California landlords may be liable for hazards on city property.

Four justices of the California Supreme Court, holding firm against three stem dissents, ruled recently that a landlord can be held liable for a hazard on property that the landlord controls but does not own.

The court cleared the way for trial in a lawsuit filed by Gilardo Alcaraz, a tenant of a Redwood City apartment complex who was injured when he stepped into a broken water meter box. The box was recessed in a strip of city-owned land adjacent to the complex. Alcaraz sued the landlord, Peter Vece, who maintained the two-foot-wide strip as part of the building's front lawn.

The trial judge threw out the case, holding that because the hazard was located on municipal land, Vece had no duty to protect Alcaraz. The case was reinstated on appeal.

Affirming, Chief Justice Ronald George wrote, "[I]f the condition of the meter box created a dangerous condition on land that was in defendants' possession or control, defendants owed a duty to take reasonable measures to protect persons on the land from that danger, whether or not defendants owned, or exercised control over, the meter box itself." (Alcaraz v. Vece, 60 Cal. Rptr. 2d 448 (1997).)

George added that the landlord "could satisfy such a duty by posting warnings or erecting barricades on the property under [his] control, and would not have been required to inspect or repair the meter box."

The majority rejected an argument by one dissenter that California law required a landlord to obtain a commercial benefit from a property before he or she could be held liable for a hazard.

The court remanded, charging the jury with determining whether Vece had exercised control over the city-owned land by regularly mowing the lawn and, after Alcaraz was injured, erecting a fence around the broken meter box.

The majority said the decision applied settled principles of premises liability law. But three dissenters, who wrote separately, warned that the ruling was a dangerous expansion of landlord liability that would have undesirable consequences.

"Because the majority imposes the duty based on innocuous or good-neighborly conduct that does not contribute to the danger and therefore carries no moral blame, its expansion of tort liability runs counter to traditional notions of tort law," Justice Joyce Kennard wrote.

She added that under the ruling, Vece "would have been better offend not subject to liability if instead of mowing the city's adjoining strip of land, he had left it in its natural state, unkempt and a blight on the neighborhood."

The two other dissenters, Justices Marvin Baxter and Janice Brown, agreed. "The lesson of this case is simple," Brown wrote. "Do no good works lest you incur liability."

Jesper Rasmussen, a San Francisco attorney who represented the landlord, said the ruling fails to provide clear guidance for homeowners about what actions might create a liability risk. "People are going to ask, how do I conform my conduct to the requirements of the law? And they're going to have to guess," Rasmussen said.

He also faulted the court for punishing people's civic-minded good works. "In today's society, that's pushing us in the wrong direction. I think we want to encourage people to be neighborly, rather than further isolating homeowners and businesses."

But Bernie Bergesen, a Berkeley lawyer who represented Alcaraz on appeal, called that criticism "a red herring." He noted that there was no visible divider separating the apartment building's lawn from the city's strip, and that it was in Vece's best interest as a landlord to keep the entire lawn manicured to attract and keep tenants.

"The landlord probably thought he owned the whole yard," Bergesen said. "He was maintaining it. It was reasonable for tenants to think he was keeping it safe."

In February, the New Jersey Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case. That court, also divided 4-3, ruled that a landlord could not be held liable for failing to warn a tenant about crimes that had been committed on an adjacent lot when the landlord received no economic benefit from the lot.

Holding a landlord liable would "transfer to an innocent property owner the duty to prevent criminal conduct that is more properly the responsibility of others," the majority said. (Kuzmicz v. Ivy Hill Park Apartments, Inc, No. A-5-96, 1997 WL (N.J. Feb. 20, 1997).)