With the enactment of Assembly Bill 1482, signed by Governor Newsom in October 2019, the California legislature imposed a “just cause” limitation on lease terminations, non-renewals, or evictions for most California residential landlords, and also imposed a cap on the amount of annual rent increases allowable for many of the same landlords.
In June, the United States Supreme Court dismantled what many considered to be an untenable “preclusion trap” in Fifth Amendment takings law when it decided Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania.
If a tenant receives a verbal assurance from a landlord while negotiating a lease, and the assurance is not written in the lease, does the tenant have any recourse if the assurance turns out to be false?
An unfortunate trend in recent legislation is the increased use of technical definitions in widely separated areas of law, forcing the reader to review multiple volumes of several different codes in order to understand a single, apparently simple, piece of legislation.
The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, popularly known as “Proposition 65” (or “Prop. 65”), requires businesses to warn California residents before exposing them to specified chemicals.
“If a tree falls in the forest with no ears to hear does it make a sound?” While the answer to that riddle still remains elusive to many, a recent California court of appeal decision did succeed in answering another riddle: “If a tenant has yet to be formally evicted, but the lease is terminated, do they still lawfully possess the premises?”
By Jana Contreras