A Month's Rent, Not a Extra Warning Letter: Why LA's Eviction Rule Survived a Landlord Lawsuit

Cities and the state of California are constantly wrestling over who gets to write the rules for evictions. Landlords say state law sets the process, and cities can't slow it down. Cities say they have real power to protect tenants. In April 2026, a California appeals court had to referee exactly this fight — and the outcome hinged on a distinction that sounds technical but actually matters a lot: the difference between a "substantive" rule and a "procedural" one.

This is the story of Apartment Association of Los Angeles County v. City of Los Angeles.

The Backdrop

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles put temporary protections in place that made it harder to evict tenants — including tenants who'd fallen behind on rent. As those emergency protections were set to expire in 2023, the LA City Council didn't just let things snap back to normal. It passed two permanent ordinances instead.

The first, called the Eviction Threshold Ordinance, said a landlord couldn't even start the eviction process for nonpayment of rent until the tenant owed more than one full month of "fair market rent" — a number set every year by the federal government for comparable apartments in the LA area. In other words, if a tenant owed less than that threshold amount, the landlord legally couldn't evict them for nonpayment yet, no matter how many days had passed.

The second ordinance required landlords to pay relocation assistance to certain tenants who moved out after a big, otherwise-legal rent increase.

A landlord trade group, the Apartment Association of Los Angeles County (also known as AAGLA), sued the city, arguing both ordinances were illegal because they conflicted with — and were therefore preempted by — California state law.

Substantive vs. Procedural: Why This Distinction Runs the Whole Case

To understand this case, you need to understand one core legal concept: in California, cities are allowed to pass laws that add new substantive requirements for evicting a tenant — things like requiring a legitimate reason (a "just cause") to evict someone at all. What cities generally can't do is mess with the procedure the state has already set up for how eviction lawsuits move through the court system once a legitimate reason to evict already exists.

Think of it this way: California's eviction law (called the Unlawful Detainer Act) is a fast-track legal process. Once a landlord has valid grounds to evict — say, a tenant hasn't paid rent despite getting the state-required three-day notice — the landlord can use this streamlined court process to get the tenant out quickly. Cities can change what counts as valid grounds for eviction (substance). But cities generally can't tack extra procedural hoops onto that fast-track process itself once valid grounds already exist — extra notices, extra waiting periods, extra paperwork requirements layered on top of the state's process.

This distinction has come up in several California cases before this one. In one earlier case, a Pasadena ordinance required landlords to send tenants a formal "Written Notice to Cease" and give them extra time to fix a rent problem before even sending the state-required legal notice. Courts struck that down — it was seen as a classic procedural add-on, tacking a whole new step onto the state's existing timeline. Similarly, a San Francisco ordinance requiring an extra 10-day warning-and-cure period before certain evictions was also struck down as improperly procedural.

But in another earlier case, a San Francisco ordinance that simply blocked no-fault evictions of families with school-age kids during the school year was upheld — because it didn't add any extra steps or paperwork. It just changed when eviction was allowed at all, based on substantive circumstances (whether school was in session). Even though that rule obviously delayed some evictions, courts called it substantive, not procedural, because it didn't require landlords to do anything extra — it just limited when the underlying grounds for eviction existed.

Where LA's Eviction Threshold Ordinance Landed

The appeals court concluded LA's ordinance was much more like that second example than the first.

Here's why: the Eviction Threshold Ordinance doesn't require landlords to send any extra notices, wait through any extra warning periods, or take any additional affirmative steps beyond what state law already requires. It doesn't touch the three-day notice process at all. What it does is simpler — it changes the underlying financial trigger for when nonpayment becomes a valid reason to evict in the first place. Instead of "any amount of unpaid rent" being enough to start the clock, LA said the threshold has to be at least one month's fair market rent.

The court explained that yes, this will often mean it takes longer, in practice, for landlords to reach the point where they can evict someone for nonpayment. A tenant who's a little behind on rent — but not a full month's worth behind — simply doesn't meet the ordinance's bar yet. That's a real, practical delay. But the court found that this kind of delay is a side effect of a substantive rule, not evidence that the rule is secretly procedural. The ordinance measures the threshold in dollars owed, not in days elapsed — and that distinction, the court said, is what keeps it on the "substantive" side of the line.

The landlord association tried to argue that even if the ordinance was substantive, LA had gone too far — essentially trying to gut nonpayment of rent as a valid ground for eviction altogether. The court rejected that too, pointing out that the ordinance doesn't eliminate nonpayment as grounds for eviction; it just delays when that ground kicks in. The court declined to speculate about whether LA could go even further in the future (like raising the threshold sky-high, or banning nonpayment evictions entirely) — that wasn't the question in front of it. For the ordinance actually being challenged, the city was well within its broad authority to regulate the substantive grounds for eviction within its own borders.

What Happened to the Second Ordinance?

While the eviction threshold rule survived, the case's second half didn't go LA's way. The relocation assistance ordinance — which required landlords to pay tenants extra money when they moved out after a big, legal rent increase — was struck down. The court found that this rule conflicted with a different state law (the Costa-Hawkins Act) that specifically gives landlords the right to raise certain units to full market rent without penalty. Requiring a payout every time a landlord used that legal right, the court reasoned, effectively punished landlords for doing something state law explicitly allows — which crosses the line into an actual conflict with state law, not just an added substantive condition.

Why This Case Matters

This decision draws a clearer picture of exactly how far California cities can push local tenant protections without running into a preemption problem. A city can raise the bar for what counts as a legitimate reason to evict someone — even if doing so predictably slows down the eviction process — as long as it doesn't tack new procedural requirements onto the state's existing fast-track eviction machinery. Extra notices and mandatory waiting periods bolted onto the process itself are a bridge too far; changing the underlying financial or factual threshold for when eviction becomes valid in the first place is fair game.

Worth noting: this case is still in motion. The California Supreme Court has already agreed to review it, so this isn't necessarily the last word — landlords, tenants, and cities across California watching this fight closely may see the rules shift again before it's finally resolved.