After ruling, tenants can no longer weaponize Delta motions

In 1974, the putative owner of a property in Los Angeles filed an unlawful detainer action to remove his tenants. Except that they were not his tenants. They had purchased the home from him under an installment sales contract and then started to miss their payments. Their sales contract provided that, in the event of a breach, the contract would essentially transform into a lease, the buyers would become tenants, the contract payments would become rent payments, and the buyers could be evicted for non-payment of rent. The summons in an unlawful detainer action is a 5-day summons -- not 30. When the buyers failed to respond on time, they were defaulted. Their motion to set aside was denied, and the Appellate Division affirmed.

On writ review, the Court of Appeal was displeased because case law from 1966 barred the crafty effort to turn defaulting home purchasers into tenants. As a result, the remedy of unlawful detainer was simply not available to the seller, and the five-day summons was "substantially defective in illegally purporting to shorten defendants' time to plead." That was Greene v. Municipal Court, 51 Cal. App. 3d 446 (1975).

Eight years later, Greene would become the basis for the decision which the California Supreme Court reviewed in Stancil v. Superior Court, 2021 DJDAR 4345 (May 3, 2021). It is called Delta Imports, Ltd. v. Municipal Court, 146 Cal. App. 3d 1033 (1983). It too involved an unlawful detainer action. But, unlike Greene, it involved an actual landlord-tenant relationship. The opinion opens with the sentence: "This appeal raises the issue of whether a tenant in an unlawful detainer action is entitled to quash service of summons where the underlying complaint fails to state a cause of action for unlawful detainer." That sentence alone begs the question: Is that not the function of a demurrer?

In Delta, the landlord alleged various breaches of the lease, but completely failed to allege the necessary service and expiration of a written tenancy termination notice. In short, the owner failed to allege exactly how the tenant came to be "unlawfully detaining" (as opposed to simply breaching a contract).

The Court of Appeal rejected the notion that a demurrer was the proper vehicle to attack the defect because, in its view, "[a] motion to quash service is the only method by which the defendant can test whether the complaint states a cause of action for unlawful detainer and, thereby, supports a five-day summons. A general demurrer only tests whether the complaint states a cause of action for something even if it is on a theory other than unlawful detainer .... Moreover, if the defendant appears in the action by filing a demurrer, he moots the very point he is seeking to raise."

What then developed over the next 35 or so years is the problem addressed by Stancil.

Unlike a demurrer, a motion to quash can be supported with declarations, thereby allowing a tenant to expand the range of arguments designed to attack a complaint. And, most vexing for landlords, if a trial court denies a motion to quash, the defendant can petition appellate tribunals for extraordinary writs, thereby automatically staying the trial court proceedings under CCP Section 418.10(c).

Over the years, motions to quash based on Delta would become a clever tactic used by tenant attorneys to attack unlawful detainer complaints, try to force mini-trials on the merits on the front end, and, if unsuccessful, at least buy the tenants months, if not years, worth of delay with petitions for extraordinary writs.

And, unlike Delta, these motions were used to attack complaints that indisputably pleaded everything needed to allege proper unlawful detainer causes of action. In short, Delta had created a monster.

The published case law involving Delta motions reveals quite hyper-technical nitpicking of the notices to quit attached to the complaints being attacked and the allegations made therein. A prime example is Danger Panda, LLC v. Launiu, 10 Cal. App. 5th 502 (2017), in which the tenants argued that mandatory relocation assistance payments made to a family of four (grandmother, parents, and a minor child) in an Ellis Act eviction had been improperly divided between the three adults, when they should have been divided between all four occupants. By the time the Court of Appeal reversed the trial's court grant of the Delta motion in that case (holding that a minor cannot be a "tenant" and therefore was not entitled to a division of the assistance payments), a number of years of delay had been secured for the tenants.

By 2015, the Court of Appeal had seen enough in Borsuk v. Appellate Division of Superior Court, 242 Cal. App. 4th 607 (2015). In Borsuk, the tenant had filed a Delta motion supported by her declaration in which she denied that she had ever been served with a tenancy termination notice. She basically insisted the landlord was lying. Clearly, that very well could have been the ultimate issue for trial. It was a Delta motion at its worst. Borsuk heavily criticized Delta, and held that a motion to quash cannot be used to attack the merits of an unlawful detainer complaint.

Given the split of authority, the California Supreme Court granted review in Stancil. In its opinion, the Supreme Court basically harmonized both cases and clarified the proper use of a Delta motion. A motion to quash cannot be used to attack the merits of the claim. Stancil definitively puts a stop to this dilatory tactic. But, if an unlawful detainer complaint does not even attempt to allege how the tenant is actually unlawfully detaining and therefore fails to include the bare minimum allegations needed to state such a claim (a problem that almost never arises in practice), then a Delta motion can be used. For this reason, the Supreme Court was very clear that it expects these occasions to "arise infrequently."

With the passage of Assembly Bill 1482 (effective Jan. 1, 2020), rent and eviction control systems now proliferate throughout California. They impose increasingly onerous requirements on property owners to recover possession of their properties and create a fertile ground for clever pleading attacks. San Francisco now funds eviction defense on the taxpayer's dime. Other municipalities will surely follow. Stancil at least ensures that these complexities cannot be weaponized with dilatory Delta motions. Those days are thankfully over. 