San Francisco Legislative Update (Archives): Daly Amendment to the Rent Ordinance

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Ordinance 57-02, also known as the Daly Amendment to the Rent Ordinance, was an effort to conform landlord-tenant interactions with the price ceiling and eviction control regulations of the Rent Ordinance. Among other things, it required that a landlord needed to have a present intent to evict before entering any buyout agreement. (The goal was to avoid the “Ellis bluff” – or the threat of evicting pursuant to the Ellis Act to urge a tenant to enter a buyout, where the landlord received the benefits of a vacated unit without the statutory constraints against re-renting that come with the Ellis Act.) It voided any waiver of tenants’ rights under the Rent Ordinance, unless the tenant had independent counsel and the waiver was approved by a court or a retired judge. And it imposed misdemeanor penalties for violations of these provisions.

The Daly Amendment was approved on May 2, 2002 and challenged shortly after by a group of landlords, tenants, and San Francisco real estate attorneys, as seen in the case Baba v. Bd. of Sup’rs of City & Cty. of San Francisco (2004) 124 Cal. App. 4th 504.

In Baba, Division Two of the First District Court of Appeal determined that the Daly Amendment violated several rights of both landlords and tenants. The prohibition against negotiating a buyout without a present intent to evict violated landlords’ speech rights for communications that, even if they were inherently commercial in nature, were not inherently false or misleading, and therefore deserved certain minimal protection. It determined that the requirement that tenants have independent counsel in entering court-approved settlement agreements violated their rights to self-representation in civil proceedings. Finally, it determined that the conduct that was the focus of criminal liability was speech – the regulations constituted content-based speech regulation.

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