RENT WAR SUMMIT

Tuesday, May 11 -- In the ongoing rent wars, it was viewed by some as a summit of sorts.

Major leaders of both the tenant and landlord factions gathered Friday afternoon in the City Council office for an informal meeting on tenant rights. Among the dozen movers and shakers brought together by the council were:

• Landlord leader Bob Sullivan, past president of the powerful Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, who filed a suit that forced the city to revisit its housing plan.

• Land use attorney Chris Harding, who represents most of the major developers in town and who won $700,000 in legal fees in an out of court settlement in the case filed by Sullivan
•Deputy City Attorney Adam Radinsky, who prosecutes tenant harassment cases for the city.
• Tenant activist Michael Tarbet, a behind-the-scenes force in Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, which just won a super majority on the council.
•Three Council members - two from SMRR (Kevin McKeown and Michael Feinstein) and one (Paul Rosenstein) from the opposition.
• Several lawyers from both camps.

Conspicuously missing from the meeting were:

The topic: A proposed ordinance intended to strengthen tenant protections against harassment. Tenant activists contend a growing number of landlords are forcing tenants to vacate their units so they can raise the rents to market rates under a state law that took full effect Jan. 1. Landlord leaders say the activists are blowing the issue out of proportion for political gain.

The timing: The meeting came just five days before Richard Bloom is scheduled to be sworn into office Tuesday night, giving SMRR a five-member super majority on the seven-member council, something that wasn't lost on anyone who attended the meeting.

"They knew we had them," said a tenant advocate who was present.

"When the other side's got five votes, you try to negotiate, 'cause they can pass anything they want," a landlord advocate acknowledged.

On the table was a council proposal to strengthen the city's current tenant harassment laws, which were recently bolstered by a ballot initiative. To be safe, tenant leaders want to add the following additional protections:

• Make it illegal for landlords to willfully harass tenants even if it cannot be proven it was done with malice. Tenant advocates note that landlords could willfully harass tenants in order to make money, not a necessarily malicious intent in more moderate tenant circles.
• Outline situations where landlords can be held accountable for tenants who disturb the peace of other tenants. Tenant activists contend that some landlords are moving in noisy tenants in order to drive others out.
•Protect tenants who file complaints with agencies, such as the rent board, from possible retaliation from landlords.
• Base a finding of fact in a tenant harassment case on a "preponderance of evidence" rather than on "clear and convincing" evidence.
• Require that landlords give tenants a receipt when they pay the rent in cash.
• Make relocation assistance a right.

"It will make life for good landlords easier," said McKeown, who called the meeting "the first major sit down cordial interaction."

Some of the tenant activists present were thrilled with the outcome, coming away with the sense that the opposition was buying into the proposed ordinance.

"They agreed to pretty much everything," said one tenant leader present at the meeting.

Sullivan, however, reads the results of the meeting differently.

"If they're implying that we're endorsing the ordinance, that's not true," he said "But we're not endorsing harassment. We're concerned that it doesn't become a persecution ordinance."

Landlord leaders, who played down the importance of the meeting, contend that current laws already protect tenants against the kind of harassment the proposed ordinance addresses.

"It's not needed," said Sullivan, the past president of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles.. "Everything is already illegal in other parts of the law."

P.S. There is a picture taken at the meeting that shows McKeown, Tarbet, Harding and Sullivan sitting in a row at the table. The SMRR photographer hoped to release the picture, but at least one subject of the photo requested that it not be released.