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HOUSING - The real estate industry continues to use a little-known state law called the Ellis Act to destroy tens of thousands of affordable housing apartments in California, fueling the housing affordability and homelessness crises. Housing activists have fought for years to repeal or reform the harmful law, but the real estate industry has used its vast political connections to stop any change. As a result, California continues to lose affordable housing units year after year, with no way of getting them back.
Passed in 1985, the Ellis Act allows a landlord to evict tenants in a rent-controlled building so a property owner can leave the rental market. The law was intended to help small landlords who could no longer tend to their rental property and needed a way out. Since then, the Ellis Act has increasingly become a tool for Big Real Estate to buy a rent-controlled building, evict tenants, and then turn the property into luxury condominiums or a boutique hotel, which was not the original intention of the law.
“It’s abused by corporate landlords and developers,” says Larry Gross, executive director of Coalition for Economic Survival in Los Angeles, “who destroy affordable housing and replace it with luxury housing.”
The Ellis Act applies to any California city that has rent-controlled apartments – from San Francisco to Santa Monica to Los Angeles.
For San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project created databases that show the serious damage that’s been done to those cities’ affordable housing stock.
In San Francisco, between 1994 and 2022, there were 5,549 Ellis Act evictions. With roughly two people per household in that city, that’s around 11,098 residents who have lost affordable housing. That number has only increased when adding data from 2023 through 2025.
In Los Angeles, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project teamed up with Coalition for Economic Survival to create an Ellis Act database. With an interactive map that appropriately shows an explosion with each eviction, the figures are grim: between 2001 and 2025, 31,469 Ellis Act evictions have taken place in L.A. With an average household size of 2.8 persons, roughly 88,113 people have been impacted.
Los Angeles is the California city that’s been most devastated by the Ellis Act, losing at least 31,469 rent-controlled apartments – forever.
“The loss of affordable housing [in L.A.] is actually much greater,” says Gross, noting the many Ellis Act evictions are done under the radar.
Activists have no doubt that the Ellis Act has fueled the housing affordability and homelessness crises in California. First, high-priced luxury housing is replacing rent-controlled units, resulting in less affordable housing stock and vastly higher rents and contributing to the housing affordability crisis. Second, when people lose their rent-controlled apartments, there’s the definite prospect of homelessness.
“People who are tossed out of their affordable units can’t easily find similar housing,” says Larry Gross, “so they end up on the street.”
That’s backed up by a 2023 UC San Francisco study that found Californians are most often pushed into homelessness because of sky-high rents.
Gross notes that residents evicted by the Ellis Act routinely “end up paying two or three times what they’re currently paying” for their rent-controlled unit. Alarmingly, Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, found that unaffordable housing is linked to higher mortality rates.
The Ellis Act, in other words, negatively impacts Californians’ well being.
“We’re never going to address our housing affordability crisis without repealing the Ellis Act,” says Gross. “We need to build more affordable housing and preserve existing affordable housing. If we don’t do both, we’re just spinning our wheels.”
Like many activists, he’s bringing up a sensible, multi-pronged approach to the housing affordability and homelessness crises called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other protections; preserve existing affordable housing, don’t demolish it for luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.
Gross has been a veteran housing justice activist for decades. Asked why state politicians haven’t repealed or reformed the Ellis Act, he says, “It all goes back to the money and political power of the real estate/landlord lobby.”
He’s referring to such lobbying groups as the California Apartment Association and the California Association of Realtors, who are bankrolled by real estate companies. Using corporate landlord money, the CAA has delivered millions in campaign cash to buy political influence and favors from city and state elected officials.
Gross says without equivocation about the Ellis Act: “It’s a failed housing policy – because you’re never going to replace the affordable housing units that you’re losing.”
Housing justice activists will continue to fight for the repeal of California’s Ellis Act.
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(Patrick Range McDonald is an award-winning author and journalist, honored by the Los Angeles Press Club as Journalist of the Year and for Best Activism Journalism, and by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for Public Service. He serves as an advocacy journalist for Housing Is a Human Right and is a regular contributor to CityWatch, focusing on housing, homelessness, and social justice issues in Los Angeles and beyond.)
