Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in California

Re: changing a month to month rental agreement

[not spell checked] With a month to month rental agreement either side can give a 30 day written notice, without it being in any particular form, of a change in the terms of the prior rental agreement [you basically are agreeing each month to a new agreement for 30 days and just incorporating the last agreement]. The other side then has until the end of that 30 days to decide if they will accept the new terms; if a tenant decides not to, then they would have to move out at the end of that 30 day period or the landlord would have to evict them.

If you live in a rent control city, the landlord can not necessarily change the terms of the lease. The landlord can not order the utilities to be shut off because of a rental dispute, but your landlord might have found a way around that provision. If the utilities are shut off at any time before the last minute to agree to the new rental contract,the landlord can not shut them off and has committed a civil wrong in doing so.

What should you do? You should not have wiated until now to ask! I assume that you want to continue to rent there. I also assume that the landlord has made the switch to increase the profits on the building. Immediately contact the landlord and point out that you have been a good tenant, if that is true, that if you have to leave it may take him 2-3 months to find a good replacement tenant and the odds are that the new tenant will not be as good as you have been, to gain maybe $100 in reduced costs he is spending perhaps 2-3,000 [assumng rent of $1,000 per month], will have to return your security deposit, and will have to repain the interior, perhaps repalce the rugs, etc, in oreer to make it presentable to new potential renters. You are willing to pay the utilities but he has to reduce your rent by an amount that will be equal to the average expected utility bill. Until the details of an agreement can be worked out, you need to contact the utility company to keep the powere on.