Lu v. Vivente 1, Inc.

Background

Kai Lu sued Vivente 1, Inc., the landlord of the residential property where she lived. Lu originally leased Unit 26. In February 2022, she agreed to move temporarily to a two-bedroom unit while repairs were completed in her original unit.

Lu requested a reasonable accommodation involving a live-in aide. Vivente approved that request on March 31, 2022, subject to qualification of the aide and completion of required documents. Vivente later issued approval for Lu to transfer to a two-bedroom unit, also conditioned on providing the required information for the live-in aide.

Vivente served Lu with a notice requiring her to return to the original unit. After Lu did not return, Vivente filed an eviction lawsuit in state court. A jury found for Vivente, and judgment was entered on February 8, 2023. According to the state-court judge’s statement quoted in the opinion, Lu had never hired a live-in aide and had not provided Vivente with a name or Social Security number for a potential aide. Lu appealed the state-court judgment, and the opinion states that the appeal was pending. Her later petitions for writs of mandate and an immediate stay were denied, and the state appellate court lifted the temporary stay of eviction.

Lu brought claims under the federal Fair Housing Act, the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, California negligence law, and California’s Unfair Competition Law. She sought a temporary restraining order to prevent eviction.

Legal standard

The court applied the same standard used for a preliminary injunction. To obtain emergency injunctive relief, Lu had to show that she was likely to succeed on the merits, likely to suffer irreparable harm without relief, that the balance of hardships favored her, and that an injunction would serve the public interest. A lower standard could apply if she showed serious questions on the merits and the other requirements were satisfied.

Reasons for denying emergency relief

The court first held that Lu could not show likely success because the requested injunction would be a collateral attack on the state-court judgment. The Full Faith and Credit Act requires federal courts to give state-court judgments the same respect they receive in the state courts that issued them. The court applied California law and found all three requirements for collateral estoppel—precluding a party from relitigating an issue already decided—were satisfied: the state-court case decided whether the eviction notice was valid; there was a final judgment on the merits; and the parties were the same.

The court separately addressed Lu’s claims. For the federal Fair Housing Act and California Fair Employment and Housing Act claims, the court found that Vivente had approved Lu’s accommodation requests rather than refused them. The court therefore found no likely success on those claims. The same reasoning defeated Lu’s Rehabilitation Act claim because she had not shown that she was denied a reasonable accommodation.

Regarding the Unruh Civil Rights Act claim, the court said the claim would fail if based on the provision incorporating the Americans with Disabilities Act because the Americans with Disabilities Act does not apply to residential apartment complexes as public accommodations. The court said a claim under another Unruh Act provision could apply to the business of renting housing, and that such a claim could include intentional discrimination through failure to provide a reasonable accommodation. Even so, the court found no likely success because Vivente had granted Lu’s accommodation requests. The court also addressed a separate California disability-accommodation provision cited in Lu’s motion and reached the same conclusion.

The court rejected Lu’s negligence claim because it depended on alleged failures to train, hire, supervise, or discipline employees regarding fair-housing-law requirements, and Lu had not shown likely success on those underlying fair-housing claims. The court rejected the Unfair Competition Law claim because Lu had not alleged unfair business practices by Vivente.

The court also found that Lu delayed seeking emergency relief. She filed for relief more than a year after receiving the notice and more than ten months after Vivente filed the state-court eviction complaint. The court treated that delay as an additional reason to deny the temporary restraining order.

Order

The court denied Lu’s motion for a temporary restraining order. The denial was expressly without prejudice to filing a motion for a preliminary injunction.