By Bill Hooey, head of Fair Housing Coalition
Here are four things that every landlord in the City of Los Angeles should be aware of.

Item #1 – A Secret Meeting
I received a phone call last week from someone who works for the City and he told me about a secret meeting that involved people who work for the city, the county and the state. At this time, it appears that the Los Angeles City Council is moving forward to legalize the thousands of illegal units across LA. As long as they don’t pose a health or safety issue to the renters, the City wants to legalize them.

There are some people in Los Angeles who converted a garage behind their home into an apartment. These people should remain vigilant because what some government officials want to do is … after the illegal unit is legalized; they want to declare the property a commercial location (no longer a private home). These same people have high hopes of one day doing a “split roll” so that commercial properties in LA County will lose their Prop 13 protection.

If that ever happens, people who have lived in their homes for decades could find their home’s real estate taxes doubling or tripling. 
We must remain keep our eyes open so those with this secret agenda are not able to stab homes owners in the back. As soon as I hear more on this, I will share it with those in my database.

Item #2 –Helping Homeless Veterans
The City of Los Angeles has, according what I’ve been told, the largest homeless population in the country. City government has been working hard to find apartments for the homeless vets and they’ve been able to find about a thousand vets a place to live. Word has gotten out and homeless vets from across the country are now moving to LA.
So, instead of getting smaller, the problem is getting bigger. Two weeks ago, a group of landlords met with the Mayor on this issue. They are willing to rent units to homeless vets but the truth is that some homeless vets do have emotional and drug problems. So in trying to do something noble, a landlord could end up with a huge problem.

These landlords told the Mayor that before they will rent to a homeless vet, they want an exemption from the RSO for that unit. That way, if the homeless vet doesn’t pay the rent, causes damage to the building, causes problems for other tenants, brings in his friends to move in with him or brings in any type of illegal activity (such as drug use), the landlord won’t have to go through a nightmare to evict this problem tenant.

I support this idea and I believe we should start going to City Council meetings expressing that we want to help homeless vets but we need an exemption from the RSO for the unit we rent out to a homeless vet. This could be one giant step that helps us in dealing with the RSO.

Item #3 – Videotaping The Police
About ten days ago, the California Assembly passed a ruling stating that it is perfectly legal for anyone to videotape Police Officers in a public place. (Update asks why would this even be a question?) You can’t cross that “Crime Scene Yellow Tape” but you can video the Police from any open public place.

So, when a housing inspector enters your building and many of them believe they have Police powers, you can videotape them while they are on your property. If they threaten you with stopping the inspection and leaving, we would like to know about it.

Item #4 – For Hotel and Motel owners
The US Supreme Court struck down a LA law three weeks ago. The City of Los Angeles had created a law that gave the LAPD the authority to enter any hotel or motel and look at the registry to see who was staying there or had stayed there recently. If the owner did not comply, he/she could be arrested. The United State Supreme Court ruled that was unconstitutional. The great thing about this ruling is that it shows that they City of Los Angeles doesn’t have any problem creating laws that violated the constitution. This could give us some extra power in our lawsuits against the City when we go to court in October.