Usually the landlord, if you were hurt in a shared part of the building. Usually not the landlord, if the hazard was inside somebody’s unit and appeared after they moved in.
What decides it is control and knowledge. Who was responsible for the place you were hurt, and what they knew about the hazard before you were hurt by it. A dangerous stairwell, walkway, garage, laundry room or lobby sits on the landlord’s side of that line. A hazard inside a tenant’s home sits on the other, and getting across it requires something specific.
This article is by Accident Lawyer of California, P.C., the personal injury practice of Aryan Aliakbarzadeh, Esq. in Northridge, California, admitted to the State Bar of California in October 2012. It describes how these cases work in California; it is not advice about yours.
Control is the first question Link to this section
California law puts a duty of ordinary care on whoever occupies and controls land. The modern rule comes from Rowland v. Christian, decided by the California Supreme Court in 1968 at 69 Cal.2d 108, which grounded it in the general negligence provision of Civil Code section 1714.
Control is what makes that duty attach to a particular person. In an apartment building the landlord has not handed over the shared parts. The stairs, the paths, the parking, the lighting, the laundry, the pool, the elevators and the roof are the landlord’s to inspect and repair, and the duty follows.
Inside a leased unit the position reverses once the tenant takes possession, because the tenant now has the control the duty depends on.
So the first thing worth establishing after an injury on residential property is not who owns the building. It is who was responsible for the specific spot you were hurt on.
What the landlord has to have known Link to this section
For a hazard inside premises a tenant possesses, the leading case is Uccello v. Laudenslayer, decided by the Court of Appeal in 1975 at 44 Cal.App.3d 504. The court treated it as an exception to the general rule that a landlord is not liable for dangerous conditions arising after the tenant takes possession, and it set two requirements.
The landlord must have had actual knowledge of the dangerous condition. Not a suspicion, and not knowledge the court thinks they should have had.
And the landlord must have had the right to do something about it, which in that case meant the right to remove the danger by retaking possession of the premises.
Both of those are high bars, and deliberately so. A landlord who has genuinely never been told is usually not responsible for what happens inside a unit.
Which is why, in practice, these cases are won or lost on the paper trail. Complaints to the manager, maintenance requests, prior incidents, emails, texts, inspection records and notices. A hazard that somebody reported in writing three months earlier is a very different case from one nobody mentioned.
Why a store case is not the same as a building case Link to this section
If you fell in a store or a supermarket the analysis runs differently, because the business controls the whole premises and is expected to inspect them. There the argument is usually about how long the hazard was there and whether a reasonable inspection would have found it, and that is covered in who is responsible when you slip and fall in California.
On residential property the division of control does most of the work instead. The same fall, in a store aisle and in a tenant’s kitchen, produces two different cases.
Common areas sit closer to the store analysis, because the landlord holds them and is expected to look after them. Inside a unit sits at the Uccello end, where actual knowledge is required.
What this means if you are a tenant, a guest or working there Link to this section
A tenant hurt in a common area is in the strongest position of the three, because the control question answers itself and the tenant usually has a documented history with the building.
A guest or visitor has the same claim in principle. California’s duty of care is not limited to people with a lease, and Rowland dismantled the older system that sorted visitors into categories and gave them different levels of protection. What a guest often lacks is the paper trail, which is why finding out what the tenant or other residents had already reported matters so much.
Somebody there to work, a delivery driver, a contractor, a caregiver, has the same claim against the property’s controller, and may also have a workers compensation claim through their own employer. Those two run in parallel rather than canceling each other out.
In every version of this, expect your own share of responsibility to be raised. California reduces a recovery by the proportion of fault the evidence supports rather than defeating the claim, and how that argument is actually run is in what happens when a claim is partly your fault.
The evidence that decides it, and how fast it goes Link to this section
Photograph the hazard before anybody repairs it. A broken step, a missing handrail, a dead light, a torn carpet edge, standing water. Repairs are the correct thing for a landlord to do and they also remove the evidence, so the photographs taken in the first hour are often the whole case.
Photograph the wider scene as well, so the lighting, the approach and the surroundings are recorded, not just the defect.
Report it in writing to the manager or the owner and keep your copy. A text or an email with a timestamp is worth more than a conversation.
Ask other residents whether they had reported the same thing. This is the single most valuable thing a hurt person can do early and almost nobody does it.
Get the owner’s name, not just the management company’s. They are frequently different entities and the claim may involve both.
See a doctor even if nothing seems broken, and do it promptly. A gap between the injury and the first medical record is the most common argument used later to suggest the injury was not real.
The deadlines, including the short one Link to this section
An injury claim in California is generally subject to a two year deadline from the date you were hurt, under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.
If the property is public, and that includes a housing authority, public housing and buildings owned by a city, county or the state, a written claim usually has to be presented within six months under Government Code section 911.2. That one runs while you are still being treated and it is the deadline people miss.
Work out early which you are dealing with, because the owner of a residential building is not always who the sign on the door suggests.
If you were hurt at a building in Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley, the first job is establishing who controlled the place you were hurt and what they had already been told. Aryan Aliakbarzadeh, Esq. handles premises injury claims across the Valley. Call or text 818-718-2522, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or use the contact page.