Last week, corporate landlord Douglas Emmett Inc., announced plans to evict all tenants in its 25-story Barrington Plaza apartment complex in West Los Angeles. The building comprises 712 rent-stabilized units, 577 of which are occupied by residents. The company, which owns 18.3 million square feet of office space and 4,209 rental units in Los Angeles and Honolulu, has cited a city order to upgrade the building’s sprinkler system as the reason for these evictions, which came after a 2020 fire injured 13 and killed one resident.

The Los Angeles Housing Department’s decision to allow these evictions is unusual, and it sets a dangerous precedent as Los Angeles gears up to mandate extensive renovations to residential buildings as part of its Green New Deal decarbonization efforts.

Douglas Emmett is using the Ellis Act, which drives Californians into homelessness, as the justification for the mass eviction. Passed in 1985, this California state law was created to allow mom-and-pop landlords who are planning to “go out of business” to evict tenants from rent-controlled units to take them off the rental market. But the Ellis Act has been routinely used by corporate landlords to circumvent local eviction protections in order to oust low-income renters and transform their homes into boutique hotels and pseudo-condominiums. This has led to the removal of tens of thousands of rent-controlled units in Los Angeles, exacerbating the city’s affordable housing crisis and displacing working-class communities.

To continue reading the rest of the article, please click on the source link below:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-05-18/mass-evictions-barrington-plaza-renters-decarbonization-protections