There’s trouble in paradise.

A 52-unit apartment complex two blocks from the beach in Santa Barbara is at the center of a community, legal and ethical firestorm that has pit tenant vs. landlord and sparked wider debate about renter protections and rent control.

Depending on who you ask, it’s a story in which tenants have been systematically evicted by greedy landlords over a two-year period in favor of bringing in international students who pay thousands of dollars more in rent per bed.

Or, it’s a story in which longtime local property owners, invested in the community, decided to buy a 100-year-old apartment building on the lower Westside, replace the electric and plumbing infrastructure, and raise the quality of living for tenants, while also increasing the rents to pay for all of the repairs.

Who’s right in this timeless drama of wealth vs. working class? It depends on your view of the world and the political chess game underway at 215 Bath St.

“The tenants are mad that when these units go back online, they are going to be rented for more money,” said Lacy Taylor, an attorney for Thyne, Taylor, Fox, Howard LLP who represents the property owners. “I want to make it clear that there have been hundreds of thousands of dollars — over $1 million — spent on renovating these units.

“To think that a landlord is not going to be allowed to increase the rents when the work is done is ridiculous.”

However, tenants in the three-building complex tell a different story — one of harassment, double standards and something far greater than a landlord/tenant dispute.

Last May, the City of Santa Barbara’s prosecution unit filed charges against the property manager alleging that he terminated 11 tenancies without just cause and failed to serve proper permits. The case is still working its way through court, and a readiness and settlement conference is scheduled for March 5.

The apartment complex has emerged as a symbol of a fierce debate in Santa Barbara over housing and rising rental costs in a city that has the second-highest poverty rate in the state and that is desperately in need of more affordable housing.

The tenants have aligned themselves with the Santa Barbara Tenants Union and Alex Entrekin, the area’s most powerful eviction defense attorney and an expert in tenant law.

“The tenants at 215 Bath are people who live and work in this community,” Entrekin said. “Many of them are well known, with friends and connections built over decades. The property owners have treated them without dignity, respect or rights under the law.  Theirs is not a fight for new rights. It is a struggle for basic respect and the right to live peacefully, protected under the law.”

The alliance has turned the dispute into a much broader conversation about the future of renters’ rights and rental protections in a city that has always been expensive to live in but during the past few years has exploded to the point of unaffordable for most working-class residents.

Entrekin has helped negotiate big money for the tenants who chose to leave and give up their fight against eviction. Some tenants have received upwards of $30,000 from the property owner to relocate, far more than the roughly $3,500 that is legally required and much higher than what other property owners pay for relocation expenses.

The property owners — Chris Parker, Austin Herlihy and James Knapp — have dangled such large checks and dozens of tenants have accepted. Herlihy has said that some of the tenants have asked for so much money that it feels like extortion.

Other tenants don’t have a price and have rejected cash offers, contending that $30,000 would not last very long in Santa Barbara and that there’s a larger play to be made.

Some of the tenants want to stay in their apartments until the City Council passes a “right-to-return” ordinance that prevents a property owner from increasing the rents more than 10% from what tenants paid before a building was renovated. So-called renovictions were thrust into the public eye when Chicago-based Core Spaces bought out an apartment building in Isla Vista and evicted more than 500 tenants.

Herlihy said that he and the other property owners are local and invested in the community, and not devils as they are portrayed. He and Parker, his business partner and vice president of the Hutton Parker Foundation, recently were part of the team that purchased the Tri-County Produce site, and they plan to build apartments and preserve the market.

They believe they are the target of a systematic attack to use their project as a poster child for the need for rent control, when all they are trying to do is improve the 100-year-old building that needed its electric and plumbing replaced to avoid fire and other potential problems at the site.

The politics may not be in their favor.

Two council members are working on a memo to present to the full council that would force a discussion on a right-to-return ordinance and an eventual vote on the matter. If such an ordinance passes, 215 Bath St. most likely would have to comply. How long such an ordinance would take to pass is unknown.

The tenants and their supporters are standing at the center of potential renter rights history if they can be the symbol of what goes wrong when landlords try to evict tenants over renovations. The City Council lacked enough votes to support a right-to-return ordinance in 2022, but there’s possible support on the council now to approve a measure.

“I don’t think the court case is going to stop it,” said Stanley Tzankov, co-founder of the Santa Barbara Tenants Union. “We need that cap upon return. As it stands right now, people can still get renovicted.”

“Beach Trash”

The remaining tenants said they feel disrespected. They talk about endless construction, several losses of power for eight hours at a time, and harassment. They contend that the property owners are purposely making their lives miserable as retaliation for not wanting to move.

It took years for Lisa Haworth to collect the hundreds of shells and pieces of driftwood that she found at the beach. She makes art from the treasures she discovers on the sand.

Haworth had set the items out in front of her apartment, a place that she once called her “Zen” and place of “joy and happiness.” She said she had the items outside for much of the past 10 years.

“It was a very beautiful display that I had,” Haworth said. “It was my personal artwork.”

However, it took only a few minutes for all of her stuff to get thrown into the trash. A worker, at the order of the property owners, disposed of the items in the garbage. She was told that they blocked a public balcony walkway and were a safety hazard for the workers who were renovating the building.

