A Handful of Holdouts Re-Evicted at Isla Vista’s CBC & The Sweeps

An eight-month battle to evict tenants at Isla Vista’s CBC & The Sweeps has left the place a “ghost town,” tenant advocates say, while the landlord’s contractors hammer and grind in renovating the apartments as a handful of tenants struggle to hang onto their homes. The renoviction fight reached a stalemate sometime in December, when the Santa Barbara Superior Court ruled that the eviction notices were insufficient. The victory seems to be a Pyrrhic one as the landlords have taken the loss and already issued corrected termination notices.

About six unlawful detainer cases were dismissed, said attorney Lacy Taylor of Thyne Taylor Fox Howard, and the new owners decided to restart the process rather than appeal the ruling: “It’d take longer to appeal than to re-notice,” she said. Taylor also noted no rent had been collected since eviction proceedings began in March 2023, as acceptance of rent would mean the tenant could remain. Instead, the landlord was offering “a substantial sum of money, including waivers of rent and other things” to induce the few remaining tenants to vacate, Taylor said.

What had been a thriving community of families, children, students, and workers on El Colegio, the main road to UC Santa Barbara, has been emptied as tenants self-evicted, said Stanley Tzankov, who is a member of the Santa Barbara Tenants Union, which has been helping the tenants fight their evictions. With Wendy Santamaria, an organizer with CAUSE, Tzankov said he’d visited the four buildings in January: “After going to all 166 doors, we found about 146 uninhabited site units almost all undergoing construction, and 20 that were or looked like they could be occupied.”

Many of the tenants had fought to keep their relatively reasonably priced apartments — in the $2,000s for a one-bedroom — after CBC & The Sweeps was bought in March 2023 by Core Spaces, a Chicago-based developer that specializes in converting existing buildings into pricey, upscale college apartments.

Tzankov stated that Core Spaces had applied for permits indicating the company’s intent to “change the property to expensive by-the-bed student-only housing at the expense of hundreds of short- and long-term” tenants. Currently under review at County Planning are permits to replace windows, and to renovate electricity, lighting, plumbing, and some structural elements to convert about 10 apartments to study, fitness, and club rooms.

Rather than interpreting the timing of the county’s urgency law passed in the summer — which included the requirement that any eviction notice for “substantial renovation” describe the renovations, supply copies of the permits, and allow the tenant to return to the unit once renovations were completed — the court’s ruling looked to California’s no-fault eviction laws in effect at the time the notices were served, Taylor said. The original notices did not specify the work to be done, just that “substantial renovation” was necessary and the tenants must leave. Taylor disagreed with the court’s decision to dismiss the unlawful detainers, calling it “a stretch” and inconsistent with prior court rulings.

Appealing was also not worthwhile, she said, because there was no record on appeal because eviction cases are confidential. In fact, in attempting to obtain a copy of the court’s ruling, an administrator for the courts informed the Independent that an Ex Parte application, a legal pleading usually prepared by an attorney, was necessary.

Given the confidential nature of eviction proceedings, the tenants’ attorneys with the Legal Aid Foundation of Santa Barbara County would not comment on the ruling.