The Brief

Rent control can either be your friend or your enemy.

The laws are often the bane of landlords who’d like to charge more and a potential safety net for tenants who can’t afford steep rent hikes. But why it’s around isn’t necessarily because politicians want to protect the little guy — rent control has historically been used to mitigate another problem.

If you want a breakdown of how rent control may work in your area today, here’s the guide for that. But in this one, we’ll explore more of the backdrop: how high inflation, wartime efforts and a housing crisis birthed different eras of rent control.

The wartime effect

L.A.’s first round of modern rent control came more than 80 years ago — and it was perhaps the strictest we’ve seen.

When World War II began in 1939, industrial employment ballooned. The Great Depression was easing, so workers migrated to Los Angeles in the tens of thousands for employment. But the surge in population, combined with the war effort, created a perfect housing storm that lasted for years.

More people were coming at a time when our housing stock couldn’t keep up. About 15,000 residential projects went unfinished because labor and supplies were diverted to the war, according to research from the UCLA Luskin Center. With demand way up, many people had no choice but to live in severely overcrowded and unsuitable conditions. The situation was so dire when a federal study was conducted that a veteran shared how he was living in a house with 18 other people while trying to turn a chicken coop into a place to stay.

A 1945 poster letting tenants know about their rights under rent control.

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United States Office of Price Administration

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Illinois Digital Archives, Illinois State Library, and Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias

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The ultimate solution would be more housing, but that would take years to improve. In the interim, the federal government deployed a rent freeze (and other price controls) in 1942 to ensure essentials remained affordable. Alisa Belinkoff Katz, lead author of UCLA’s study of rent control in L.A., says this move made rent control part of the war effort and more acceptable to landlords.

“It was considered sort of the patriotic thing to do, at least at first while the war was going on,” she said. “It became something that was widely publicized and that people were engaged in.”

That publicity campaign helped to make tenants aware of their rights. Landlords and renters were also required to sign a property registration form that recorded the rent amount under the freeze. To Katz, the tenants who kept tabs on compliance, along with federal enforcement, is what made the rent freeze effective.

A line of people outside of the rent control office at Broadway in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 1942.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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Property owners register their rentals at the Broadway rent control office in Los Angeles on Sept. 25, 1942.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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The support of landlords didn’t last long, though. The L.A. County apartment association’s president at the time, David Culver, complained about treatment in a meeting with landlords, and together they vowed to take action. They argued that the rent cap was too low to afford taxes and maintenance, and some threatened to take their rentals off the market.

Once the war ended, rent control became a ticking clock. After a postwar federal housing act went into effect, allowing local governments to lose the rules, the L.A. City Council voted to decontrol. Residential rents went back under the sway of the market.

Property owners cheer as the L.A. city council votes 10 to 4 in favor of rent decontrol on July 2, 1950. More than 2,500 owners and tenants packed the council chamber.

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Herald Examiner Collection

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Los Angeles Public Library

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‘Stagflation’ in the 1970s and Proposition 13

Decades later, L.A. was in a different predicament.

An oil crisis was going on, aiding a surge in inflation while economic growth was at a snail’s pace. This is when the term “stagflation” was coined (a portmanteau of stagnation and inflation). Among a number of other things that became more expensive, L.A. home prices were skyrocketing along with owners’ property tax bills.

Landlords again organized around this issue. Howard Jarvis, then-executive director of the L.A. County apartment association, went down in history as the champion of 1978’s Proposition 13 — a measure that aimed to cap property tax rates. But in order for it to pass, he knew that the state’s renters — which made up 45% of households, according to Katz’s research — needed to be convinced to vote for the proposition.

Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, co-sponsor of the measure, celebrating after Proposition 13 was declared a winner on June 6, 1978.

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Ken Papaleo

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Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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Landlords got involved to persuade their tenants. They argued that getting their tax bills reduced would trickle down to their tenants, too. Some even offered rent rebates if it was successful. But after Proposition 13 prevailed at the polls, the rose-colored glasses fell off. Despite what they’d said previously, many owners continued to raise their rents — some by more than 20% that same year.

“It should be an incentive to keep rents low, one would think,” Katz said. “But it hasn't worked out that way because property values continue to rise all over the city. [It helps landlords] because their taxes aren’t going up. So if their taxes are stable and their rents are allowed to increase all the time, then of course it helps them.”

