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Letter: More than just dust

January 4, 2013 10:27 AM

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Editor:
I am a tenant of the La Terra Dulce Apartments, and I have to point out that there was no effort to get a balanced viewpoint from residents of the building for that article (“City attorney halts tenant harassment investigation,” Dec. 19), leaving us open to the snarky comments on your website as if the sum of the harassment in this building was construction noise bothering wannabe screenwriters or having to pick-up keys.
The construction the new owners are doing will make this very old building much more livable, and I think that is well worth the noise during the day. If I believed they were going to allow the long-term tenants to stay in our rent-controlled homes, I would be delighted.
My issue is harassment. They are changing all the locks on the building and refusing to give out keys that can be copied, as always has been the policy. Plus they are changing the door code on the front door and not giving it out to anyone. No key or door code for my boyfriend, housekeeper or petsitter, no way for them to enter my home when I am gone. They are essentially denying me the right to choose who and when my loved ones or employees may access my own home. Not even FedEx and UPS will be allowed to enter with a key code to deliver here. That is tenant harassment, blocking reasonable entrance to bonded delivery personnel in order to make life difficult.
Another example of harassment? A month ago they ripped out the water pipes to my master bedroom, which I rent to my roommate, in an obvious effort to drive my roommate out. They’ve ignored my many requests to replace them.
My biggest complaint, however, is that the new owners have told us, in the presence of representatives from the City Attorney’s Office and Rent Control, that they plan to enforce the old leases, which means to evict us because we signed leases, most of us many years ago, that the previous owner/managers told us would never be enforced. We were told we could, and were always allowed, to have pets even though the leases say no pets. These new owners can serve us with three-day “perform or quit” notices (which have been filed on people here already) to force us to give up our pets or be evicted.
The previous managers of the building rarely agreed to amend leases to add roommates; they did not care and neither did we. Only now we will each come home one day to a three-day notice to evict our roommates because they are not on the lease, and if they don’t leave the new owners can start eviction proceedings.
The new owners will not allow us to add our roommates to the lease even though they know that the former owner/ manager allowed them and knew them. Just as the new owners refuse to let us add our pets, even though almost everyone here has a pet and they know they are here with the full knowledge and permission of the former owners (oral and implied contracts).
Whomever forces them to take this to court will win and the new owners know it, but how many can afford thousands of dollars in legal fees? When faced with the horrible reality of losing their homes unless they can come up with the money for lawyers, they will take the settlement offered by the new owners to get out. They will have to. And then the new owners will more than double the rents and few will be able to afford to live here.
And we should all fear that.

Pamela Lane
Santa Monica

See this story as it appeared in the paper

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Brenda Barnes says:

March 11, 2013 at 10:55 AM

It also is absolutely not true that you have to have the prior landlord confirm you had rights in order to have them now. If everyone in the building had pets and the owners took rent while leases said they could not have pets, if it were me I’d say they waived their right to enforce the leases, under state law. Under rent control you have the rights tenants had on 4/10.78. Most landlords are too new to have any records of what those rights were, but in virtually every building there is a long=term tenant who knows, or at least someone who knows someone who knows. Here we have people who were here in 1986, which is only eight years after the base date, so unless a landlord could prove what we know of our own personal knowledge were our rights then had not been tenants’ rights on 4/10./78–in other words, were new rights in 1986 since the base date–tenants have those rights now.

Brenda Barnes says:

March 11, 2013 at 10:55 AM

If the facts are as the tenants states them in the letter, tenants of that building are absolutely being harassed and denied their rights under rent control. Hiring an expensive attorney is not by any means the only option to fight this. We have copies of papers filed in keeping Marc Luzzatto from evicting one of the VTP tenants–he lied to the Council when he said he had not tried to evict anyone, that all the tenants left voluntarily. This tenant is now in his 12th month without paying rent. That’s what a landlord brings on himself by wrongly trying to evict tenants. At market rents that is a considerable amount of money. The website address to get the papers to copy, if a tenant wants to, as this tenant is representing himself, is http://www.occupysmresources.weebly.com.

Brenda Barnes says:

March 11, 2013 at 10:55 AM

You should not assume, Jon, that just because your son was able to do something in the past, tenants are able to do it now. Can you imagine the City Council of Bob Myers’ City Attorney days deciding to throw out 109 homeowners so developers could make money, the way the current one is doing about Village Trailer Park? It’s the same change in the RCB. SMRR, the Council, and the RCB all decided that to stay in business–once there was vacancy decontrol and Ellising allowed by state law–they would be for “more” apartments rather than for “low-cost” apartments or ones where tenants actually get the rights they are entitled to under the Rent Control Charter Amendment.

Brenda Barnes says:

March 11, 2013 at 10:55 AM

The RCB used to represent tenants. I worked there as an attorney in 1980 and a department manager 1981-6, shortly after the law passed in 1979. There was no question the law was passed to protect tenants’ rights. How anyone could rerad it and not know that is beyond me. However, the current RCB is anything but a representative of tenants’ rights. I saw only the letter you link to. I do not know what snarky comments the tenant is referring to. However, I have hung up on RCB information coordinators this year more than once. The nonsense they are handing out there now is enough to make me ill. I know what the law is, and that ain’t it.

Jon Mann says:

January 5, 2013 at 1:06 PM

I thought the RCB represented people in rent control units for free? If you don’t qualify for legal aid, hire a private attorney if you can’t find one to take it on contingency, or you can charge a roomate up to $1000 a month and use that to hire an attorney. That’s what my son did for the spare bedroom in his rent control apartment. You might lose if the lease excludes pets and roommates; no matter what verbal agreement you had with the previous owner, unless you can get the original landlord to verify the oral agreement.

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