LA Tenants Have Won a Breakthrough Against Landlord Abuse

Because the Highland Park tenants had occupied their four-unit rent-stabilized building for decades, their rents were significantly below market rate. When a new landlord, Andrew Izquierdo, purchased the building in 2024, he immediately began waging a campaign to have the tenants vacate their homes.

Izquierdo first attempted to raise their security deposits by $1,000, although he ultimately lowered the increases after tenants notified him of rent increase adjustment regulations under Los Angeles’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Then he informed tenants that they would only be allowed to park the number of cars listed in their leases, which for most tenants was one car, but for one tenant was zero. The former landlord had permitted them to park as many cars as needed — a number which, as their children grew up, had increased, although the leases were never amended to reflect this. When tenants didn’t comply and continued to park in front of the building and in a garage on the lot, the landlord sent a tow truck to remove the cars from the premises.

Hector Chairez Rojas, who has lived in the building for twenty-seven years, described in an interview watching his truck be towed onto the aboveground train tracks behind the building and trying to defend his vehicle. “My family, especially my kids, were really humiliated by what happened, and one of them is in therapy because of this.” When the tow truck driver offered to leave the cars in exchange for money, Chairez Rojas told him, “I’m not going to give you any money, because it’s not my fault that the cars are being towed. If anybody needs to pay, it’s the landlord.”

Ultimately, residents and members of the Los Angeles Tenant Union, whom tenants had contacted for support, were able to prevent the cars from being towed. But the harassment continued. The landlord cut down a garden that tenants had planted and tended for years. He also offered cash-for-keys to a family cohabiting one of the units alongside another tenant — an offer the family ultimately accepted. When the other tenant, Otto Tojin, a senior citizen, refused to accept a cash-for-keys offer, the landlord filed an eviction notice against him.

Tojin ultimately went to court and won. But soon after the eviction hearing, construction workers showed up at the building to install plywood in Tojin’s unit, which effectively barricaded him in his room, separating him from the kitchen, living room, and bathroom, which they subsequently began demolishing. His neighbor, Chairez Rojas, arrived alongside members of LATU to block the demolition. Eventually the police got involved, the construction was stopped, and tenants took down the plywood so Tojin could regain access to the kitchen and bathroom. The crew, however, had a key to the apartment and repeatedly returned and entered the apartment without Tojin’s permission while the other neighbors were at work and continued renovating.

Around this time, Ben Cassorla, Housing and Tenant Deputy with Council District 1, who had heard about the issues with the building, contacted Mario Torres, who has lived in the building since the 1990s, and began helping the tenants report the illegal construction work to the city. When an inspector visited and realized that there was a tenant living in the unit, the inspector issued a stop-work order and informed the tenants that the landlord had listed the unit as vacant when he applied for a renovation permit. But the crew kept returning in violation of the stop-work order and continued to carry out unpermitted work.

Eventually, after tenants repeatedly attempted to prevent the crew from carrying out the work, the construction crew returned flanked by armed security guards. Torres said the guards “were saying they’re police officers. They didn’t have badges or anything, but they did have guns, and they were saying that they have permits to do the construction and that they were going to do it regardless of what we say. That’s when people from the tenant union put out a quick response in the chat to anybody that’s around to come and support us, to see what’s going on.”

Tenants say police also showed up but didn’t intervene or check the work permits, and the work continued for a number of days. The armed guards also returned. In one instance, tenants say the guards attempted to intimidate Tojin as he was leaving the building by insinuating that they were ICE agents, exploiting the current political climate in the city and illustrating the often sinister and cruel tactics pursued by landlords to terrorize tenants and force them out of their homes. Torres said of Tojin: “If it wasn’t for the tenant union and us unionizing right here in the building, who knows where he’d be by now?”

The tenants documented everything that was happening in the building, from the armed guards and unauthorized entry to the ongoing unpermitted construction work, and Torres repeatedly filed paperwork with the city to notify them of further violations. They also organized a protest with LATU and some of their neighbors, and around a hundred people showed up and marched to the offices of the real estate and property management company, Las Casas Realty, which Izquierdo owns with his family, demanding the return of their parking spots and much-needed maintenance and repairs.

Tenants also persuaded inspectors from the city to investigate a variety of habitability and health and safety issues in the building. When the landlord failed to remediate those issues, a judge placed the building in the city’s Rent Escrow Account Program (REAP) and awarded tenants a 50 percent rent reduction. The 50 percent is paid into an escrow account managed by the city until the landlord resolves the outstanding issues. After the tenants filed further complaints with the city, the landlord, seemingly in an effort to retaliate, stopped paying the gas bill and tenants were notified that the water heater would no longer work. With the help of Cassorla, however, tenants were able to negotiate a deal with SoCalGas to use funds from the REAP account to pay the bill and keep the gas on.