In effect, the law was a type of rent control but for landlords, because it lowered their property taxes and limited increases.

Renters feeling the pinch

Demand for tenant protections was high in this decade, especially in middle-class communities. Renters had few rights and people were feeling the pinch.

“Our phone started ringing off the hooks,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival. “It appeared that the speculators discovered Los Angeles. They were buying up rental units throughout the area, raising rent, putting a fresh coat of paint on it, some minor repairs, and then selling it again."

Gross was one of the key people leading the fight for rent control and helped organize tenant unions. He says some apartment buildings were getting flipped four to five times a year. And after Proposition 13, he says the “lid blew off” with rent.

“It was the first of many broken promises that landlords provided to their tenants.”

Renters rallied, urging L.A. leaders to take action. The city council members who represented white, middle-class districts supported the measures, but the ones leading Black and Latino districts did not. Back then, rising rent was viewed as a middle-class problem, and community leaders in lower-income districts worried that rent control would drive away investment in their communities.

Still, the council got enough support to roll back and temporarily freeze rents. Mayor Tom Bradley claimed it was a necessary step to halt “outrageous rent increases.”

The freeze gave the council time to draft a long-term response, which is where the Rent Stabilization Ordinance in place today came from. With this law, landlords can only increase rent in certain properties (built on or before Oct. 1, 1978) generally between 3% and 8%, based on inflation. (There’s a rent freeze on these properties currently because of COVID-19.)

Where we are now

Since the '70s, a lot has changed. Rent control has grown to multiple cities, but so have the legal battles surrounding it.

“It's literally been somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game with landlords,” Gross said. “Because landlords will find loopholes in the law and then use that to evict tenants or increase rent. And then we'd identify those loopholes and we get the city council to close them.”

Property owners looked to change these rules, too, and they got key laws passed from higher up.

New rent laws

1985: The Ellis Act, a California law that allows landlords to evict residential tenants in order to leave the rental business, passes. A landlord filed a lawsuit against Santa Monica, which instituted rent control six years earlier, for refusing to let him demolish his rental property, claiming it was in bad repair. He lost the case when it reached the California Supreme Court, but shortly after the state legislature passed the Ellis Act.

1995: The landlords’ grand slam, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, passes. This was the state legislature’s response to landlords' building frustration with rent control laws, which were more regulated in some cities.

West Hollywood and Santa Monica, had the strict “vacancy control” rule. Under that provision, owners couldn’t raise rents to market rates between tenants, but small increases were allowed during tenancy. The act made that provision illegal statewide.

“It literally puts a bullseye target on the back of particularly low rent, long-term [rentals],” Gross said on the removal of vacancy control. “If they get those tenants out by any means, they can jack up rents to whatever they want.”

The act also prohibited rent control on residential properties built after Feb. 1, 1995, excluded single-family homes and condos, and generally tied city leaders' hands.

“It froze existing local rent control laws,” Katz said. “It had a huge impact because it prohibited what local governments were able to do to protect renters in their jurisdictions.”

2019: The Tenant Protection Act created a statewide rent increase cap. This cap is adjusted yearly based on inflation. It’s intended to prevent very large increases. And, coming soon, California will be voting on rent control in 2024 (for a third time).

Navigating rent control

It can be tough to easily understand how, when, and where rent control affects you. Everything can change depending on what city you’re in, your building type and when it was built.

Some basics you should be aware of are the main types of rent control:

• Rent freeze (rents are not allowed to rise at all in a given period).
• Vacancy control (rent can’t rise to market rates between tenants, but smaller increases are allowed during tenancy — this is illegal in California).
• Vacancy decontrol (rents can rise to market rates between tenants, and increases are allowed during tenancy — the standard in the state now).

Another way that rent control can change is with how much of the consumer price index, which measures inflation, gets factored in.

For example, the city of L.A. typically lets rent controlled properties increase between 3% and 8% a year, depending on the full rate of inflation. But Katz says that other cities have used a lower percentage of CPI. And the city of L.A. has a freeze on increases in rent controlled buildings until February 2024.

