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Now You See It, Now You Don’t: BH Landlord Names Disappear

Mark Elliot

We long relied on the city’s property information portal called CitySmart when researching Beverly Hills landlords. We use a variety of sources and methods to hold landlords accountable, of course, but the CitySmart portal provided one essential piece of information not easily available: the name of the landlord. Now in a major step backward for transparency the city has summarily removed from that portal all of the landlord names. What’s behind this bit of “now you see it, now you don’t” sleight-of-hand?

It seems like the city simply wanted to pull down the names of all landlords of rent-stabilized properties. Take for example this before-and-after comparison.

Until late 2021 each of the residential landlord names were shown on its page in the CitySmart property information portal. It was posted at the top right corner of the information window where a tenant could easily find it.

151 S Maple citysmart owner name
The landlord’s name used to show in the upper right corner of the city’s property information page.

Then in late 2021 each landlord name was gone. Not selectively but all of them were redacted. The city simply pulled the plug on the posting of them. There was no explanation. This screencap from November 2021 shows only an APN number where the landlord name used to be.

151 S Maple without landlord's name

Knowing the actual landlord’s name — be it an individual, trust, LLC or a corporation — is useful if a tenant wants to do her due diligence before renting. In fact that’s what landlords have urged tenants to do! But the fact of the matter is that a prospective tenant will have a difficult time researching a landlord because the landlord’s identity may well be unknown until the lease is presented for a signature.

There are alternative means to identifying the landlord but none is convenient. Land titles identify the property owner, for example, but that search is not available to the public without paying. A trip to the tax assessor’s office will provide a name.  And perhaps the easiest option is to file a public records act request with the city. There is no charge for it but you might wait weeks to obtain the requested information.

None of those methods will help a tenant advocate who might research multiple landlords in any given day on behalf of tenants. Indeed this represents a real blow for transparency. Unfortunately no amount of petitioning has succeeded in returning the landlord names to CitySmart. We haven’t even been able to get a definitive reason why the names were taken down!

City’s Reason #1: “Inaccurate” Data

We noticed the landlord names had disappeared en masse from the city’s website in November of 2021 and we promptly reached out to the administrator who is responsible for the City Smart platform. We asked, “Is this a temporary change?” The administrator’s reply:

This is not a temporary change. I don’t know the reason why this change was made, but I can understand how there could be many. I do know that ownership data comes from the assessor’s office and is not actively maintained in the system. Showing it has caused confusion. It was displayed with the use of an external process that aggregates data provided by the assessor’s office. Since data from the assessor’s office are delivered to us only a few times a year, the delay can cause this value to be inaccurate.

“Inaccurate” data? Stripping all landlord names for a potential few inaccuracies seemed like using a sledgehammer for a fly. Moreover we have, over the years, highlighted numerous inaccuracies in the CitySmart data. The city isn’t generally in a hurry to fix them. Why now?

We posted that question to the director of the Information Technology at City Hall using “I seem to recall that there was a state statute that indicated the owner name should be hidden,” said CTO David Schirmer. When we asked whether the deletion of the names came at the behest of his IT department or the Community Development Department (parent department of the rent stabilization office) he suggested we talk to the city manager.

City’s Reason #2: The Statute

We first took the question to the city’s Sunshine Task Force, which is a citizen-led body that meets monthly to identify local government practices that can be improved from a transparency perspective. The city attorney pointed to a state law that makes it unlawful to post the home addresses and telephone numbers of ‘officials’ as defined in the statute.

Government Code § 7928.200 does indeed prohibit the online posting or sale of personal identifying information of elected or appointed public officials. It is an exemption from the state’s public records access law. It has been in the news recently because public access advocates won the release of the names of law enforcement officers — the kind of pubic record that § 7928.200 was enacted to shield.

Where landlords are concerned this is the relevant language from Government Code § 7928.205:

No state or local agency shall post the home address or telephone number of any elected or appointed official on the internet without first obtaining the written permission of that individual.

