Los Angeles Has Mapped Every Building's Rent Control Status

Los Angeles's extreme housing shortage has nearly two-thirds of Angelenos paying way more than they can afford toward their rent. To try and increase access to information about the dwindling supply of rent-stabilized housing in the city, Mayor Eric Garcetti's announced that information about whether or not a building is rent-controlled will now be listed on the city's zoning and planning website, ZIMAS.

Those who are lucky enough to live in rent-stabilized units (there are around 118,000 in play in LA right now, making up "about 85 percent of the city's rental housing stock") have a lot of protections available to them, but some people might not know whether their home is rent-controlled or not. The hope is that by including a building's rent-stabilized status on ZIMAS, more people in these units will be aware that these protections apply to them.

Another new feature added to ZIMAS is information on whether a building's owners have applied to use the Ellis Act, which is supposed to allow aging landlords to get out of the rental game, but usually translates into the evictions of a lot of rent-stabilized tenants as owners convert to expensive condos or hotel rooms. Ellis Act properties can't go back on the rental market for at least five years, and by tacking this information onto a property's ZIMAS page, "the City and stakeholders [can] better monitor properties that have been removed from the City's rental stock,' the release says. Ellis Act evictions doubled in LA from 2013 to 2014, so there are lots more properties in this category to keep track of.
· Mayor Garcetti Announces New Access to Information on L.A.'s Rent-Stabilized Buildings [Official Release]
· 10 Los Angeles Renters' Rights Your Landlord Doesn't Want You to Know [Curbed LA]
· 58.5 Percent of Los Angeles Renters Can't Afford Their Rent [Curbed LA]
· Mass Rent-Control Evictions Doubled in Los Angeles Last Year [Curbed LA]