Unfinished Business in Santa Barbara Landlord-Tenant Dispute

Last week seemed like a move in a positive direction in the nearly year-long conflict between the tenants of a West Beach apartment complex and the property’s owners, when the landlords’ lawyers offered the 14 remaining tenants a chance to sign a lease renewal to stay — though they would have to agree to some new provisions and move into different units on the property.

But this development didn’t do much to assuage the tenants’ concerns over the eviction notices that caused this panic in the first place, and as their attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation looked deeper into the renewal agreements, the veneer of a bona-fide good-faith offer began to fade in the fine print. And when one of the tenants, Mike Aracic, got a look into the unit he was supposed to be moving into, he was shocked to find what he described in an email sent to property owners, city officials, and media as a “gutted” apartment, with  “holes in the floor and rodent droppings on the filthy, ancient refrigerator.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” he asked in the message directed to landlord James Knapp. “The unit you offered me as part of this recent ‘agreement’ is not only not remotely equivalent … but it’s also completely uninhabitable.”

Aracic’s message reflects the sentiments of his fellow tenants, who feel as though the renewal offers were an empty gesture and attempt to court public opinion by Knapp and his partners of the Koto Group, whose conduct, Aracic said, “remains wildly unprofessional.”

In an email response, which was also sent to all parties, Knapp wrote that the unit “is still under construction” and that work to address the aging building “has been underway for the past few months.”

“Per the letter you received,” Knapp wrote, “we are offering you an equivalent replacement unit,” which “will be available in the next few months once completed.” They allowed Aracic to view the unit at his request, though Knapp said “no one at any point has indicated that you would move into a unit under construction.”

Attorneys for the tenants and landlords are working behind closed doors to address Legal Aid’s concerns with the offers — including the fact they reference 11 attachments that weren’t provided in the documents — while the tentative two-week deadline for tenants to sign their leases was unofficially extended in the meantime. But the unpolished offer, like the unfinished units and the unanswered questions over the Koto Group’s plans for international student housing, leave the tenants hesitant to sign their names on the renewals.

Further complicating matters are the criminal and civil cases making their way through the courts. Knapp is currently facing three criminal misdemeanor charges for ”terminating tenancy without just cause,” failure to abide by the city’s just-cause ordinance, and neglecting to serve appropriate permits with the notices to tenants.

Knapp’s attorney Robert Forouzandeh filed a civil suit against the city in response, a lawsuit that claims the city’s criminal charges go “far beyond the specific remedy that state law allows city attorneys to pursue.” The criminal case, Forouzandeh says, is a purely “politically motivated prosecution that is in violation of state law,” which “should never have been filed and should be dismissed.”

On Tuesday, Forouzandeh met with Assistant City Attorney Denny Wei and Judge Clifford Anderson in closed chambers for more than 40 minutes in the latest hearing regarding the criminal case, which was continued for a readiness and settlement conference on October 7. This delay would allow some of the dust to settle regarding the renewal offers and civil lawsuit — with the condition that no more harm be done to tenants in the interim.

“We’re waiting to see what’s going on next with the civil case,” Wei told the Independent, though he said he could not provide more details due to it being an ongoing case.

The criminal case is the first time the city has pursued a landlord for specifically breaking the portions of the just-cause ordinance that were updated in the past two years in order to protect tenants from the process of renoviction, in which landlords evict tenants by serving a notice that their unit will be under “substantial renovation.”

City officials updated the ordinance in March 2023 to require landlords to acquire permits for all work they claimed was needed and provide copies of the permits to tenants when serving notices. In the case of 215 Bath Street, the city prosecutor argues that Knapp did not have just cause or provide the proper permit information in their January 31 notice to tenants, which only included permit numbers for minor electrical and plumbing work.

Stanley Tzankov, a co-founder of the Santa Barbara Tenants Union who has provided support to the members of the Bath Tenants Association through every step of this process, says that the recent tenant protections were passed, despite pushback from several councilmembers, due to “consistent, bold, and effective groundswell of working-class tenants and allies speaking truth to power over these last couple of years.”

“The most important provision that seemingly helped the tenants who weren’t forced out of their homes was the stronger requirements that adequate permitting be provided before noticing,” Tzankov said “This was an area where we could see that the owners of 215 Bath Street were clearly entitled to operating with reckless disregard for these types of common-sense rules and finally got tripped up by that. This is new in our area and it demonstrates how desperately these permit requirements have been needed.”