A landlord leased two greenhouses it knew contained asbestos and lead paint, said nothing, and repaired storm damage anyway. The county quarantined the property and the orchid grower lost its business. California's Court of Appeal held that neither the indemnity clause nor the waiver of consequential damages could shield a landlord whose negligence came from violating a disclosure statute.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act put $1.2 trillion behind roads, transit, and now transmission corridors for data centers, and condemnation filings have followed the money. A Los Angeles landlord who tried to claim a restaurant tenant's $6.1 million eminent domain award found out that a clause assigning 'all awards' to the landlord doesn't reach the goodwill the tenant built as a business, and that the fight over who gets what has to happen inside the condemnation case itself or not at all.
California built real protections for small commercial tenants into SB 1103, then made every one of them depend on a filing most eligible tenants never make. The rent-notice and treble-damages provisions only reach a "qualified commercial tenant," and nothing turns a business into one except a specific letter to the landlord.