For Haworth, the incident last year was just one of a series of demeaning actions by the owners, a place where she has lived for 10 years and once enjoyed the sunsets and time at the pool.

She said she was devastated that her belongings were thrown away.

“It was beautiful,” Haworth said. “It wasn’t beach trash. Lacy, it’s not beach trash. I actually take painstaking hours to make my pieces.”

Haworth described hellish conditions living at 215 Bath St. She lives on the second floor, surrounded by vacant studios and apartments, after tenants took relocation money and moved on. Her cute, nicely decorated studio apartment overlooks the swimming pool. However, she said she has had to take matters into her own hands. She installed a video camera and an extra lock to serve as her protection.

The apartments next to her are vacant, and the doors are left open at night, inviting people who don’t live at the building to walk onto the property.

“I have had actually several incidents of them trying to get in my door — homeless people,” she said.

She recalled calling the police at 2 a.m. because a man was banging on her door trying to get in.

Sometimes, she said, the property owners do not notice her properly when crews are trying to enter her property. They send an email, not a visually posted notice.

“I was a Realtor and a property manager before I came to Santa Barbara. Yeah, that’s not right. It has to be legal, written,” she said.

Haworth said she doesn’t care if the property owners need to enter the building to make repairs, but “you need to notify me in the proper way.”

Haworth is among the remaining 11 tenants who have called a rent strike, refusing to pay rent until the property owners withdraw three unlawful detainers against residents. Haworth is not one of them. She signed a new lease last year with an 8.8% rent increase.

Before she signed her new lease, she was offered money to leave.

“It was an insult,” she said. “It wouldn’t have lasted me much longer paying double somewhere else.”

Haworth and some of the tenants describe living in harassment conditions. They say that construction noise has been nearly debilitating and that the owners are purposely trying to agitate the tenants because they are upset that they won’t leave. They allege that it took the property owners an inordinate amount of time to fix the laundry room because of mold. Once the situation was remedied, EF International and workers were given the code to do laundry, but not the other tenants, the tenants say.

“After a year of debilitating construction noise, neglect to tenant complaints, unpermitted work, and faulty eviction attempts, the owners continue to disregard tenants’ requests,” Entrekin said. “Concern for safety, quiet enjoyment — the right to securely call one’s home a home or one’s possessions their own — are not viewed as rights due basic respect, but rather as privileges marketed only to those paying short-term student rates.”

Haworth said she is also upset that the international students are allowed to hang their garments over the rail and have chairs.

“Treat us humanely,” she said. “We just want it the way it was before they took it over.”

She said she has a restraining against one of the workers, with whom she claims in a legal declaration that he called her several foul names and removed her property.

“I have suffered constant interruption by construction workers, have withstood noise and utility outages, and have been nice and pleasant to those workers who were simply doing their jobs,” Haworth wrote in a declaration. “I wonder why respondent and his employer cannot simply let me live peacefully. Instead, I must live in a state of being constantly emotionally drained by unnecessary conflict acted upon by respondent.”

Taylor and Herlihy dispute much of Haworth’s characterization of events that have happened on the property. They believe they have noticed her properly whenever work needed to be done. Taylor said that her beach items stretched far beyond just her unit and that her lease did not allow her to store items in a common walkway.

Corina Svacina, one of the most vocal tenants, faces an unlawful detainer.

The property owners want Svacina and two other tenants in the building to move out so they can complete renovations to the building. They say they can’t complete the work with tenants inside it. Svacina doesn’t have a lease.

She said she has attempted to pay rent for eight months, but the property owners won’t accept it because they want her out, and cashing the check would trigger a new lease.

“In our point of view, we have acted in good faith time and time and time again, and they continue to act in bad faith and not honor their half of the agreement,” said Svacina, who pays $1,722 a month for a studio.

She said she would like things to go back to the way they were, where she can pay rent and live in the apartment she wants.

“It sucks. It’s chaos,” Svacina said. “I don’t enjoy what I am going through. I have a lot better things to do. I don’t want to fight for this. I want to live my life and do other things.”

Another tenant, Mike Aracic, also has an unlawful detainer against him. He moved to the building in 2018. He said he believes some of the renovations are unnecessary.

“Our thing all along is just that we want to stay here,” Aracic said. “We have a nice little community of residents here. We’re just trying to not be evicted.”

Aracic said the communication has been weak.

“There’s work at all hours of the day and night. There are utility interruptions. A couple of times they said we can’t use the pool, with no real explanation as to why,” Aracic said. “They are just very much like our way or the highway.

“It feels like they are trying to make it unpleasant for us.”

The Landlords

The owners bought the building in 2023 for about $16 million. They claim they are being falsely accused of exploiting tenants. It’s quite the opposite, they say. They believe they are victims of a vendetta by the city, the tenants union and Entrekin to use them as a model for why rent control is needed.

The complex is divided into three buildings — A, B and C. Building C has been renovated, which includes new electricity, although it’s still being run on a generator because Southern California Edison has not connected the power. The building is occupied by international students, and one longtime family signed a new lease and declined to move.

