The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to prohibit landlords from evicting tenants for allowing people or pets displaced by last month’s fires to live them.
In a 14 to 0 vote, councilmembers granted preliminary approval to such an ordinance, which supporters say is needed because some residential leases ban unauthorized people or pets.
The new rules, which are expected to come back to council for a final vote next week, would last for one year and apply only if the additional occupants and pets were displaced by the Palisades, Eaton or other January fires.
Tenants will have to notify their landlord that they brought in occupants or pets uprooted by the fires and provide a variety of information, including the address where the additional occupants formerly resided.
The protections would apply to all properties in the city.
In addition, if a building falls under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance, landlords won’t be able to impose a special rent increase that’s typically allowed when additional people move in, if the new occupants are fire refugees.
“During this emergency acts of kindness and compassion should not be punished,” Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the hard hit Pacific Palisades neighborhood, told her colleagues before the vote. “Anyone who has opened up their home to provide shelter, peace and security should not have to worry.”
The council’s action Tuesday comes amid a larger debate on what sort of tenant protections to offer in the wake of the January fires that destroyed or seriously damaged more than 12,000 homes in the county.
After the fires broke out January 7, there were widespread reports of illegal price gouging, but it’s unclear just how more competitive the region’s rental market as a whole has become.
Housing and disaster recovery experts have said they expect rent to increase to some extent, because thousands of homes were destroyed in an already tight market.
Most homes lost appear to be single family houses and because of that some experts said they expect rent to rise most in larger units adjacent to burn areas, with upward pressure on costs becoming more muted as units become smaller and farther away from the disaster zone.
Last week, the council declined to approve a proposal that would have paused rent increases on many apartments citywide for a year and also prohibited several types of evictions, including non-payment of rent, if tenants were impacted economically or medically by the fires.
In a heated debate, some council members, including Park, criticized the rules as too sweeping. The proposal was sent to the council’s housing and homelessness committee where it’s scheduled to be heard Wednesday.
