Your Rights When the Landlord Wants You to Vacate Your Apartment to Make Renovations

The landlord has certain obligations in asking or requiring you to vacate your apartment so that he (or she) can perform renovation work. Some of these legal obligations are established by San Francisco’s Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance. (evection-related provisions) The gist of it is this, if the landlord wants you to vacate your apartment, he can only do so for any of 14 specific reasons spelled out in the ordinance. The 11^th possible reasonis his need to rehabilitate any portion of the building that would necessitate your departure. In that case, the landlord is required to: obtain any necessary permits on or before the date that you are notified that you are being required to vacate; provide you with written notice that plans and permits are on file that you may view in city offices; pay you your actual costs for moving of up to $1,000, not less than 10 days prior to the date the landlord takes possession of your unit; and perform the work in the minimum necessary time. He is prohibited from requiring you to vacate for more than 3 months without the permission of an administrative law judge at the rent board.

The rent board also maintains rules . These rules (e.g. 12.15 – 12.17) add the requirements that the landlord provide the tenant with copies of the permits, a description of the work to be done and a reasonable approximate date that the tenant can return on or before the date of service of the notice to vacate. The rules clarify that the landlord is obligated to pay for the move back as well as the move out but it is ambiguous as to whether there is an additional limit of $1,000. The storage of personal property, insurance of personal property while in storage or transit and the reasonable replacement value of property lost stolen or damaged, the cost of dismantling and reassembling property, the cost of reconnecting public utilities and the difference in rent for the period of displacement are all obligations of the landlord. If he knows or should know that repairs will take longer than 3 months he is required to file a petition with the rent board with copies to the tenants and a hearing is required on such a petition within 30 days.

In the past, our landlord has, we believe, pretended to an “emergency” as an excuse to kick tenants out. Beware of this argument. We see nothing in the ordinance or the rules that provides the landlord unilateral authority to declare an emergency and thereby require a tenant to vacate. The obligations imposed by the rent board rules (e.g. 12.19) related to emergencies fall only upon the landlord. He is obligated to re-offer the unit to the tenant that was forced out, not by the landlord but by fire or other natural disaster, within 30 days of completion of repairs. The only reasonable interpretation of this rule is that it presupposes that the tenant had already vacated as a result of the disaster.

In the event that the landlord wants you to vacate your apartment so that he can make renovations (such as to eliminate mold or asbestos), you may wish to enforce your legal rights as landlords generally tend to disregard these laws and their legal obligations and they get away with it when the tenants do not know their rights and do not enforce them, despite the fact that such violations could send landlords to jail in extreme cases. The rent board staff are not supposed to give you legal advice and I have found the rent board to be a waste of time. I recommend that you find a good lawyer who specializes in landlord/tenant law. How to find a qualified attorney to assist you may be the subject of an article in the future.