This article was produced by the nonprofit journalism publication Capital & Main. It is co-published here with permission.
Vindication arrived too late for Karen Hunt.
From the day she heard a knock on her door in May 2023 at the Barrington Plaza in West Los Angeles, Hunt knew something was not right. The two men outside her apartment wouldn’t tell her who they were, not even after they handed over the eviction notice.
“Early morning, and they just continued to stand there repeatedly knocking, saying, ‘We have to talk to you and give this to you in person,’” Hunt said. “We’d heard rumblings about what was going on. I finally just opened the door, took the envelope and shut the door on them.”
The notice was part of an effort by the building’s owner, Douglas Emmett Inc., to clear nearly 600 units via eviction — for safety’s sake after two fires in the building, according to Emmett’s attorneys. Tenants quickly concluded that the evictions were instead a ploy to force out people like Hunt, who lived under rent-control provisions, and then renovate and rerent their apartments at dramatically higher prices.
Some of those tenants sued, and earlier this month, a Superior Court judge tentatively agreed with them, saying the actions by the Emmett company violated both state and local law. Once the ruling becomes final, those who refused to move out of the Barrington will be allowed to remain.
“It’s a landmark decision — probably the biggest tenants’ rights legal victory the state has ever seen,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, which fights for the rights of low- and moderate-income Angelenos. “It may save the homes of hundreds of people.”
Karen Hunt’s home won’t be one of them. Now 69, Hunt dug in for months before finally deciding earlier this year to vacate her one-bedroom garden apartment, beat the eviction deadline and leave the Barrington. She is one of hundreds of tenants who now know what they previously suspected: They were evicted illegally.
“I was 13 years old when my parents moved into the Barrington,” Hunt said. “I moved out for about a year and a half at one point, then came back. And the particular apartment that I just left, I had lived there for more than 40 years.
“Most of my life was there. I had a sense of community in that building. That’s gone.”
Though the ruling by Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford III is not yet final, it was unambiguous. Ford found that the Emmett development company failed to meet the requirements for eviction set forth in both the state’s Ellis Act and the local Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance.
Those laws set the conditions under which a landlord can evict tenants, and one such condition is if the landlord is getting out of the rental business altogether. Emmett’s attorneys argued that the developer met this requirement, since he would be taking the Barrington units off the market for an extended period of time to install fire sprinklers after building fires in both 2013 and 2020.
Ford found otherwise, saying in his ruling that the company “always had the present and continuing intent to renovate the units for future use as residential rental housing.” Evidence presented during the civil trial included charts and PowerPoint presentations showing the company’s future plans.
Contacted immediately after the ruling and again Monday, a spokesperson for Douglas Emmett Inc. said the firm would have no comment on the Barrington case.
“Their argument was, Hey, we’re not going to collect rent for three years, that’s going out of business,” said Frances Campbell, one of the attorneys who represented the tenants in the case. “That’s like saying, for those moments that I take my hands off the wheel, I’m not driving the car. It’s an artificial construct.”
But most Barrington tenants didn’t stick around to see the court case unfold. Of the 577 tenants who faced eviction, all but about 100 accepted relocation fees and moved on. And the civil ruling didn’t get them their Barrington rent-controlled apartments back; it simply established that the Emmett company broke the rules when it evicted the tenants. A new lawsuit would be required to ask for remedies.
“It sounds like they pulled off the scam, right?” Campbell said. “It sucks for everyone who left. And the reason they left is they got an eviction notice.”
Once the notices began going out in May 2023, the Barrington Plaza Tenants Association was established, and Campbell’s firm was contacted. “We knew something was wrong the moment we were evicted,” said Monique Gomez, who spearheaded the association and continues to organize it. “We knew we were in the right — but even if you believe that, it doesn’t always go that way once you get to a trial.”
It was that uncertainty that preyed on the estimated 480 tenants who accepted relocation fees and moved out of their rent-controlled units, Gomez said. (Gomez stayed in hers.) Many of the tenants were from outside the U.S., she said, and may have been intimidated by the thought of having anything to do with the legal system.
“These tenants were getting emails saying, ‘You’re going to lose your relocation credit. Your credit history is going to take a hit,’” Gomez said. “A lot of these people were afraid it would affect their status in this country. Most are blue collar, trying to make a life here, and they got kicked out of their homes.”
Campbell and Gross were both part of a meeting last week with many of the former tenants, and it is possible that a lawsuit seeking remedies against the Emmett company will go forth. But for people like Karen Hunt, the damage has been done.
Hunt paid $2,200 per month for her garden apartment and three storage units. That storage contained much of her family’s history, including things left behind by her parents, who also spent most of their adult lives at the Barrington.
She thought the tenants would win the lawsuit. “But there was so much uncertainty,” Hunt added. After having fought breast cancer and survived a heart attack, she couldn’t bear the thought of counting down to her eviction date while waiting for a verdict.
Hunt has since moved with her adult daughter into a two-bedroom townhome not too far from the Barrington. The price is more than $4,000 per month. “I feel lucky to be able to even do that,” she said. “Then again, I never wanted to leave.”