In 1989, Lourdes Mata left Durango, Mexico, and moved into an apartment complex on Mohawk Street in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, she said, her neighbors formed another family that helped her grieve over the one she left behind. They were Thai, Filipino, Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadoran. The children grew up together, interpreting for their parents at backyard barbecues and on their morning walks to Mayberry Elementary. When alone, the kids liked to teach each other curse words in their parents’ languages.
That community was still mostly intact in 2022, when Ariel Isaacson and Brandon Eshaghzadeh, both in their 20s, purchased the Mohawk Street property for just under $2.5 million. The new landlords soon filed evictions against the residents in the building’s seven occupied units. Under California’s 2019 Tenant Protection Act, landlords are prohibited from evicting tenants when tenants have done nothing wrong — with certain exceptions, called “no-fault just causes.”
One of those no-fault just causes — the one that Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh invoked — is for “substantial” renovations. Advocates for both renters and landlords agree that the renovations clause can offer landlords a way around rent control, disagreeing only on whether that is a good or bad thing.
Substantial renovation evictions are common enough to now have a nickname: renovictions. Tenant advocates say landlords use minor improvements as a pretext to expel rent-controlled tenants. “Renovictions are being used by landlords, particularly corporate landlords, to push long-standing tenants out, flip their units and raise the rent,” said Grace Hut, who researches renovictions in Los Angeles at the tenants rights group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy.
The eviction notices at Mohawk Street stated that the tenants needed to leave their units so the landlords could remodel kitchens and bathrooms, replace plumbing fixtures and install washers and dryers.
For Lourdes Mata, 59, those upgrades for future tenants would mean losing the place that has defined her life in the United States. “It was in these apartments that we started to really set down roots,” Mata said this summer, just days before she would begin radiation treatment for breast cancer. “It was really sweet and lovely until it all ended.” Mata spoke in Spanish and her daughter Erika Hernandez, 36, translated into English for a reporter.
Hernandez thinks her Gen Z landlords were “born in a golden crib” and can’t appreciate a community that’s older than they are.
“We hold onto memories, and I don’t think they do,” she said. “I don’t think they know what that’s like.”
The Mohawk tenants say the renovations they’re being evicted for are not substantial enough to require them to leave their homes. They think Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh are trying to replace them with tenants who can pay more rent. In 2022, when the pair bought the property, the Mata family paid $800 a month for their two-bedroom; Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh could likely quadruple that rent if they evicted the family and re-rented their unit at the market rate for two-bedrooms in Echo Park. A couple blocks away, a two-bedroom apartment is currently advertised at $3,400 on Apartments.com.
Isaacson, Eshaghzadeh and the building’s manager did not respond to multiple emails and messages requesting interviews.
The Mohawk tenants sued Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh for tenant harassment earlier this year, arguing in part that the evictions are baseless, which constitutes harassment under city law. (The suit also says the owners tried to intimidate them with eviction notices that demanded they remove their personal property from common areas and satellite dishes from the roof. The tenants argue the demands are arbitrary and unreasonable.) Niv Davidovich, a lawyer for Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh, called tenant allegations “entirely false” and “defamatory.” He also said he had evidence of the tenants harassing and assaulting managers. A video he said captured that assault showed tenants encircling and shouting at a manager.
To fight their evictions, the Mohawk residents organized a tenant association. It meets on Mondays over Filipino dishes like pancit and puto bread (a steamed cake that, to the amusement of the Mexican and Central American tenants, shares its name with a Spanish-language vulgarity). The tenants say their organizing has won crucial repairs and renovations, like black mold remediation in two units — one of which belongs to the Mata family. Management did not act to remediate their mold outbreaks this year until after the association publicized the mold on Instagram and marched to their manager’s house to demand he fix the issue, correspondence with property manager Victor Ocampo shows. (Ocampo did not respond to emailed questions. Lawyer Davidovich blamed tenants for the delay, “if it occurred.”)
In the fight, Lourdes Mata feels supported by her neighbors much as she did in her first days in the property in 1989. Her cancer treatment, however, means she has to stop attending meetings.
“I won’t be able to join the group on those Monday nights where that support is most felt,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to get used to.”
Advocates for tenants disagree with landlord organizations on whether the substantial remodel loophole should exist, but they tend to agree on one point: It helps landlords get around the state’s 2019 rent control law.
That’s what eviction lawyer Dennis Block, one of the most prominent landlord advocates in Los Angeles, told his viewers in a recent webinar called “Renovate to Beat Rent Control.”
The 2019 state law mandated that landlords can no longer evict tenants without “a reason,” Block explained in the webinar. Thus, landlords should “use the wonderful reason that is authorized by statewide rent control, and that is to renovate the unit,” he advised. In an earlier May webinar, when a Burbank landlord said he had an elderly and disabled tenant paying rent well below market rate, Block told him, “Your medicine is a renovation eviction.”
The 2019 California Tenant Protection Act struck a compromise between pro-tenant groups and the state’s powerful landlord lobby, which generally opposes rent control and is a major donor to state lawmakers. The law applies to most rental units constructed at least 15 years ago.
Landlord interest groups supported the 2019 state law because they preferred it to stricter rent control ballot initiatives placed before voters by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation each election cycle, CalMatters reported that year.
