Trouble on Lincoln Boulevard
200 eviction notices
handed out at Lincoln
Place
By Sheila
Bernard
About 200 households at Lincoln
Place Apartments in Venice have received Ellis Act eviction notices from
landlord AIMCO, the largest owner of rental housing in the United States, second
only to the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The Ellis Act
is a state law which allows a landlord to evict tenants in order to go out of
the rental business.
The landlord does not know what it wants to
do with the property, but figures it can get more for the land or do more with
the land if all the tenants are gone. The landlord has aggressively approached
the residents over the past six months, offering an “enhanced relocation
package” containing additional money and benefits over what is required by
law. Some tenants have accepted the package, and about 200 haven’t.
The reasons for tenants to stay and refuse
the package are many. Some are seniors or others on fixed or low incomes for
whom the loss of affordable housing and the move away from familiar surroundings
would represent a significant decrease in quality of life.
Others have children who are doing
well in their neighborhood schools among familiar friends and neighbors. Part of
the support system for these seniors and families consists of other tenants,
long time residents who don’t want to be uprooted from their community or
from the sturdy and well-designed apartments, which have been found eligible for
the National Register of Historic Places by the California Historic Resources
Commission. In May, the Commission will decide whether to also include Lincoln
Place in the California Register.
In
response to the threat of redevelopment, tenants have found several developers
who made offers to the landlord to buy the property at a win-win price which
would provide the landlord with significant profit while allowing the buyer to
preserve all remaining tenancies, preserve all the historic buildings, and allow
some existing tenants to purchase their units. But the landlord has not accepted
any of the offers that have been made to
date.
There are two appellate court
cases pending on the property. In the first, LPTA v City of LA, the tenants
allege that the City improperly granted the owner of Lincoln Place a subdivision
to demolish and redevelop the property based on a nine-year-old EIR that did not
consider that the property had come of age and been declared historic.
In the second case, 20th Century
Architecture Alliance v City of LA, four preservation organizations including
the LA Conservancy allege that the City improperly allowed the demolition of
seven of Lincoln Place’s original 52 buildings in violation of its own ban
on the demolition of historic properties absent a finding that preservation was
infeasible. Both appellate cases will be heard on July 9.
If either the tenants or the
preservationists prevail, the landlord will not be able to demolish the
buildings without further environmental review and possible sanctions. In spite
of that, the landlord issued the Ellis Act notices on March 18, so that those
tenants who are neither seniors nor disabled will have to be out by July 18,
nine days after the appellate cases are
heard.
The tenants are optimistic about
their prospects of prevailing in their appellate case. Their optimism is partly
based on the fact that the appellate court issued a writ of supersedeas
(restraining order) against the landlord to prevent any more damage to the
buildings pending the hearings on July 9.
However, despite our optimism
concerning the appellate cases, remaining in our homes is much more tenuous. The
Ellis Act has both tenants and lawyers intimidated. Landlords seem to have
prevailed in most Ellis Act cases, and although the tenants intend to pursue
every legal and political avenue open to them, the prognosis is less than
encouraging.
If the tenants are
evicted, hundreds more affordable units are lost to the west side of Los
Angeles, already so jobs rich and so housing poor that the freeway is jammed to
crawling going into the Westside in the morning and the same going out of the
Westside every day. Parking is an increasing problem. Yet, development goes on
unabated, and smart growth is a more and more distant dream for tenants and
homeowners alike. The Ellis Act states that it is not intended to interfere with
cities’ planning and zoning prerogatives, but it does exactly that, and
has not so far been challenged on that
basis.
Besides the planning
considerations, there is the fact that a tenant in Santa Monica committed
suicide as a direct result of an Ellis Act eviction, as reported in the Santa
Monica Mirror. Many tenants at Lincoln Place are at risk of homelessness as they
try to navigate an enormously inflated housing market that increases by 3
percent per year even in occupied units, faster than seniors’ increases in
Social Security.
The Ellis Act would
appear to give landlords the “absolute right to remove rental units from
the market.” Yet there are countervailing rights that also have so far not
been raised to challenge the Ellis Act.
For
example, the City routinely displaces homeowners and other property owners to
make room for schools, roads, or baseball stadiums.
The City should tell the landlord at
Lincoln Place, “If you are interested in removing these units from the
rental market, you may offer them for a fair market value based on their present
use to a developer who will use them for the public purpose of preserving the
historic buildings and preserving what is left of the jobs/housing balance on
the Westside.” This would be a type of condemnation, but without the City
being required to purchase the units. The right of government to take property
for “just compensation” is stated in the Constitution, so a state
law should not be able to trump
it.
There is also the fact that
tenants, who have raised a credible defense of their neighborhood, are now being
threatened with the deprivation of our day in court. How can we continue to
prosecute a case while we are scrambling to keep a roof over our heads? At the
very least, the court or the City should step in and put the Ellis evictions on
hold, so that the clock doesn’t start ticking until we have had our day in
court. How else are renters, who comprise 65 percent of the population of Los
Angeles, to believe that we have equal protection to property owners under the
law?
The larger question relative to
the rights of tenants will be solved as our society moves further along the
continuum of rights for everyone. First our country granted voting rights to
black men. Then women got the vote. Then people with disabilities won the right
to equal access.
One of the final
frontiers is equal rights for people who do not own property. Our society is
actually of a mind to go one step further: we purport to believe in an
“ownership society.” If we really mean it, then we should provide
opportunities for tenants to own the units they live in, rather than allowing
giant corporations to buy up entire stable rental neighborhoods and destroy them
rather than working out a win-win situation which will bring us closer to an
ownership society wherein all of us have a stake.
Posted: Fri - April 1, 2005 at 08:30 PM