Cities with floors for increases, like L.A., can wind up with a problematic deal for renters and a better one for landlords if rents rise above CPI.

“Several times in the last few years, CPI has actually risen less than 3%, but landlords were allowed to raise the rents by 3%. So that's another question, whether that should be adjusted," Katz said.

Figure out where you stand

Rent control is a tangled web of seemingly boring rules, but it does have real effects. To supporters of the protections, the aim is about keeping things affordable and fair.

“It helps to give some security to tenants in a sense that it extends the protections that homeowners have,” Gross said. “What rent control does is level the playing field.”

If you're a renter and would like to know more about where your home stands with rent control, check out my colleague David Wagner’s cheat sheet to rent hike. If you’re in the city of L.A., you can also put your address into ZIMAS and check the housing tab to see what laws apply.

An East Hollywood nursing home that nearly lost its license this year because of repeated state citations for deaths of residents at the facility was cited again last month after another person died.

The California Department of Public Health cited Brier Oak on Sunset after a 92-year-old resident bled to death on Sept. 27. Staff members had continued injecting her with blood thinners over a 40-hour period in violation of clinical guidelines.

It’s an AA citation, the most severe the department issues when violations of care standards are determined to be a substantial factor in someone’s death. The facility faces a $120,000 fine.

These kinds of citations are rare. The department has recently issued, on average, fewer than 20 AA citations yearly across more than 1,200 skilled nursing facilities in California.

Brier Oak has received three AA citations for patient deaths since late 2022.

State regulations require authorities to suspend or revoke the licenses of any facilities that get two AA citations within a period of 24 months.

The state Public Health Department began that process with Brier Oak in May based on resident deaths in 2022 and 2024. But officials dropped that effort later because they say they determined the two patient deaths had occurred 26 months apart — just outside of the two-year window.

A spokesperson for the company that owns Brier Oak told LAist it has appealed the first two citations and is considering whether to appeal the third.

Advocates for nursing home residents say the recent death could have been avoided if the state had taken action.

“There were red flags, and a lot of these red flags existed prior to the death of this poor resident,” said Tony Chicotel, senior staff attorney with  California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

The state said Brier Oak has until Dec. 19 to notify the department if it intends to appeal.

What led to the patient deaths?

In the recent death at Brier Oak cited by the state, multiple communication and technical failures by nursing staff led to the patient bleeding out over a period of 40 hours, according to the citation.

The 92-year-old patient was immobile and had been prescribed a blood thinner called heparin to help prevent blood clots from forming. But once a patient is bleeding, those injections make bleeding worse, and potentially fatal.

When nursing staff found bright red blood in the resident’s diaper the day before she died, Brier Oak failed to follow established processes for documenting the bleeding or communicating it to a nurse practitioner or medical doctor, according to the citation.

Nurses told state authorities they delayed informing physicians because they “get mad” when contacted in the middle of the night.

The facility’s staff also failed to fully assess the patient to determine the possible causes of the bleeding and or to properly monitor the issue during crucial periods, according to the citation.

She suffered four internal bleeding episodes over 40 hours and continued to receive blood thinner injections.

The citation says a nurse practitioner at Brier Oak told state licensing authorities later that if she’d been informed about the patient’s ongoing bleeding, she would have stopped the blood thinner and sent her to a hospital.

In 2022, Brier Oak received a AA citation after a 62-year-old woman died from respiratory failure in part because nurses hadn’t been trained to operate her breathing machine.

In 2024, the nursing home got another AA citation. This time, a 63-year-old woman with paraplegia and severe obesity fell from her bed and died while a nursing assistant was changing her. The assistant was alone, even though the woman’s care plan required two staff members.

Who owns Brier Oak?

Brier Oak on Sunset is primarily owned by Genesis Healthcare, a publicly-traded nursing home operator that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July.

Once the largest nursing home operator in the U.S., Genesis was facing billions in debt when it declared bankruptcy, according to court filings. That includes millions in potential damages from lawsuits related to patient care failures.

In a brief statement to LAist, a company spokesperson said it's still considering whether or not to appeal the recent citation at Brier Oak.

The citation should trigger a suspension or revocation of the facility's license, according to state regulations. The latter means it would have to close its doors. The two most recent deaths and citations at the facility occurred within the two-year window.

