Robert Prete is 84 years old. He lives alone in a rent-stabilized apartment on Harper Avenue in West Hollywood, where he’s been since 2010, on a low income.
In June ’24, Prete went to the City’s Rent Stabilization Division and filed a complaint against his landlord, 1279 North Harper LLC, managed by Scott Properties Group out of Santa Monica. He said they’d been overcharging him since 2019. The City agreed with him. Twice. Two separate decisions by a hearing examiner said the landlord owed Prete more than $7,600 in illegal overcharges.
Then the painful wake-up call — the math changed. After a third review by a different examiner, the City told Prete he hadn’t overpaid at all. He had actually underpaid — by $1,627. And state law gives the landlord the right to go after him for it.
On Thursday, February 12, all seven members of the West Hollywood Rent Stabilization Commission voted to make that final. The decision is done.
How the MAR Works
Every rent-stabilized apartment in West Hollywood has something called a Maximum Allowable Rent, or MAR. It’s the legal ceiling on what your landlord can charge you. Starts with whatever the base rent was when you moved in, then gets adjusted over time. The commission approves small annual percentage increases. If your landlord fails to maintain the building and the city orders a rent reduction, the MAR goes down. When the landlord fixes the problem and proves compliance, it can go back up.
Roughly 80 percent of West Hollywood residents are renters and thousands of apartments fall under rent stabilization rules that go back to 1985. The MAR is the number that makes the whole system work. Or doesn’t, depending on who’s doing the math.
Prete’s MAR had been adjusted dozens of times over the 14 years he’d lived there. Rent reductions for maintenance problems, partial restorations when the landlord fixed some of them, annual increases from the commission, and rent increase notices from management on top of all that. Some of those notices turned out to be valid. Others weren’t. Working out what the MAR actually was at any given point meant going back through all of it from the beginning, and the starting number had to be right or nothing after it would be either.
Two Decisions, Same Mistake
Prete’s building has had real problems. A 2018 order cut the rent because the landlord never painted the exterior, which the ordinance requires every seven years. More than seven years later, through all three hearings, that paint job still hadn’t been done. A 2020 order cut another $80 for a broken washer and dryer and dirty common areas with soot on the walls. Then a 2022 order reduced the rent after inspectors went out and found broken concrete in the stairwells, missing tiles, and stairs they described as looking like they hadn’t been cleaned for a very long time.
Prete didn’t have a lawyer. He had two neighbors from the building, John Ainsworth and Carolyn Thomason, who came to the hearings and testified on his behalf. As for what he paid each month, Prete told the hearing examiner he went by whatever the building’s online rent portal said he owed. The property manager didn’t dispute that. She confirmed the portal shows tenants what’s due and management expects them to pay that amount.
Hearing Examiner Jamaar Boyd-Weatherby took the case first. He held a hearing in August 2024, then issued his decision in October. Prete had been overcharged $7,681.84, he found. The landlord appealed. The commission looked at it and sent the whole thing back for Boyd-Weatherby to redo the calculations. So he held another hearing in April 2025 and issued a second decision in June. The number came out about the same — $7,656.48 after a credit for the Jewish Family Services payment Prete received during COVID. The landlord appealed again.
Pages 148 Through 151
On August 14, 2025, the commissioners were going through the evidence packet themselves when they noticed something Boyd-Weatherby apparently never accounted for. Four 30-day rent increase notices, dated 2014 through 2017, on Bates-stamped pages 148 through 151. The landlord had applied annual increases during those years that brought the rent up from $1,445 to $1,514.88 by September 2017. You can read the entire case here.
In both of his decisions, Boyd-Weatherby wrote that “there is no evidence submitted into the record” showing the rent had been lawfully increased before 2023. Those four pages had been in the landlord’s own exhibits from the start.
The commission voted 7-0 to hand the case to a new examiner. Alan Seltzer got the file with instructions to review those rent increase notices. He went through the existing record on paper. No new hearing. His September 2025 decision said the notices checked out and he recalculated the MAR using $1,514.88 as the base instead of $1,400.
That $114.88 gap changed everything downstream. Boyd-Weatherby had the MAR at $1,231.88 through most of the disputed period. Seltzer’s version put it at $1,486.88. A difference of $255 a month, every month. What had been a $7,600 overcharge turned into a $1,627 underpayment.
