The Recorder - January 25, 2006
Law, Precedent Argued in Renter Case
By Pam Smith
California legislators should be able to undo a court's interpretation of a state law without having to name names, the San Francisco city attorney's office argues.
The city was in the First District Court of Appeal on Tuesday to defend a law requiring landlords who want to get out of the rental business to pay tenants they're evicting.
San Francisco argues that changes to the state's Ellis Act — which protects owners' rights to quit the rental market — render moot a 1992 court decision interpreting the act. But last year a superior court judge concluded that lawmakers would have used "clear language" if they had wanted to disavow a specific ruling.
In Pieri v. San Francisco, A110571, property owners sued the city over a local law that requires them to pay thousands of relocation dollars to each tenant they kick out. Last year, San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren ruled that the ordinance ran afoul of the Ellis Act, citing precedent that the city argues no longer applies after the relevant section of the act was amended.
But that interplay between case law and statutory amendments, though it took up a fair amount of ink in Warren's ruling and the appellate briefs, didn't get much attention Tuesday during oral arguments.
"The question before us is, can we read the Ellis Act as it's been amended to apply [relocation relief] to all tenants?" Justice Maria Rivera noted. However, landlord lawyer Andrew Zacks argued that the city's law undermines the Ellis Act by imposing a prohibitive cost on landlords who want to quit the rental business. And the justices repeatedly pushed him to define how much money judges should consider prohibitive.
At one time, the Ellis Act included a paragraph saying the statute did not prevent a local government from mitigating the impact of eviction on those living in residential hotels — generally "lower-income households." The following paragraph said this reference shouldn't have been read to limit governments from addressing the same concerns "for other types of accommodations."
Backing landlords, the First District held in Channing Properties v. City of Berkeley, 11 Cal.App.4th 88, that this last reference applied only to other low-income housing. However, the 2003 amendment cut the reference to lower-income households and the entire subsequent paragraph.
With the language no longer addressing income levels, San Francisco expanded its relocation assistance law to cover all tenants. The city argued that the plain meaning of the act now applies to tenants rich or poor.
But the superior court concluded that the language and the history of the Ellis Act didn't support that argument. In his ruling last year, Judge Warren noted that the preamble to the original Ellis Act specifically said that it was intended to supersede a 1985 court opinion.
"If the Legislature wanted to overturn Channing Properties with the 2003 amendments," Warren added, "it would have included similar, clear language."
