Last month, a noise complaint at an East Chula Vista apartment complex escalated into a violent brawl. The struggle ended with one resident stabbed with a broken bottle and six people arrested.
The October melee drew citywide attention, particularly from landlords’ industry groups like the Pacific Southwest Association of Realtors. They’ve blamed state and local efforts to protect renters, arguing those laws make it harder for property owners to kick out tenants who break the law.
In response, the Chula Vista City Council has launched a review of the city’s Tenant Protection Ordinance. City Councilmember Michael Inzunza said he wants to see changes that would make it easier for landlords to evict “nuisance tenants” and take legal action against them.
“This isn't even part of tenant protection,” Inzunza said at a recent City Council meeting. “This is about public safety.”
Tenants’ rights advocates, though, fear the October incident is being used to justify an effort to walk back important reforms passed in recent years. Gilberto Vera, a senior attorney at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, said the Tenant Protection Ordinance does not protect renters who commit crimes.
“My concern is that this is being used more as a guise to weaken the overall protections than addressing this type of behavior specifically,” Vera told KPBS.
The City Council is expected to hear possible changes to the ordinance by late January.
What the Tenant Protection Ordinance does
In a nutshell, Chula Vista’s Tenant Protection Ordinance makes it harder for landlords to evict renters who follow the terms of their lease and pay their rent on time — and gives the city more power to fine landlords who violate those rules or harass their tenants.
The City Council approved the ordinance in 2022. The law came amid fears that expiring state and federal eviction protections from the Covid-19 pandemic would lead to a surge in evictions.
However, none of those protections will shield tenants who violate their lease or break the law, said Jennifer Nations, the managing director of UC San Diego’s Homelessness Hub.
For example, Chula Vista’s ordinance specifies that a landlord could legally evict someone who is taking part in “criminal activity” or has made a “criminal threat” against them or other tenants. The ordinance also states they have the right to evict tenants who create a “nuisance” by disturbing other residents.
“It protects tenants who've been striving to live in a way that respects the property,” Nations said. “If a tenant is engaging in criminal behavior, there's absolutely no protection for them."
In 2023, the Homelessness Hub found Chula Vista had one of the highest rates of eviction lockouts in the county.
Three other cities in the county, San Diego, Imperial Beach and Lemon Grove, also have their own local tenant protection ordinances.
After Eastlake brawl, landlords’ groups urge changes
According to police, last month’s brawl began when a resident confronted neighbors about a loud party.
Videos of the fight published by NBC 7 show several people struggling with each other in a driveway at the Casa Lago apartment complex in Chula Vista’s Eastlake neighborhood. During the struggle, one person was allegedly stabbed with a broken bottle.
By the end of the brawl, officers had arrested and booked six people from the party for allegedly assaulting the first resident and another neighbor. The person who was stabbed was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.
Landlords’ industry groups highlighted the incident at a City Council meeting on Oct. 27, arguing the Tenant Protection Ordinance was at least partly to blame.
George Ching, a lobbyist with the Pacific Southwest Association of Realtors, said state and local protections prevented landlords from removing “dangerous people.”
Ching said the Council could amend the ordinance so it wouldn’t take effect as soon as a renter moves in. That, he argued, would give landlords an added window to evaluate their tenants.
“It creates sort of like a trial period,” Ching said. “Where, if there's problems because of this new tenant that has moved in, you don't have to worry about proving just-cause in order to provide a 30-day notice for the tenancy to end.”
(Vera, the housing attorney, argues that such a change would also enable landlords to discriminate against tenants.)
Molly Kirkland, communications director for the Southern California Rental Housing Association, argued landlords were also facing more hostile behavior. Many of their members, she said, had reported a rise in harassment and threats.
“This is a result of regulation, overlapping regulation,” Kirkland said. “We shouldn't be vilifying the owners and the managers here.”
Residents hold management company responsible
Some residents of the Casa Lago apartment complex see the situation differently.
At that same City Council meeting, several people who said they were residents of the complex blamed Willow Bridge Property Management, the company that manages the apartments.
Margarito Martin said a specific group of residents was responsible for disrupting the complex. He alleged they were using luxury apartments to throw large parties and had led to people driving drunk and crashing inside the complex.
But Martin said the primary responsibility lay with the property’s owners and Jorge Cabrera, Casa Lago’s property manager.
“He is the manager that has been mismanaging all of this, all of these problems,” Martin said. “He’s there to protect the big company, not us.”
Cabrera, who also attended the City Council meeting, told city officials that the company was taking legal action against the tenants involved. He told the City Council he was limited in what he could share but said the company had filed an “unlawful detainer,” or eviction lawsuit.
“To our residents, please know that we care deeply about our community and remain committed to supporting you,” Cabrera said.
What the City Council is looking at
Inzunza, whose district includes the Casa Lago apartments, has led the effort to roll back the city’s tenant protections.
In the aftermath of the fight, Inzunza swiftly organized a community meeting and told reporters that he blamed Covid-19-era protections for renters. In an Oct. 24 social media video, he encouraged people to show up at the City Council meeting and share their thoughts.
At the Oct. 27 City Council meeting, Inzunza pressed city staff to review the Tenant Protection Ordinance for any provisions that would “unnecessarily delay the removal of tenants engaged in serious misconduct.”
He also asked them to evaluate giving the city attorney’s office more power to inspect rental properties and document alleged violations by renters. Inzunza said he hoped that would help landlords gather evidence for if they needed to get a court order to remove their tenants.
“The objective is to provide stronger enforcement tools while preserving due process and protections for law abiding tenants,” Inzunza said.
Inzunza is part of a prominent South Bay political family with troubled ties to the rental industry.
His brother, former-National City Mayor Nicholas Inzunza, was a deeply negligent landlord. In 2005, a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation found Nicholas owned over 100 properties in poorer neighborhoods with no heat or hot water, broken toilets and numerous other violations — and was evicting tenants who spoke out.
During the meeting, some of Inzunza’s colleagues questioned the motivations behind the effort.
Councilmember Jose Preciado questioned whether landlords’ industry groups were incorrectly conflating the Tenant Protection Ordinance with the fight at Casa Lago.
City Attorney Marco Verdugo said it was possible that stricter documentation of tenant violations could help landlords in court. But he cautioned that eviction lawsuits were the purview of the state and said the city couldn’t expedite them.
One person who remained notably quiet during the meeting was Mayor John McCann.
McCann owns multiple rental properties in Chula Vista. He was barred from voting on the original Tenant Protection Ordinance by a state watchdog organization in 2022 and has previously recused himself from discussions relating to tenant protections.
Last month, McCann voted along with the rest of the City Council to approve Inzunza’s request.
‘A guise to weaken the overall protections’
To Vera, the housing attorney, the City Council’s discussion raises several key questions.
Firstly, he thinks the Council should ask whether these potential revisions to the Tenant Protection Ordinance would have changed the course of the October incident at Casa Lago.
In Vera’s view, that Eastlake apartment complex landlord would have been well within their rights to evict the tenants involved — even with the ordinance in place. If the City Council looks at delaying the protections from taking effect for 12 months for example, it’s not clear to him that would have led to a different outcome.
Vera also thinks the Council should consider whether these revisions could hurt other tenants who are following their lease and paying their rent on time.
His final question is whether the city has hard data on how many landlords experience problematic tenants. Vera pointed out that Chula Vista is the second-largest city in San Diego County.
“I don't want to minimize the extent of this issue and how it impacted those tenants,” Vera said. “But … it would seem, to me, drastic to make sweeping changes to an ordinance for a one-time thing.”
