Dept. of Fair Employment & Housing v. 1105 Alta Loma Road Apartments, LLC

In Dept. of Fair Employment & Housing v. 1105 Alta Loma Road Apartments, LLC (2007) 154 Cal.App.4th 1273 (DFEH), the Court held that an action against a landlord for disability discrimination for refusal to acknowledge or accommodate a tenant's disability in removing an apartment building from the rental market, and evicting the tenant under the Ellis Act was also not subject to the SLAPP statute. (Id. at pp. 1284-1285.) As in Marlin, the DFEH Court assumed the landlord's "acts of filing and serving notices of its intent to remove its residential units from the rental market, . . . and its filing and prosecuting its unlawful detainer actions against the tenant constituted" protected activities. (Id. at p. 1283.) However, the Court also found the landlord was not sued because it filed the notices, or because it communicated with the tenant in connection with the eviction process, or even because it filed an unlawful detainer action against her. Although the suit may have been "triggered by" the landlord's filing, serving and processing of the paperwork necessary to remove its units from the rental market, and its filing of an unlawful detainer action, it was not sued because it undertook those protected activities. Rather, the gravamen of the tenant's complaint arose from the landlord's discriminatory failure to accommodate her disability, by extending her tenancy for a year. (Id. at pp. 1284, 1287-1288.)