In 2018, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation placed an initiative on the ballot that would have removed a state prohibition barring cities from imposing rent control on most housing built after February 1, 1995. The initiative would have allowed cities to ban landlords from raising rents when tenants leave — whether voluntarily or by eviction. Pro-landlord groups spent more than $70 million fighting it, and the initiative failed by nearly 20 percentage points.
After that initiative failed, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wanted to broker a compromise and asked the state Legislature to send him a rent control bill that found some middle ground. The result was the 2019 Tenant Protection Act. Landlord groups backed it as an alternative to another AIDS Healthcare Foundation-sponsored rent control ballot measure. That measure failed, too; the foundation has another rent control initiative on state ballots this November.
That’s how the Tenant Protection Act became law in 2019. One of the key concessions made to landlords was to allow them to evict tenants for substantial remodels, according to Amy Schur, who took part in negotiations over the law as campaign director for ACCE Institute, an advocacy group on issues including tenants’ rights.
“The landlord lobby fought tooth and nail to have the most expansive exemptions they could get into [the law to] protect their ability to do these ‘no-fault’ evictions,” she said, referring to evictions in which tenants have not broken any lease terms or otherwise done anything wrong.
A spokesperson for the bill’s author, David Chiu — now the San Francisco city attorney — said Chiu could not remember whether the renoviction carve-out helped secure the votes needed for passage. The spokesperson, Alex Barrett-Shorter, said, “Every provision of that bill was heavily scrutinized and negotiated.”
“That law was still a huge win,” said Grace Hut, the researcher at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. “But this loophole does undermine its ability to protect tenants.”
Since the passage of the Tenant Protection Act, cities across the state have reported surges in renovictions, including Concord, South Pasadena, Long Beach, Alhambra, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Maywood and Chula Vista.
Some California cities, including South Pasadena, have banned substantial remodel evictions altogether. Others, such as Long Beach, stopped short of outright bans in lieu of increasing relocation assistance for renovicted tenants and increasing penalties for landlords who violate the law.
California legislators also tried to ban substantial remodel evictions last year with Senate Bill 567. The first draft of the law essentially banned substantial remodel evictions, but the bill that was signed into law stopped short of a ban. Instead, it specified what constitutes a substantial remodel, increased penalties for violators and required landlords to attach construction permits to renoviction notices.
Hut, the program coordinator at SAJE, said the new requirements are not enough to stop substantial remodel evictions. While construction permits may be costly and time consuming for landlords, “It’s very simple, especially for corporate landlords who have the savviness and money, to get those permits,” she said. “They’ll immediately recoup the costs by increasing rents if they’re successful.”
In Los Angeles, Hut and her colleagues at SAJE are urging the City Council to pass a motion banning substantial remodel evictions, which Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced on Oct. 8. It passed the Housing and Homelessness Committee on Oct. 16 and is likely to be considered by the full council in the coming weeks.
The councilmember representing the Mohawk tenants in Echo Park, Hugo Soto-Martinez, said he supports closing the loophole and that he supports the Mohawk tenants in their fight against renovictions, even if a judge found the renovictions legal.
“This is a quintessential example of a case where tenants should be able to stay in their homes, and this loophole is being exploited regardless of the renovation details,” he said.
Dan Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, a landlord trade group, said landlords evicting tenants to make merely cosmetic improvements represent “just a few bad actors.”
On Sept. 12, the Mata family defeated their eviction in court. Mohawk tenants in three other units also won their eviction cases recently.
Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh quickly issued more eviction notices against those tenants, including Mata’s family.
Three of the previous Mohawk evictions were dismissed by judges ruling that the eviction notices did not say why the renovations would displace the tenants for more than 30 days, the minimum requirement for remodel evictions. The new evictions specify a greater scope of construction, including that plumbing and gas facilities will be demolished and that entire units will be “in a state of complete disrepair.”
“The problem with substantial remodels being a basis for an eviction at all is that even when we win, landlords can change their allegations and refile more evictions,” said Laura Matter, a lawyer with Inner City Law Center representing the Mohawk tenants in eviction court and civil court in the tenant harassment lawsuit against Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh.
On Nov. 25, the latest eviction notices will expire, allowing Isaacson and Eshaghzadeh to file official eviction lawsuits against the Mohawk tenants. If the Los Angeles City Council votes to close the loophole before then, those new evictions would be thrown out. If the council delays, the evictions would stand.
Because the ordinance would take 30 days to go into effect, the Mohawk tenants ideally need a council vote by Oct. 25. The council could also prevent the Mohawk evictions by immediately implementing a moratorium on renovictions with an urgency clause. “We’re in a race against the clock,” said L.A. Tenants Union organizer Lupita Limón Corrales.
Meanwhile, Lourdes Mata has finished her 15th and final round of radiation treatments and is attending tenants union meetings again.
In her first meeting since undergoing radiation, she thanked God for helping the tenants stay housed thus far, according to her daughter, Erika, who recalled the meeting while her mother rested.
After thanking God, Mata thanked her neighbors.
“Us coming together as neighbors is how we will win this struggle,” she told the group.
