California AB 2694 Puts Long Beach Tenant Protections in Focus, and Shows How the City Lags Behind Los Angeles

A bill moving through the California Legislature this session, Assembly Bill 2694, would extend just-cause eviction requirements to single-family rental homes and condominiums statewide, a change that policy analysts say would directly affect an estimated 45,000 renter households in Long Beach. Under current state law, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, AB 1482, single-family homes and condos are largely exempt from just-cause protections if the owner provides a specific written notice at lease signing. AB 2694 would eliminate that exemption entirely, applying the same rules to virtually every rental unit in California regardless of property type.

The timing matters because Long Beach's rental market has tightened sharply since 2022. The city's own Housing Element, adopted in February 2025, identifies renter households as 55 percent of Long Beach's total population, one of the highest ownership-to-renter ratios among large Southern California cities. At the same time, median asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach reached approximately $2,150 per month in the first quarter of 2026, according to CoStar Group data cited in city planning documents. Single-family rental homes, which fall into the current exemption gap, often command higher rents and house larger families, making displacement from those units particularly disruptive.

How Long Beach Compares to Neighboring Cities

The comparison with the City of Los Angeles is direct and consequential. Los Angeles passed its own Just Cause for Eviction Ordinance in 2023, extending protections to virtually all rental units regardless of property type, construction date, or building size. That move went beyond what state law requires. Long Beach has not enacted a parallel local ordinance, meaning a renter in a single-family home in the Wrigley neighborhood currently has fewer legal protections against no-fault eviction than a renter in an identical home two miles north across the city line in Los Angeles. Residents of Santa Ana and Anaheim face a similar disparity; neither city has enacted local just-cause expansions, leaving them equally dependent on whatever the state legislature ultimately decides.

The Long Beach City Council discussed a potential local renter protection expansion at its Housing and Neighborhoods Committee meeting in March 2026, but took no action, with committee members noting they preferred to wait for the outcome of AB 2694 rather than duplicate or conflict with pending state legislation. That wait-and-see position means Long Beach residents in the exempt single-family category remain in a legal gray zone for at least the remainder of 2026. If Governor Gavin Newsom signs AB 2694 before the Legislature's September 12 deadline, the protections would take effect January 1, 2027, under the bill's current text.

What the Bill Would Mean Day-to-Day for Long Beach Renters

Under AB 2694 as currently written, a landlord seeking to remove a tenant from a single-family rental in Long Beach would be required to cite one of the permissible just-cause reasons: non-payment of rent, lease violations, owner move-in, or a set of other defined circumstances. No-fault, no-reason terminations with 60-day notice, currently legal for exempt units, would no longer be permitted. The bill also retains the relocation assistance requirement for no-fault owner move-in evictions that already applies to multi-unit buildings under AB 1482, projected to extend to an additional roughly 18,000 single-family rental units in Long Beach alone, according to the California Housing Partnership's 2025 rental stock analysis.

Local housing advocates note that Long Beach's large stock of older Craftsman bungalows and post-war single-family rentals in neighborhoods like Cambodia Town, North Long Beach, and Zaferia are precisely the units most frequently cited in eviction cases that fall outside current protections. The bill passed the Assembly Housing Committee on a 7-to-2 vote in May 2026 and is currently before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Senate floor vote is expected in late August. Long Beach residents can track the bill's progress through the California Legislature's public bill tracking portal at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.