Jennifer Lanchart said she was shocked to find that the one-bedroom apartment she recently rented in a 1920s bungalow community in East Hollywood for $2,175 a month did not include a very basic amenity: a refrigerator.
“I was like, ‘What?’” she said. “I took it for granted because every place I’ve been in had one.”
When she spoke to friends, she learned that fridge-less apartments are commonplace in Southern California and that renters are often expected to buy their own when they move in. Ms. Lanchart said she spent about $700 at Lowe’s for an LG fridge and “wasn’t happy about it.”
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a new state law that will require apartments to come with a refrigerator and stove, basic appliances that many renters expected would already be required. The mandate applies to all leases that are signed, amended or renewed on or after Jan. 1, 2026.
Tina McKinnor, the Assembly member who sponsored the bill, said the high cost of rental housing in the state had been exacerbated by outdated laws that did not consider basic household appliances a necessary part of a rental unit.
“A working stove and a working refrigerator are not luxuries — they are a necessary part of modern life,” Ms. McKinnor, a Democrat from Inglewood, said in a statement last month, when lawmakers gave the bill final approval. “By making these necessary appliances standard in rental homes, California can provide all of its residents with a safer, more affordable and more dignified place to call home.”
While it’s not clear how many apartments in California are rented without refrigerators, The Los Angeles Times reported in 2022 that rental listings provided by Apartments.com showed that Los Angeles and Orange County had the fewest number of apartments with refrigerators among nearly two dozen large metropolitan areas nationwide.
Mike Dunfee, who owns a property management company in Long Beach, Calif., traced the practice of renting apartments without refrigerators to “old-school” landlords who wanted to save money and did not want to be responsible for repairs. “That’s becoming more and more a thing of the past, but it absolutely still exists,” he said.
Most units without refrigerators are in smaller apartment buildings or homes owned by mom-and-pop landlords, he said.
He said that requiring those appliances will be good for landlords because it will make their apartments more attractive to prospective tenants. It will also benefit tenants, he said, because the refrigerators they buy for one apartment may not fit in the kitchen nook in their next apartment.
“This one is common-sense, and it will be good for the landlords, even the ones who were resisting this,” Mr. Dunfee said. “It would be like selling a car without a radio or air conditioning.”
Michael Cusumano, managing director of Bur-Cal Management in Burbank, Calif., which manages rental properties in Southern California, took a more critical view. He said that requiring refrigerators and stoves “just creates additional headwinds” for landlords who have to contend with a statewide rent cap and other regulations.
The California Apartment Association, which represents the state’s rental housing industry, opposed the law, but not because of the cost of providing refrigerators and stoves, said Whitney Prout, the group’s executive vice price president of legal affairs.
She pointed instead to two provisions in the law that she said would impose more burdens on landlords. One specifies language that must be included in leases when tenants decide to bring their own fridges. The other gives tenants who bring their own fridges the right to demand a new one from their landlord within 30 days.
“The base line requirement to provide a stove and fridge in good working order is something most rental housing providers already do, and this isn’t going to change that,” Ms. Prout said. “It’s just going to say the minority of people who don’t are going to have to.”
Larry Gross, the executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a Los Angeles tenant advocacy organization, called the law “a tremendous tenants’ rights victory.”
“The burden is already hard going into a new apartment,” since tenants have to pay first and last month’s rent, he said. Adding the cost of a refrigerator has been “economically infeasible for many tenants here in Los Angeles,” he said.
Landlords could simply pass on the cost of a new refrigerator to a tenant moving into a vacant rental unit, but would face greater limits in rent-controlled apartments, he said. The law, he said, “is going to benefit many, many people throughout the state.”
Ms. Lanchart said she wished the law had been passed when she moved into her apartment in East Hollywood and had to buy a new fridge. “It’s an exorbitant expense,” she said. “Rents are really high, and it’s so hard to live a comfortable life, so I’m glad this is happening.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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