None of this involved Prete or his neighbors in any way. Seltzer did a paper review, so nobody notified them it was even happening. Ainsworth raised that at Thursday’s meeting. He called it a due process problem. Legal counsel for the City, Kellean Martz, said the commission’s remand directed a record review, not a new hearing, so there was nothing to send notice about. Whether to hold a hearing was the examiner’s call, and Seltzer didn’t see a reason to.
Thursday Night
Ainsworth spoke for Prete at the February 12 meeting. He told the commission that Scott Properties has been in violation of the rent stabilization ordinance for more than 15 years by refusing to paint the building, and that every rent increase notice management signed included a certification that the property was in compliance — which he called a false certification. You can see the entire meeting below.
Daniel Monge, the property manager appearing for Scott Properties, asked the commission to affirm Seltzer’s decision. He called the unpainted exterior a cosmetic issue and said the rent reduction itself put the landlord in compliance. Then he dropped a surprise — he’d gotten approval to paint the building, and crews would start in 10 to 11 days.
Ainsworth said it was the first they’d heard of it.
“Giving the rent reduction to us is not something that you’re giving to us,” Ainsworth told Monge. “It’s something that’s been imposed as a penalty for not providing housing services that we all had when we first moved into the building.”
Legal counsel Martz explained a point the commissioners asked about several times during deliberations. Under the ordinance, a landlord with a rent reduction in place who is properly applying it counts as being in compliance for purposes of annual increases — even if the actual maintenance work has never been done. The reduction satisfies the requirement. Commissioner Agassi Topchian added for the record that rent reductions aren’t penalties. They’re a corresponding adjustment for a lost housing service.
Commissioner Joshua Kurpies said what everybody in the room could already feel. He was sorry this dragged on so long. He didn’t have a good reason for why the first two decisions managed to miss evidence that was right there in the file.
“Some might call this a bad example of how the process played out,” he said. “But also the process played out and resulted in what I believe is the correct outcome. So is it glass half full or half empty? I’m not sure.”
Chair Frank D. Rorie Jr. turned to Prete before calling the vote. He told him the landlord has the legal right to raise rent even when there’s a reduction in place for something like the painting. He knew Prete disagreed. But Rorie said the case had been through three rounds of review at this point, and that’s the process doing its job — even when the result isn’t what anyone saw coming at the start.
“This one really took its twists and turns,” Rorie said, “but it ended where it ended.”
The vote was 7-0. Adam G. Bass, Kimberly Copeland, Kurpies, Kaitlin McCafferty, Topchian, Vice Chair Rena Goldman, and Chair Rorie. Topchian asked legal counsel to add language to the resolution documenting the MAR at $1,469.88 from Seltzer’s decision. They did.
What This Means for Renters
A tale of confusion this surely is. Here’s an 84-year-old man on a low income who filed a legit complaint backed by well-documented maintenance failures that city inspectors confirmed. He did his part and paid what the building’s online portal told him to pay. Twice he was told he was owed more than $7,600. Nearly two years, three hearings, two remands, two examiners, and 222 pages later, the answer flipped. The hearing examiner managed to miss documents that were sitting in the file the whole time.
The MAR system is built on tracing years of incremental adjustments and getting every one of them right. Census data shows more than 5,800 seniors live in West Hollywood, most of them renters. Tenants who file complaints almost always represent themselves. Most don’t have lawyers. A lot of them, like Prete, qualify for fee waivers.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that paying what the portal says isn’t enough. Prete did everything a reasonable tenant would do and it still wasn’t enough to protect him. The portal doesn’t know your MAR. Your landlord’s accounting might not reflect it accurately either. The only way to know for sure is to get your rent history from the City and check it yourself — or get someone who understands the system to check it for you. That’s not a comfortable thing to tell people who are already stretched thin, but after watching this case play out over 20 months, it’s the harsh reality.
What Renters Should Know
If you’re thinking about filing a rent decrease application, request a copy of your unit’s MAR History of Rent Adjustments from the division first. Keep copies of every rent increase notice you’ve received. Hold on to records of every payment. And think about reaching out to a tenant rights organization before you file.
The Rent Stabilization Division is at (323) 848-6450 if you have questions about your MAR or think you’re paying more than the legal limit. They offer free mediation and can walk you through your rent history.
The next Rent Stabilization Commission meeting is Thursday, February 26, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. in the West Hollywood Park Public Meeting Room at 625 N. San Vicente Boulevard.
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