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Critique is important, but constantly celebrating when someone with perceived privilege has property stolen or is injured or whatever is damaging to society and our own selves.
Thoughts and prayers.
I mean, I can think of people even more deserving, but in the end, charging 3 grand per month for what looks like a room with at least one code violation should be considered some kind of moral failing.
NYC, where I live, has effectively banned Airbnb recently. It’s a great change. LA should do it too.
It's not like he is buying up properties specifically to rent out on AirBnB.
He's renting out his guest house, which is attached to his main house, and he's owned it since 1990.
Congrats on turning over all rentals to large, soulless corporations. You think you have problems now? Ha!
But he tried to run a hotel out of his house instead, because it could be more profitable, and the externalities wouldn’t affect him.
Oh well.
He did have a long term lease with her. From the ladies lawyer:
> “This is not a short-term Airbnb — it was a long term rental, they had a separate long term rental agreement and there’s documentation to prove it. In fact, the City of Los Angeles has sent multiple letters to Jovanovic outlining to him why his conduct is illegal and must cease.”
That's the whole premise of this legal loophole. He didn't have the permits to rent long term, yet did so because airbnb makes it easy and he didn't know the law.
Then he was nice and let her stay longer, which gave airbnb an out for liability.
Then she realized she had an ace up her sleeve and is milking the system to get a payout.
The net result is that this lady wins, but society loses because people will read this, and start question if it's actually worth taking advantage of SB9 and building that ADU for long-term leases, if something like this can happen if you make a single mistake with the law or rental ordinances.
This type of thing just hurts housing availability, and drives consolidation to corporate landlords.
He chose not to register his guest house as a short-term rental prior to putting it on AirBnB, even though the law had been on the books for several years before he started. But that doesn't matter, because he allowed this tenant to stay for more than 30 days, so the tenancy was not subject to the short-term rental regulations.
But even before that, he chose not to have his guest house permitted for occupancy, which requires some paperwork and a building inspection. This is probably why he didn't register his guest house as a short-term rental, but it is also the reason he's in this mess, since the lack of an occupancy permit is the reason he can't evict his tenant for nonpayment of rent. (Los Angeles's eviction moratorium ended earlier this year, see https://cityattorney.lacity.gov/tenant-protections)
He also made unpermitted changes to shower (in this context, meaning he failed to get a permit for the shower from the building department before commencing the work), which would have brought it out of compliance with the building code, even assuming it had been properly permitted for occupancy.
The problem is that it was permitted as an ADU, and sons of the work was not permitted, because the owner landlord was too cheap to get the proper permitting. The cure was for him to get the proper permitting, which the article makes clear he had yet to do.
The ironclad assurance is a legal system, that allows you to evict when one side breaks the agreement, which failed ridiculously in this case.