The One-Year Written Lease Offer
The Impact on Rents and Student Housing
Prior to the pandemic, which feels like a very long time ago, the City of Santa Barbara was considering numerous tenant protection ordinances including just cause and relocation benefits.
During the numerous discussions and vociferous objections on both sides, the just cause ordinance was tabled, but they passed a “one-year written lease offer” ordinance that the council thought was only requiring landlords to have a written agreement and offer a tenant one-year lease at the onset of their term.
Not a lot of objections except a minor few that said that they liked starting a tenancy month-to-month because then they got to know the tenant a bit before committing to them long term. Try before you buy kind of thing.
Then the ordinance was written. The former city attorney borrowed from a template he had drafted in the bay area and tried to make it the law of the City of Santa Barbara without a second thought.
That’s when we legal eagles saw what was lurking in the details for the first time.
This proposed ordinance for a “written lease” added language to include the following:
The lease offer had to be done every year, even if the tenant declined year after year the landlord’s offer;
The lease offer had to include substantially similar terms, including rent;
Failure to offer the annual lease would give the tenant a perpetual affirmative defense for a landlord’s failure to offer the lease annually, even just once.