Can Lack of Parking Render Apartment Building Owner Liable?
An apartment complex does not maintain sufficient guest parking, despite a City ordinance requiring it to do so. A guest shows up, can’t find parking, so parks across the street. Her ultimate destination is her friend’s apartment in the complex, so she jaywalks across the street, gets hit by a car, and suffers a traumatic brain injury. Is the apartment owner liable for her injuries on account of not providing her a parking space?
No, according to the California Court of Appeal in last week’s case of Issakhani v. Shadow Glen Homeowners Ass’n.
Anaies Issakhani was unable to find a parking spot while attempting to visit her friend at the Shadow Glen apartments in 2014. She parked across the street, and was hit by a car as she jaywalked to get to her friend’s apartment. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and sued the Shadow Glen Homeowners Association, arguing that the failure to maintain enough guest parking on the site was a breach of the duty of care and the legal cause of her injuries.
To support her argument, she pointed to a city zoning ordinance that required the apartment complex to maintain sufficient guest parking on the site. The ordinance was passed in 1979, when the building was completed. Issakhani argued that the purpose of the ordinance was to prevent the sort of harm she suffered.
The Court disagreed. The Court noted that the purpose of the ordinance was to eliminate street parking so as not to upset the residential character of the neighborhood by having too many cars parked on the street. The purpose of the ordinance was not to prevent pedestrian collisions that occurred off site. The case follows similar reasoning, most recently in a 2017 California Supreme Court case (Vasilenko v. Grace Family Church) that held a “landowner who does no more than site and maintain an offsite parking lot that requires invitees to cross a public street to reach the landowner’s premises does not owe a duty to protect those invitees from the obvious dangers of the public street.”
The Court confirmed California’s consistent approach to cases like these which refuse to impose a duty upon landowners to provide onsite parking to protect their invitees from the dangers of crossing nearby streets to access the property.
It’s a sad case, but it reiterates the longstanding rule that property owners are not liable when invitees are injured en route to but off their property.
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