A MAJOR city has come to the support of its residents against eviction.

Santa Monica City Council members are drafting resolutions to support tenants at Barrington Plaza who are facing mass eviction.

The Barrington Plaza Tenants Association filed a lawsuit against Douglas Emmett Inc., the owner of the building, over the eviction.

If the eviction attempt is successful, it would be the largest Los Angeles mass eviction since the 1950s.

“This mass eviction of over 522 occupied units, and the subsequent removal of these units from the rental market will exacerbate market pressures for new rental units, inevitably placing upward pressure on rent prices in Santa Monica.” the city council agenda said.

“This looming eviction is especially concerning for renters in Santa Monica, where Douglas Emmett, Inc. owns several large residential properties.”

Douglas Emmett is invoking California’s Ellis Act and said the evictions are necessary for building upgrades like fire sprinklers.

The council members in Santa Monica City said their legislature doesn’t have the proper capacity to limit fraudulent usage of the Ellis Act and the evictions that follow.

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According to The Coalition for Economic Survival, 29,467 units in Los Angeles have been evicted with the Ellis Act since 2001.

The tenants at Barrington Plaza already tried once to stop the eviction efforts.

In August, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant denied the tenants’ request to stop the evictions, according to ABC7.

This is due to the sprinkler systems that Douglas Emmett cited as his reason to evict tenants.

The Barrington Plaza building suffered two catastrophic fires in the last ten years, one of which killed a 19-year-old foreign exchange student.

The apartment complex was built in 1961, but fire sprinklers weren’t mandated until 1974. This let the building get away with not installing them for decades.

The city council is hoping Emmet can make the necessary safety improvements without evicting tenants by using Los Angeles’ tenant habitability program.

Doing so will let the tenants keep their current living situations and rent prices while the building becomes safer.

The U.S. Sun has reached out to Douglas Emmett for comment.