Landlords v. Tenants: Has the Balance Tipped with SB567? And Will It Last?
By Aser G. Tolentino, Esq.
The fact that California is facing a housing crisis is hardly breaking news at this point, except that it keeps getting worse. Tenants who had to pay more and more for less and less through the tech bubble, great recession, and aftermath of COVID may have found ample reason to despair that the Golden State might in fact be governed by that alternate version of the golden rule, “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Reviewing complaints filed by Tenant Law Group yields many accounts of people living with mold, rats, roaches, and worse, only to have the primary communication from their landlord concern nothing but demands for more rent. Progress has been made though, not least of which are the new provisions of Civil Code Sections 1946.2 and 1947.12 enacted by Senate Bill 567 coming into effect on April 1, 2024. That might beg the question for some: has the balance of power tipped toward the underdog tenant? The answer is the only one you can ever only expect from an attorney: it depends.
Ever since the late 1970s, cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco have been trying to keep the worst impacts at bay with local ordinances, which have been adopted in a limited form state-wide for the past half decade. Likewise, beginning in the 1970s, California courts began widespread recognition of tenants’ right to live in safe and healthy dwellings for which they had paid. The problem is that those protections often imposed a risk or a cost to the tenant. If you wanted to protest your landlord’s not properly dealing with mold by withholding rent, you would have to be prepared to defend yourself in an eviction lawsuit, and if you lost you faced a judgment that would stay on your record for seven years. If you wanted to fight an unlawful rent increase, you might have to eventually move out and sue for damages that might not even cover the cost of moving after attorney fees and costs. All the while, landlords were still benefiting from laws like the Ellis Act that could force tenants out, often without significant penalty when they failed to follow through on their obligations under the law.
That is the important context, for the very qualified yes: in the sense that the law now accounts for some of these, for lack of a better word, loopholes, SB567 tips the balance in favor of tenants. However, this will all depend on how these new laws are used by plaintiffs coming into court, how they are responded to by landlords and perhaps most importantly, how they are interpreted by judges and applied by juries. Californians’ fate is very much in their hands in this sense.
As to whether this trend will last, it seems clear that Californians have decided that something needs to change. SB567 is not the only major tenant rights legislation taking effect this year, and another petition to overturn the Costa Hawkins Act is again on the ballot in November. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is probably not the beginning of the end of this fight, but maybe the end of the beginning. In the meantime, if you have questions about how SB567 might affect your tenancy, the attorneys at Tenant Law Group are just a phone call, live chat, or email away.
