Barrington Apartment Plaza, Los Angeles, California. Photo from Flickr on August 1, 2009.
Mark Kreidler / Capital & Main
For Karen Hunt, the acquittal came too late.
Hunt knew something was wrong from the day she heard a knock on the door of her Barrington Plaza home in West Los Angeles in May 2023. The two men outside her apartment wouldn’t tell her who they were, even after serving her an eviction notice.
“Early in the morning, they just stood there knocking and knocking and saying, ‘We need to talk to you and give this to you in person,'” Hunt said. “I had heard rumors about what was going on. I finally opened the door, got the envelope and closed the door on them.”
According to Emmett’s lawyers, the notices are part of an effort by the building’s owner, Douglas Emmett Cos., to evict about 600 residents for their safety after two fires broke out in the building. Tenants quickly concluded that the evictions were a ploy to force out residents like Hunt, who live under rent control, and then renovate and rerent the apartments at significantly higher rents.
Some of the tenants sued, and earlier this month a Superior Court judge tentatively ruled in their favor, saying Emmett’s actions violated both state and local law. If the ruling goes ahead, those who refused to leave Barrington would be allowed to stay.
“This is a landmark decision, perhaps the biggest legal victory for tenants’ rights this state has ever seen,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Economic Survival Coalition, which fights for the rights of low- and moderate-income tenants in Los Angeles. “This decision could save housing for hundreds of people.”
Karen Hunt’s home is not one of them. After months of holding out, Hunt, now 69, finally decided to vacate her one-room garden apartment earlier this year, beat the eviction deadline and leave Barrington. She’s one of hundreds of tenants who now know what they previously suspected: They were evicted illegally.
“I was 13 when my parents moved to Barrington,” Hunt said, “I left for about a year and a half, then I came back, and I lived in the apartment I just left in for over 40 years.”
“I spent most of my life there. There was a sense of community in that building. That’s gone now.”
Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford III’s ruling is pending, but it is clear: Judge Ford found that Emmett Development did not meet the requirements for eviction under both the state Ellis Act and the local Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance.
These laws set out the conditions under which a landlord can evict a tenant, one of which is if the landlord gets out of the rental business altogether. Emmett’s lawyers argued that this requirement is met because the developer plans to take the Barrington property off the market for an extended period of time to install fire sprinklers after two building fires in 2013 and 2020.
Ford disagreed, saying in its ruling that the company “has always had a present and continuing intent to renovate the units for future use as rental housing.” Evidence presented in the civil trial included diagrams and PowerPoint presentations showing the company’s future plans.
Contacted immediately after the ruling and again on Monday, a spokesman for Douglas Emmett said the company does not comment on Barrington’s case.
“Their argument was that not collecting rent for three years means they’re out of business,” said Francis Campbell, one of the lawyers who represented the tenants in the lawsuit. “That’s like saying the moment you take your hands off the wheel, you’re not driving the car. It’s an artificial concept.”
But most of Barrington’s tenants didn’t wait for the courts to unfold. Of the 577 tenants who faced eviction, all but about 100 accepted relocation fees and moved. And the civil judgment didn’t get Barrington’s rent-controlled apartment tenants back; it only found that Emmett violated the rules when it evicted them. They’ll need a new lawsuit to seek relief.
“It looks like they were successful in their scam,” Campbell said. “It’s unfortunate for all of those who left. The reason they left is because they got eviction notices.”
The Barrington Plaza Tenants Association was formed and contacted Campbell’s company when the notices began going out in May 2023. “The moment we got the eviction notice, we knew something was wrong,” said Monique Gomez, who spearheaded the association and continues to organize. “We knew we were in the right, but even if you believe that, that doesn’t always happen when you go to court.”
That uncertainty has hurt the estimated 480 tenants who accepted relocation fees to move out of rent-controlled units, Gomez said. (Gomez stayed in his.) Many of the tenants are from outside the U.S. and may have been frightened by the idea of any interaction with the legal system, Gomez said.
“These tenants were getting emails saying, ‘You’re going to lose your relocation credit. It’s going to hurt your credit history,'” Gomez said. “A lot of these people were afraid it would affect their status in the country. Most of them were blue-collar workers, they were trying to make a living here, and they were being evicted from their homes.”
Campbell and Gross attended a meeting last week with many of the former tenants and a lawsuit may be filed seeking relief against Emmett Cos. But for people like Karen Hunt, the damage has already been done.
Hunt was paying $2,200 a month for a garden apartment and three storage units that housed many items related to his family’s history, including those left by his parents, who lived in Barrington for most of their adult lives.
She assumed the tenants would win their case, “but there was so much uncertainty,” Hunt added. Having battled breast cancer and survived a heart attack, she couldn’t bear the idea of waiting for a ruling and counting down the days until eviction.
Ms. Hunt has since moved with her adult daughter to a two-bedroom townhouse not far from Barrington, paying more than $4,000 a month in rent. “I feel lucky to be able to make it,” she says, “but I didn’t want to leave.”
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Mark Kreidler
Mark Kreidler is a California-based author and announcer and the author of three books, including Four Days to Glory.
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