Building A is occupied by Svacina and two others with unlawful detainers against them. Some workers are also living in the building. The rest of the units are vacant. The building needs its electric and plumbing replaced, and the work cannot be done with tenants living there, according to Taylor, the attorney.

She said she offered tenants the opportunity to move to Building B. Some people took that option, but the people who stayed in Building A are holding up renovations, Taylor said.

Taylor said about 10 tenants were offered the option to move into Building B, which needed the least amount of work, and construction could be completed with tenants living there. Some tenants rejected a move, which would have allowed them to sign a new lease.

“They complained about the leases we offered them,” Taylor said. “I think I drafted five renditions of leases. Every time I would give it to them, I would say, ‘Get this back to me.’ I would beg, ‘Have you looked at the lease? Have you looked at the lease?'”

She said the tenants would come back questioning the validity of the leases and asking for changes.

“I made the changes, I sent it back to them, they would wait weeks, they would get it back to me and say, ‘Well, but now there are these other three things we want changed on the leases,'” Taylor said.

She said the tenants were then offered the option of transferring their existing lease over to the new building or accept anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 in relocation fees to move.

“They said, ‘We don’t really like that unit. We want an upstairs unit. We want a corner unit. We want a bigger unit. We want this,'” Taylor said. “They kept going round and round until finally I put my foot down and said, ‘Listen, take it or leave it.'”

She gave the tenants a deadline to accept, and the tenants didn’t accept. She said one renter later, after the deadline, accepted the offer, but Taylor said it was too late.

“We said, ‘No, we’re sorry, it’s gone on too long. We’re now going to issue new notices on this building,'” she said.

Svacina said she was the one who eventually accepted the offer and signed a lease for a bottom-floor unit, “but they decided that it took too long to sign it,” so Svacina never got a new lease.

Taylor said she has little patience left for the situation. She stressed that the law allows a property owner to terminate a tenancy to do structural work, electrical work and plumbing work. The landlord has a right to do that, she said, if the work is reasonably expected to take longer than 30 days in that unit.

Taylor said the issue isn’t about the tenants as much as it is about pressuring the city to pass rent control. The tenants and their supporters need a “rallying cry” to get the law changed, she said.

“Make no mistake: They want absolute rent control,” Taylor said. “They don’t want a landlord to be able to raise the rent ever for any reason, even a substantial renovation.”

Taylor said the goal is to say, “Look at these big, bad landlords. Look at what they are doing. City, you have to do something, you have to pass these laws because these big, bad landlords are villainizing these tenants. They are doing bad things, they are trying to run them out.”

She said the tenants with unlawful detainers who turned down $30,000 to move may regret their choices.

“Let’s say they win. Great, good for them. They win,” Taylor said. “We come back and we have to re-notice or we have to do something different. Or let’s say best-case scenario they get to stay. They get an 8.8% increase. EF moves in around them, and they are in a college dorm-type situation. That’s what they get to be. That’s their best-case scenario.”

The alternative?

“Their worst-case scenario is a sheriff knocks on their door and drags them out with no relocation assistance on a week’s notice, and that is a very real possibility. Plus, they owe all the unpaid rent,” Taylor said.

She added, “It makes me sad when they walk away from tens of thousands of dollars in relocation benefits.”

Herlihy told Noozhawk that it is unclear if more EF international students will move into the rest of the buildings, but for now no one can move into the vacant units because the tenants in Building A need to move for the electrical and plumbing to be fixed.

What’s Next?

A couple of weeks ago, several of the tenants and their supporters launched a “rent strike” and held a press conference at 215 Bath St.

“We, the tenants, are taking a stand and participating in a rent strike,” Haworth said at the event. “Until conditions are improved at 215 Bath, or until the city takes real action against our landlords, we will no longer attempt to pay rent.”

Svacina, Haworth and Aracic made a list of demands, which included dropping the unlawful detainers and sharing a timeline for all construction going forward, as well as remove and address all fire hazards that remain on the property.

“We’re taking a stand, not just for ourselves, but because we know this could save our neighbors across the city, and even down the street, from similar treatment,” Svacina said.

Entrekin said despite everything that the tenants have gone through, they remain committed to dealing under the law.

“My clients are not interested in shutting down development, keeping anyone from making money or boycotting repairs,” Entrekin said. “My office is simply committed to ensuring that my clients are treated with dignity and respect under the law. My clients simply demand respect for the rights provided to every tenant in Santa Barbara.”

Taylor said she expects that the court will eventually rule in the property owners’ favor over the unlawful detainers and law enforcement will have to remove the tenants who have not moved.

“I want to make clear that I do not want to have that happen,” she said. “I never, ever want to see a sheriff come and remove a tenant from a property. We absolutely did everything we could to try and work around it. We offered them an obscene amount of money to relocate, and they refused.”

She said these final tenants were not willing to accept money far above the city-required relocation assistance.

“That wasn’t what they wanted,” Taylor said. “What they wanted was for my clients to agree that rents would not go up at this property and they could live forever at the same rent, and that’s just not going to happen.”