Mercado v. North Valley Construction Co. LLC (Original Saugus Café Wrongful Lockout Suit)
Alfredo Mercado, longtime operator of the Original Saugus Café in Santa Clarita, sued property owners North Valley Construction Co. LLC, Larry Goodman, and Louise Arklin (individually and as trustee of the Henry Arklin Family Trust) in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleging they changed the locks on the roughly 140-year-old restaurant on January 5, 2026 and shut down his business without any judicial eviction process. Mercado, who says he ran the café for nearly three decades under an oral month-to-month lease, also alleges the property owners tried to file trademark applications for the café's name without his consent.
Why it matters
A clean illustration of why California's flat statutory prohibition on commercial self-help eviction -- unlike Texas and the handful of states that permit it for rent delinquency -- exposes a landlord to compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorneys' fees the moment it changes locks without a court order, regardless of how informal or long-running the underlying tenancy was. Owners and asset managers relying on oral or informally-documented commercial tenancies in self-help-prohibited states should treat any lockout impulse as a judicial-process problem first, since the absence of a written lease does not create a self-help shortcut.
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