Los Angeles hit pause on legislation that could revive pandemic-era emergency tenant protections in the wake of this month’s wildfires, but City Council members stopped short of striking it down Wednesday.
Tenants surrounded Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez on the steps of City Hall Wednesday morning urging the council to vote “yes” on the motion Hernandez introduced with Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez Jan. 14. It calls for a year-long rent freeze on all units across the city and a moratorium on evictions for non-payment in cases where tenants can prove the fires set them back financially.
Landlords, for their part, are incensed, and many showed up to say so during four hours of public comment.
The motion was amended during the proceedings to remove the rent-freeze clause before the council voted 10-3 to send the legislation back to the drawing board. The move allows for a revised version to return to the council’s agenda in the future.
The idea to resurrect protections enacted during the city’s 2020 lockdown comes amid widespread illegal price-gauging in the rental market that has embittered Angelenos as thousands look for long-term refuge from fire-ravaged neighborhoods.
But resuming and expanding the city’s former rent-freeze won’t help, landlords argue.
“I wish every City Councilor would take Econ 101,” said Palos Verdes Investments’ Jerry Marcil. “They always go in the wrong direction. It really messes up the business.”
Marcil owns about 4,500 units in Southern California, but he’s not snapping up any more in Los Angeles.
“Certain cities, like L.A. and unincorporated areas of the county, need to clean up their act,” Marcil said. “You have to find cities that are not trying to kill their own housing market.”
Marcil — a major Republican donor in the county and head of the local chapter of conservative political action committee New Majority — said as much in an email to the council urging members to reject Hernandez and Soto-Martínez’s motion.
“I do not invest anymore in L.A. City. It is headed for a dark future,” Marcil wrote.
Actually, one big problem is that a blanket rent freeze would be “patently illegal,” Councilmember Bob Blumenfield argued in Wednesday’s debate before moving to return the motion to committee.
It’s unclear how the council would be authorized to freeze rents across the city, particularly in unregulated properties.
“There was some confusion around that,” a spokesperson for Soto-Martínez said. “The language would instruct the city attorney to come back with an ordinance to freeze rents to the extent allowable by law.”
A spokesperson for Hernandez did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But that component was struck from the motion by the time Wednesday’s debate got underway.
“This is a very narrowly tailored policy seeking to help the people who have had economic hardship or lost their jobs due to the fires — that’s it,” Soto-Martínez said in hopes of regaining support.
Still, council members questioned the goals of the amended motion.
Some 992 multifamily units were damaged or destroyed in the Palisades fire, 76 percent of which were subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, according to the city’s latest tally. But the financial toll on displaced households is harder to measure, since housing officials don’t actually know their whereabouts, according to Anna Ortega, the city’s rent stabilization director.
“The people economically impacted could live anywhere in the city,” Ortega said in testimony during Wednesday’s council meeting.
The eviction protections would potentially apply to all of them and more — so long as they “attest to having experienced economic or medical hardship related to the January 2025 fires,” according to the motion.
Landlords who gave public comment said the proposals would “break their backs” and even trigger PTSD from the city’s pandemic housing policies.
“The policies during COVID had consequences that harmed developers,” testified Mark Landeros, senior revenue manager at Geoffrey Palmer’s GHP Management. “We’re not asking for special treatment. We’re asking for fairness, accountability and recognition that housing providers are vital partners in addressing the city’s challenges.”
In fact, GHP sued Los Angeles for violating the Fifth Amendment’s “takings” clause when the city previously enacted an eviction moratorium during the pandemic. It was one of numerous cases that cropped up at the time challenging moratoria in other cities around the country.
A federal judge tossed GHP’s case in 2022, but Palmer isn’t throwing in the towel just yet. The company took its case to the U.S. Supreme Court in October. The court must now decide whether to take it up.