You're listening to Bill Handel on demand from KFI AM 640.

This is Handel on the law, marginal legal advice where I tell you you have absolutely no case.

I want to visit again COVID.

And as I said, when COVID first became big news and almost a million Americans died of COVID and the way we reacted and starting the testing and then coming up with the vaccines and just the politics between Biden and the Trump administrations in terms of dealing with the vaccines.

In the middle of all that, Los Angeles, which is very pro-renter, it has a very strict rent control ordinance where rents cannot be raised more than whatever the rent stabilization board allows 2%, 3% a year.

While the state of California allows up to 10% a year, but areas that are rent controlled, can the rents are and can be reduced.

Okay, so Los Angeles has rent control,

and during COVID, the city said that you cannot evict people who are in the COVID areas

for not paying their rent.

And therefore, we, the renters, don't have to pay for that time.

You couldn't evict us. Maybe we owe the money, but there's all kinds of programs.

We don't have to pay it.

So it ended up happening, a coalition of apartment owners who said they rent over 4,800

units in luxury apartment communities, mainly to high-income tenants are suing, suing the city now

asking for $20 million in damages from tenants who did not pay their rent.

Because here's what happened uh you

couldn't force them out and at the same time uh you couldn't collect their rent until the COVID

epidemic was declared over and these people just stiffed the landlords and off they went

mean they owed the money but they hadn't paid for a year.

They hadn't paid for two years and that rent racked up and they just left.

Well, this organization is suing the city for $20 million in damages.

Not because of rent control, which the Supreme Court has ruled over and over again,

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