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unified management of the property of a surviving spouse and a decedent.”
(Ibid.; see Weber v. Langholz (1995) 39 Cal.App.4th 1578, 1582–1583.)
The unique status of a trustee who is also settlor and beneficiary of a
revocable living trust puts to rest the tenants’ concerns about the
ramifications of interpreting the term “landlord” to include such a trustee.
The tenants argue that allowing trustees to qualify as landlords “would
create the potential for erosion of the two critical protective requirements
designed to ensure that owner move-in and qualified relative move-in . . .
evictions [i.e., evictions under Rent Ordinance section 37.9, subdivision (a)(8)]
are done in good faith . . . [:] (1) ensuring that the landlord [or the relative]
really moves[]in and resides [at the property] for 36 months, and (2) ensuring
that only those ‘qualified relatives’ permitted by the [Rent Ordinance] would
be able to displace existing tenants.” The tenants contend that because a
settlor can designate “multiple unrelated persons” as trustees, each of whom
“could seek to move[]in one or more qualified relatives,” considering a trustee
to be a “landlord” would “increase exponentially . . . the finite group of
persons originally envisioned . . . who could displace long-term tenants.”
To begin with, we limit our holding to the situation in which a landlord
is settlor, trustee, and beneficiary of a revocable living trust. Indeed,
appellants explicitly state that they “do not seek a blanket universal rule
from this Court . . . that any kind of trustee of any kind of a trust can qualify
[as a] ‘landlord’ under [the Rent Ordinance].” Thus, our holding involves no
risk of any exponential increase in people “who could displace long-term
tenants,” as the qualifying “landlord” is fixed once the revocable living trust
is created.
Even if our holding were not so limited, however, the tenants’ concerns
about a revolving group of trustees are misplaced. As the tenants implicitly