knowing that it would be harder to evict these tenants if necessary, owners and property managers are choosing not to rent to them, Evans said, and at a time when the metro area’s vacancy is about 4.7%, that means the already challenging task of finding an apartment is likely getting tougher for many tenants.

Tenant advocates agree that some of these government actions intended to help tenants are creating pressure for them now. 

Strategic Actions for a Just Economy community organizer Mateo Gil said the rent repayment deadlines are the main accelerant behind a rise in tenant harassment he’s seen through his work with the organization’s tenant protections team.

Back rent accrued between the onset of the pandemic and February 2023 has two deadlines by which tenants much repay what's owed — the one that passed earlier this month and the next in February 2024. But Gil said some landlords want tenants to pay off all their rent debt now.

Gil said that in some cases, owners are using unpaid rent as a reason not to complete repairs.

In these instances, tenants don’t or can’t make a full repayment — Gil said some tenants he’s worked with owe as much as $30K — are facing pressure or harassment. 

Since the earliest months of the pandemic, many tenant and anti-eviction advocates have warned that in a city where many residents spend more than the recommended 30% of their income on rent, anything short of a government-funded rent forgiveness program would simply delay the date at which many renters, faced with insurmountable amounts of back rent to repay, would inevitably be forced to move out.

City Controller Kenneth Mejia tweeted earlier this month that between February and July of this year, landlords alerted the city that they were pursuing evictions of nearly 40,000 tenants. Ninety-six percent of those evictions were for nonpayment of rent, even before the due date for rent repayment passed. That figure was almost certainly an undercount, as it includes paperwork filed with the city’s housing department and not documents filed in the courts, the city controller noted.

In addition to tenant-related issues, apartment owners are also facing challenges when they hope to sell, Evans said, noting the downward pressure on pricing that Measure ULA and macroeconomic factors has had.

Landlords of rent-stabilized units have additional hurdles. These units are regulated in a number of ways, including one that affects how much rents can be increased annually. The increase can only be between 3% and 8%, depending on inflation, and the increase has to be approved by the city. Evans said he’s concerned that LA might not allow the maximum increase allowed. He pointed to Beverly Hills, which voted earlier this year to allow a rent increase of 3.2% to 5% for its rent-stabilized tenants. 

“That’s just a slap in the face to multifamily owners after [almost] four years of no rent increases,” Evans said.