To post means to “intentionally communicate or otherwise make available to the general public.” The CitySmart platform would certainly qualify as a posting because it is public. And ‘official’ is defined to include members of Congress and state legislators; mayors and city councilmembers; appointees of those officials plus judges, district attorneys, city attorneys, police chiefs and peace officers (§ 7920.500). As a class, landlords are neither elected nor appointed and so are not protected by this statute.

Moreover the statute was not enacted as a privacy measure but rather a protective measure given the divisive political atmosphere and increasingly strident ideological attacks characteristic of the past decade. So in addition to prohibiting public agencies from posting an official’s identifying information, the statute also enjoins private citizens and non-governmental organizations from posting the information when the intent is to “cause imminent great bodily harm” or threaten such harm. (Violations may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor however if actual bodily harm does result it may be prosecuted as a felony.)

Certainly our legislature and governor did NOT have in mind the protection of a landlord when enacting this statute. Yet Beverly Hills cited the statute as a reason to summarily remove all landlord names from CitySmart.

Statute as Pretext

While don’t know why all of the landlord names were removed from CitySmart, we can assume that the statute was nothing more than a pretext to remove the identifying information of landlords.

First, it appears that no landlord is an ‘official’ that is entitled to withhold disclosure pursuant to Government Code § 7928.200. According to landlord business licensees, more than half of the city’s roughly one thousand owners of rent-stabilized housing are non-persons: LLCs (334), trusts (131), limited partnerships (16), corporations (16), and entities labeled as some variation of a partnership (13). An entity cannot meet the definition of ‘official’ because an entity cannot be elected or appointed.

Second, very few persons can meet the definition of ‘official’ in Beverly Hills. Of roughly 1000 landlords only four are elected or appointed here in the city and we have come across not one landlord who we understand to have been elected or appointed outside of Beverly Hills.

Of the four known ‘officials’ in the city three are rent stabilization commissioners: Neal Baseman, Remmie Maden and Frances Miller. All were appointed by city council as landlord representatives to the commission. However the properties owned by these landlord-officials are held by LLCs or partnerships rather than owned by an individual. Those entities cannot meet the definition of an official so the statute presents to challenge to lawfully posting the owners-of-record for the properties controlled by the commissioners.

The other official is the elected treasurer Howard Fisher. He owns a rental property however he is not resident at that property. The statute presents no challenge to lawfully posting his name as the owner-of-record for that property because it is not his home address.

Indeed we haven’t discovered a single owner of Beverly Hills rent-stabilized housing for which identifying information would be redacted pursuant to Government Code § 7928.200. Why take all landlord names down citing the statute if it simply doesn’t apply? It can only be the pretext!

And secondly, a 9th circuit federal court in 2017 issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of Government Code § 7928.200 after the state forced a private party to remove the addresses of state legislators which were posted online by a blogger advancing a political message. Essentially the court deemed the statute unconstitutional.

The court’s decision is complicated but suffice to say that the plaintiffs largely prevailed because the court found that posting the officials’ home addresses was content-based speech, which is generally afforded protection under the first amendment; and moreover that in this context the posting of the addresses constituted “core political speech” which is afforded the greatest degree of first amendment protection.

Not only did the state not show a compelling need to protect from disclosure officials’ home addresses; the state didn’t even argue that the statute was narrowly-tailored to achieve the state’s objective of protecting officials from harm. The court concluded that the plaintiff would prevail on first amendment grounds. The home addresses were re-posted online.

We would argue that those factors apply in this instance too. We can’t force the city to post landlord names but we can call-out the city’s argument that the statute somehow prohibits landlord names from being posted. It is simply not true.

Silence is the Tell!

The sham of this pretext was laid bare when we asked the city to explain its reasoning. Nothing in the statute presents a valid reason not to post owner names, we said to city manager Nancy Hunt-Coffey last May. “Can you clarify what in that statute keeps the city from posting an owner’s name when that owner isn’t an ‘official’ who is living at that address?”

We are still wait for an answer. In the meanwhile tenants and tenant advocates have no easy means to learn exactly who owns the property where they live…and that seems to be the city’s reason for taking-down those names in late 2021.

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