S.F. Apartment Assn. v. City & County of S.F. (2024)

Citation: S.F. Apartment Assn. v. City & County of S.F. (2024)
Parent Document: S.F. Apartment Assn. v. City & County of S.F. (2024)
Jurisdiction: California (state)
Effective Date: 2024-09-11
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10114513/sf-apartment-assn-v-city-county-of-sf/ ↗

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of eviction raises procedural barriers between the landlord and the judicial
proceeding.” (Ibid., italics added.) The court reasoned that, unlike a
substantive defense to eviction, landlords could not “meet the defense” by
showing that they could have qualified for the certificate had they applied for
it. (Ibid.) Instead, the certificate requirement would “preclude” a landlord
from relief in summary repossession proceedings altogether. (Ibid.)
Birkenfeld thus concluded that the certificate requirement “cannot stand in
the face of state statutes that fully occupy the field of landlord’s possessory
remedies.” (Id. at p. 152.)
      Here, the parties disagree about where Ordinance No. 18-22 falls in the
procedural-substantive framework from Birkenfeld. Plaintiffs argue that the
ordinance is procedural because it extends the notice timeline from Code of
Civil Procedure section 1161. Defendant, on the other hand, argues that the
ordinance is substantive because it limits the grounds for eviction as an
appropriate exercise of the city’s police power and therefore is not in conflict
with section 1161. As set forth below, we agree with plaintiffs.
                  III. Ordinance No. 18-22 is Procedural
      We begin our Birkenfeld analysis with the well-recognized principle
that “ ‘the distinction between procedure and substantive law can be
“ ‘shadowy and difficult to draw’ in practice.” ’ ” (San Francisco Apartment
Assn. v. City and County of San Francisco (2018) 20 Cal.App.5th 510, 516
(Educators).) Indeed, it has been described as “elusive at best.” (Id. at
p. 516, fn. 2, citing Hambrecht & Quist Venture Partners v. American Medical
Internat., Inc. (1995) 38 Cal.App.4th 1532, 1542 [noting substance-procedure
terminology “is problematic because those labels are difficult to apply as
mutually exclusive categories”]; People v. Flaherty (1990) 223 Cal.App.3d
1139, 1143 [“The determination whether a given law makes a procedural or

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