The Council of the City of Los Angeles voted on Tuesday to ban the owners to evict tenants for allowing people or pets displaced by last month's fires.
In a vote of 14 to 0, the council members granted the preliminary approval to said ordinance, that supporters say it is necessary because some residential leases prohibit unauthorized persons or pets.
The new rules, which are expected to return to the Council for a last vote next week, would last a year and apply only if additional occupants and pets were displaced by Palisades, Eaton or other January fires.
The tenants will have to notify their owner that they brought to the occupants or pets uprooted by the fires and provide a variety of information, including the address where the additional occupants previously resided.
The protections would apply to all the properties of the city.
In addition, if a building is under the city's reaper stabilization ordinance, the owners will not be able to impose a special rental increase that is generally allowed when additional people move, if the new occupants are fire refugees.
“During these emergency acts of kindness and compassion they should not be punished,” councilman Traci Park, who represents the hard neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, to his colleagues before the vote, told his colleagues. “Anyone who has opened their home to provide refuge, peace and security should not have to worry.”
The action of the Council on Tuesday occurs in the midst of a greater debate on what type of tenant protections to offer following the January fires that destroyed or seriously damaged more than 12,000 homes in the county.
After the fires broke out on January 7, there were generalized reports of illegal pricing rupture, but it is not clear how more competitive the rental market of the region has become as a whole.
Housing and disaster recovery experts have said that they expect the rent to increase to some extent, because thousands of homes were destroyed in a narrow market.
Most of the lost houses seem to be single -family houses and, therefore, some experts said they expect the rent to increase in the largest units adjacent to the burning areas, with the ascending pressure on the increasingly silent costs as it The units become smaller and further from the disaster zone.
Last week, the Council refused to approve a proposal that would have stopped the increase in income in many apartments throughout the city for a year and also prohibited several types of evictions, including the lack of rental payment, if the tenants were They saw economically or medically affected by the fires.
In a heated debate, some members of the Council, including Park, criticized the rules as too radical. The proposal was sent to the Housing Committee and homeless people of the Council, where it is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday.