The California Department of Public Health confirmed it cited Brier Oak on Nov. 26.

The department said the facility submitted a required written response before a Dec. 6 deadline, showing how it will fix the problems and prevent them from happening again..

The department determined Brier Oak was back in compliance during an onsite visit last week, a representative told LAist.

Brier Oak on Sunset currently houses about 150 patients, according to state records.

A bankruptcy judge has stalled the proposed sale of Genesis Healthcare to an affiliate of one of its investors.

Experts say it’s unclear whether the state would revoke the license of an owner who is actively trying to sell and turn over operations to someone else.

It’s been a rough start to ski and snowboard season for California mountain towns. Snowfall is well below average, but Christmas could come with some of the white stuff. Here's where things stand:

Hmmm. Didn’t we just have a record storm?

Yes. That big atmospheric river that hit Southern California last month made it one of the wettest Novembers on records. But since then, it’s been unusually warm and dry, which is not good for mountain towns that depend on snow, and the outdoor enthusiasts that flock to them.

How bad is it?

California’s snowpack is about 20% of normal for this time of the year, according to the state’s snow-tracking website. Southern California isn’t quite as bad off — we’ve gotten about half our normal snowfall so far.

As for the resorts, only about 20% of the terrain at Bear Mountain in Big Bear is open. About 35% of Mammoth Mountain is open.

Can’t they just make snow?

They are, but the unusually warm temperatures have curbed resorts’ ability to make enough snow to open more terrain. “If you're blowing water into 40-degrees, it's going to stay water,” said Justin Kanton, a spokesperson for Big Bear Mountain Resort. “ So as much as people probably would want us to just crank the snow guns all day, every day up here and just get things moving, that's not really possible.”

But there’s a silver lining!

The dry weather has allowed Caltrans to make good progress toward opening Highway 38, said Evan Engle, who chairs the board of the Big Bear Chamber of Commerce. The road typically handles up to 40% of traffic up to the mountain town, Engle said. But it’s been closed since September when it got washed out by Tropical Storm Mario.

Getting it open as soon as possible is key to keeping visitor traffic manageable, and getting supplies to Big Bear.

What’s the snow outlook?

SoCal mountains are likely to see some precipitation around Christmas, said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But with temperatures not expected to drop much, it’s uncertain how much of it will be white, Wheeler said.

If you go to Big Bear: 

• If you plan to hit the slopes, get on it early, when the snow is at its best given the warm conditions. 
• No snow? There’s more to do than ski and snowboard. Check this list of winter fun events.  
• Worried about traffic? Consider going up earlier in the week. If you can’t do that, consider taking Highway 18 through Lucerne Valley. It’s a longer route if you’re coming from L.A., but less traveled, and less likely to make you car sick (fewer tight curves). 

The Los Angeles Police Department used more than 2,400 crowd control munitions in response to protests from June 6 to 14, according to a new report.

Officers used a total of 2,431 less-lethal projectile rounds and 35 canisters of tear gas over the nine days, according to LAPD reports. The department recorded 12 injuries officers caused with those weapons.

The LAPD released the missing report last week after LAist identified the use of crowd control weapons on four different days in June that had not been reported according to state law. Assembly Bill 48, which went into effect in 2022, limits when and how crowd control weapons can be used, and requires law enforcement agencies to publicly release reports on their use within 60 days.

A 30-day extension for these reports can be granted in some cases, but the LAPD released this report about three months late even if an extension was justified.

Officials acknowledged they were out of compliance on Dec. 10 before releasing the report, saying the delay “stems from the extraordinary volume and complexity of incidents” over that time.

This report is different from others

It is unusual for a crowd control report to include more than one day, and the report for June 9 through 14 covered six days and “45 sepearte [sic] non categorical use of force incidents.”

It does not describe any of those use of force incidents specifically, and the LAPD has not yet responded to LAist’s request for more detailed descriptions of those incidents.

The report also considered the entire six days to have been one continuous protest, though it included several anti-ICE protests over the week and the national “No Kings” protest on June 14.

Two reports released earlier this year for June 6 and 8 covered single days and provided more detailed descriptions of incidents where the LAPD used less-lethal munitions against protesters.