Meanwhile, the tenants had been filing TAHO complaints with LAHD. On June 5, 2025, the city attorney filed ten criminal charges against Izquierdo, and on August 4, 2025, Izquierdo received the first ever ACE citations for TAHO violations, all of which centered on issues associated with the unpermitted construction work — they did not include the armed guards posing as police or ICE agents and attempting to intimidate tenants.

The tenants’ organizing within the building and with LATU, as well as their painstaking work of documenting the landlord’s practices and repeated filings of complaints with the city (both with LAHD and the Department of Public Health) were the most integral components of securing this unprecedented victory. But the recent passage of several amendments to TAHO appears to have played a key role as well — especially considering that, over the last four years, numerous other tenant groups have carried out similar campaigns and filed over twenty-one thousand TAHO complaints alleging harassment against landlords without LAHD holding landlords accountable by enforcing its own ordinance. The consequences for those tenants have been grave, forcing thousands to continue living in conditions that pose threats to their mental or physical well-being, or forcing tenants out of their homes by enabling landlords to illegally secure tenant turnover via harassment.

The passage of TAHO 2.0, the designation given to the TAHO amendments, was the result of a campaign led by the city’s tenant movement beginning in 2022. Seeing and living with the severe consequences of the original TAHO’s ineffectiveness, tenants and tenant advocacy groups launched a campaign to reformulate and expand TAHO in order to give it more teeth. The groups involved, spearheaded by the Keep LA Housed coalition, devised several TAHO amendments to render it more effective and enforceable before attempting to garner political support for a TAHO 2.0. The city council passed the measure in an 11–0 vote on November 6, 2024, and the stronger protections, which included many of the amendments formulated by the tenant groups, went into effect at the end of 2024.

Under TAHO 2.0, the definition of harassment has been expanded and redefined as constituting a landlord’s “bad faith” conduct, which is “willful, reckless, or grossly negligent,” intended to disrupt tenancy, and directed at a specific tenant or tenants, causing the latter detriment or harm. The amended ordinance also prohibits refusal to accept rent payments while rendering harassment an affirmative defense in eviction cases, regardless of the factuality of allegations in the eviction notice. Moreover, under TAHO 2.0, tenants prevailing in court are entitled to triple the compensatory financial damages — including for mental and emotional distress — and relocation assistance if applicable, as well as to attorney fees. In the original TAHO, attorneys were not guaranteed payment for winning TAHO cases, making it nearly impossible for tenants who couldn’t afford legal fees to find attorneys willing to take on their cases, effectively leaving TAHO enforceable only by the city as opposed to by tenants via civil lawsuits.

Taken together, these changes to TAHO are intended to strengthen the ordinance and its enforcement and to create a financial deterrent to ensure landlord compliance. In an interview with Jacobin, City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez from District 1, where the Highland Park building is located, highlighted the importance of the amendments to the ordinance, while also cautioning that the policy will likely need further tweaks down the line:

I’ve seen what it looks like when tenants are harassed to the point of having physical ailments, of them giving up and losing their housing, and having to move out of a city that they’ve lived in for decades . . . No policy is perfect, particularly when we talk about implementation. We could have the best policy, but if we can’t implement it as a city, it’s going nowhere. I would like to see more investment in the implementation of TAHO 2.0, and hopefully the city attorney steps up and starts filing more of these cases, and then we can reflect, look at the data, and do an analysis. Are there changes that we need to make? Are there gaps that still exist?

Cassorla, the Housing and Tenant Deputy from CD1, says that since the passage of TAHO 2.0, TAHO enforcement appears to be given higher priority within LAHD and response times to inquiries about TAHO infractions are shorter. Hopefully, the Highland Park tenants’ recent victory is also indicative of greater implementation of the ordinance moving forward — although for the thousands of tenants who’ve already been harassed out of their homes, such implementation obviously falls short.

The next court date for landlord Andrew Izquierdo, who pled not guilty to all ten charges, is December 10, and the tenants plan to attend the hearing. In the meantime, says Chairez Rojas, the tenants want to spread the word about their landlord’s practices to prevent him from doing the same things to other tenants and to bring those people into the tenant movement. And, Torres says, they want to help other tenants in similar situations replicate their actions, to ensure that “they know how to do it, they know the resources, they know how to organize, they know who to reach out to, and they know what to do when it’s happening. Just document everything.”

Torres added, “Reach out to your local tenant union, reach out to your city officials, send in complaints. We want to create a blueprint for the people who will be going through this pretty soon or who are currently going through it.”