🏡💚 A tenant-climate alliance wins in LA

November 15, 2024

Amidst the commotion in the lead up to the election, you may have missed a bit of good news: on October 29th, Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to scrap a provision that previously allowed landlords to evict tenants when undertaking a “substantial remodel” (sometimes called “renovictions”). Going forward, landlords will be required to temporarily relocate tenants and let them return after renovations are complete.

This is a big win for tenant rights advocates, but many other climate and environmental justice groups are also celebrating this as a victory. To understand why, and why this provision exists in the first place, we have to go back to a previous tenant victory: the Tenant Protection Act.

The Tenant Protection Act (AB 1482) was passed in 2019, and was a monumental step forward in providing statewide tenant protections. Among other things, the TPA placed rent caps and required “just cause” for eviction on most (but not all) residential rental units in California. This was a huge achievement, and was rightly celebrated by housing justice and tenant rights advocates across the state. But it was also a hard and fraught negotiation, which inevitably created loopholes that give landlords wiggle room to skirt around these requirements.

One of these loopholes was to allow the “substantial remodel” of a rental unit to be considered a “just cause” for eviction. Landlords quickly realized they could use this as a way to evict tenants, and stories soon abounded of vague remodeling plans being used to justify eviction notices.

In fact, landlords aren’t even discrete about this as a tactic. In a recent webinar titled “Renovate To Beat Rent Control,” a Los Angeles-based landlord advocate urged landlords to “use the wonderful reason that is authorized by statewide rent control, and that is to renovate the unit.” In an earlier May webinar, when a Burbank landlord said he had an elderly and disabled tenant paying rent well below market rate, the webinar host told him, “Your medicine is a renovation eviction.” 

Tenant advocates quickly realized there were significant shortcomings in the Tenant Protection Act, and they set out to try to fix them with an ambitious bill in 2023. The result was SB 567. Immediately, SB 567 hit major obstacles in the legislature and had to be heavily amended to survive. While it eventually passed and provided some important improvements on the TPA, the “substantial remodel” provision largely remains intact.

That’s part of the story of why the vote in Los Angeles is such a big deal. The other big part of this story is the coalition that came together to win it.

Advocates and residents at the LA City Council meeting, calling for an urgency clause in closing the renoviction loophole. Source: SAJE’s twitter

Tenant advocates have been thinking about how to close this loophole since the TPA passed in 2019. But in Los Angeles, an alliance of tenant, housing, and community groups joined with climate and environmental justice organizations to add new urgency to these protections. In addition to protecting vulnerable tenants, this alliance argued that these protections were necessary to allow for an equitable clean energy transition, particularly in getting fossil fuels out of our homes.

To get off fossil fuels and achieve our climate goals, we know we will need to decarbonize every sector. This includes buildings, commercial and residential. A growing patchwork of federal, state, and local policies and programs are aimed at decarbonizing our homes. This includes incentive programs, like rebates and direct-install, as well as things like building codes and appliance standards. Eventually, this will mean mandated standards that require homes to be carbon-free.

While this has the potential to provide huge benefits (home upgrades, improved indoor air quality, etc), many have raised the alarm that this could exacerbate the housing crisis through rent increases and evictions. By requiring decarbonizing renovations to meet our climate goals, we might inadvertently cause a renoviction wave that leads to displacement and gentrification, further pushing renters out of their communities or onto the streets.

That renoviction wave would be made possible by things like the “substantial remodel” loophole. That’s why climate and environmental justice groups were a big part of the coalition pushing for the vote in Los Angeles last week, with groups like the LA Tenants Union and SAJE helping to organize tenants and bring groups together.  

SAJE has been a local, statewide, and national leader on this issue by researching, advocating, and organizing around tenant protections in the context of building decarbonization. Their Decarbonizing California Equitably report details the conceptual basis for the need to pair tenant protections with our decarb efforts. The win in LA shows the organizing potential for this, and the way this new narrative can help cut through a politically obstinate issue.

Of course, the “substantial remodel” loophole still exists statewide in the Tenant Protection Act, so there remains much more work to be done. But the unanimous LA City Council vote may foreshadow more victories to come if housing and climate groups come together. At the very least, it shows us a blueprint of how to get there.

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I know there are a lot of people are still processing (and grieving) the results of the election, and there are a lot of other places to get your post-election analysis and hot takes. Whatever you might make of the results, what we do next feels pretty straightforward to me: we protect each other, and we organize.

Our allies and partner organizations have launched We Are California, with an open letter to the movement in the wake of the election. They are organizing community gatherings across the state this Saturday, November 16th (find info on your closest event on their website here).

If you’re in the Bay Area, I’ll see you at the First Congregation Church in Oakland.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• A lot of good coverage on the renoviction vote and background, but just to name a few:

  • Apartment remodeling can lead to LA renters losing their homes. The City Council just voted to stop these ‘renovictions’ (LAist)

  • For One Group of Tenants, ‘Renoviction’ Win Caps a Long Fight (Knock LA)

  • Out With the Old: The Loophole California Landlords Use to Get Around Rent Control (Capital and Main)

• Palm Springs strikes tentative $27M deal on landmark reparations settlement (POLITICO)

• Mexico Goes All In on Housing: 1 Million New Homes, Zero-Interest Mortgages (Newsweek) — I will hopefully write about this soon!

• Can We Resist Displacement From Transit-Oriented Development? (ShelterForce)

• Roughly 4 in 5 U.S. Residents Believe There Should Be Caps on Rent Hikes: Survey (Redfin)

Feel free to reply any time! I always enjoy hearing from people and getting any feedback/questions/additional thoughts.

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