The Virgil Square Apartments in Koreatown is one building where tenants are withholding rent.
A group of residents of an Equity Residential building in Los Angeles have had $25K returned to them by their landlord after they went on a monthslong utility fee strike over a utility billing system.
The system at the heart of their utility fee strike is the ratio utility billing system, or RUBS. It is used to charge tenants in buildings where all units are on shared meters. It pools all utility expenses together and charges tenants for a share of the total cost, as opposed to their exact portion, which is indeterminable because of the metering.
According to a release from residents at Equity Residential’s Virgil Square building, the REIT said it would issue “individualized credits to [tenant’s] ledger totaling each month you incurred a larger-than-expected RUBS water and RUBS sewer bill for the period between December 2023 and May 2025.”
Equity Residential didn’t comment about its use of the utility billing system that is the basis for the tenants’ rent strike but told Bisnow via email that “there were refunds sent to a group of residents at our Virgil Square property in Los Angeles after we discovered some long-term leaking resulting from worn plumbing valves.”
Dozens of residents of the Virgil Square complex, as well as EQR’s Mozaic at Union Station apartments, have refused to pay utility fees since June, citing unfair increases in those bills. The tenants say the increases are the result of the way that their landlord calculates those charges.
The tenants are continuing to strike through September because EQR “has refused to provide transparency to tenants regarding its formulaic pricing model,” the release says. That will make four months of withholding utility fees.
RUBS is prohibited in rent-stabilized units in West Hollywood and Santa Monica, but it is allowed and common in apartments in Los Angeles.
As of 2023, Equity Residential was LA’s biggest landlord, with more than 13,000 units in the city, according to Commercial Observer. It has faced legal action over some of its practices before, including a class-action suit about its late fee policy.
The action resulted in a 2024 stoppage of that policy across the company’s portfolio and lawsuits about the company’s handling of background checks on prospective renters.
