Landlords in L.A. Get OK to Hike Rents 5% in 1986

Landlords in the city of Los Angeles will be allowed to raise rents 5% on about 480,000 housing units covered by rent control starting next July, officials said Friday.

The increases are higher than the 4% permitted this year but less than the 7% annual hikes allowed from 1980 to 1984.

Barbara Zeidman, director of the city Rent Stabilization Division, said the average rent is about $425, meaning that a typical increase would be about $21. The increases are based on the Los Angeles area Consumer Price Index for the fiscal year that ended Oct. 1.

The rent hike approval is the first so-called “automatic” adjustment under amendments to the rent-control ordinance approved by Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council earlier this year. A City Council committee was notified of the 5% rent increase ceiling this week, but no action by city officials is required.

Before the recent amendments, landlords had been permitted 7% annual increases, which were below the inflation rate in 1980 and 1981. However, the increases remained at 7% when inflation tumbled below 5% in 1982 and 1983, prompting protests from tenant groups and council action to link increases to the cost of living.

Spokesman for both tenant and landlord groups, who have warred bitterly at City Hall in past years over rent control, said Friday that they do not anticipate challenges to the 5% rent increases.

“I don’t think anybody’s in heaven about it,” said Bob Rebetzer, a spokesman for the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a tenant group. “(But) everybody is willing to do business, at least for the time being, within the existing ordinance.”

Meanwhile, in what has been a relatively low-volume debate, a series of fine-tuning amendments to the rent-control law have made it through the council’s Government Operations Committee and have been forwarded to the full City Council for approval.

The most significant proposed change, and one that has left some landlords unhappy, is an expansion of requirements for landlords to pay relocation costs when they evict tenants.

Currently, landlords must pay relocation costs only when they convert their units to condominiums or demolish them for commercial development.

The proposed changes would extend those payments--up to $2,500 for senior citizens, the disabled and families with children--to evictions caused by major renovations, a landlord’s desire to move relatives into a unit or when rentals will be removed permanently from the market.

Jay de Miranda, president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, the city’s largest landlord group, said the organization is “not thrilled about it” but is accepting the proposed change.

Zeidman said there were about 2,000 evictions in those categories last year and the change is designed to provide an “economic disincentive” for a “very small number of unscrupulous landlords who abuse those reasons for eviction.”

The council committee did not endorse a proposal by tenant groups to require landlords to pay interest on security deposits. At the same time, landlords failed to gain support of rent hikes to cover costs due to increases in variable interest rate mortgages.