In the waning days of 2023, my colleague, Henry Hilston, wrote a blogpost discussing a then-recently issued decision by the North Carolina Court of Appeals, Rosewood Estates I, LP v. Drummond. There, the tenant rented the subject premises from the landlord through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Program. The landlord sent a written notice to the tenant, informing her that her lease would not be renewed following expiration of the then-current term because of various complaints it had received concerning the tenant’s improper conduct and her failure to cure the same.
The tenant failed to vacate the premises in accordance with the notice, and the landlord commenced an action in summary ejectment. As a defense to ejectment, the tenant challenged the adequacy of the landlord’s notice of non-renewal, arguing that: (i) the notice failed to provide adequate notice of the alleged breach(es) of the lease that were (nonspecifically) cited as grounds for non-renewal; and (ii) the notice was not accompanied by a VAWA Notice of Occupancy Rights and HUD Certification Form (hereinafter, the “VAWA Paperwork”).
The trial court rejected the tenant’s arguments and granted the landlord a judgment for possession. The tenant appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed, concluding that that the notice was defective for each of the reasons argued by tenant.
On the surface, Rosewood plausibly could be read as requiring a landlord for a “covered dwelling” to provide a terminated tenant with the VAWA Paperwork in conjunction with any termination notice, even when the termination has no nexus to domestic violence whatsoever. After all, nothing in the Court’s recitation of the facts in Rosewood suggests that domestic violence was in any way implicated. Moreover, the tenant, in her briefing, took the position that landlords of “covered dwellings” are required to provide the VAWA Paperwork in conjunction with all termination notices, even when there is no domestic violence nexus.
For reasons deftly summarized in Henry’s prior blogpost, imposition of any such universal requirement hardly seemed sensible. Regardless, concerns surrounding Rosewood’s broad, and overly vague holding were, to some degree, academic, since Rosewood was an unpublished decision (i.e., one that did not qualify as a binding precedent).
Then, in July 2024, the Court of Appeals, in L.I.C. Associates I, L.P. v. Brown, again addressed a landlord’s alleged failure to provide VAWA Paperwork in conjunction with notice of termination.[1] There, the plaintiff landlord issued a notice of termination, advising the defendant tenant that her tenancy would be terminated due to nonpayment of rent unless she brought her account current during a specified cure period. She failed to do so, and the landlord commenced an action in summary ejectment, alleging that the tenant had violated one or more conditions of the lease for which the right of reentry was specified, namely those provisions requiring her to timely remit her rental payments when due. The landlord subsequently filed an amended complaint, alleging that tenant also had unilaterally changed the locks to her unit without landlord’s prior authorization or approval in violation of a provision of the lease prohibiting tenants from doing so.
The magistrate ruled in the landlord’s favor, and the tenant appealed to district court. The landlord then filed a motion for summary judgment, which the district court granted. The tenant appealed to the Court of Appeals and argued that the trial court erred by granting summary judgment in landlord’s favor because the landlord did not put forward any evidence that it provided tenant with the VAWA Paperwork in conjunction with its termination notice to tenant.
The Court reversed the trial court’s summary judgment in favor of the landlord and remanded the case with instructions for the trial court to enter summary judgment in favor of the tenant. Yet, in a welcome twist for landlords of “covered dwellings,” the Court seemed to suggest that the Brown landlord’s failure to provide the VAWA Paperwork was problematic not because a failure to provide VAWA Paperwork is fatal per se, even where there is no conceivable domestic violence nexus, but because there was, at least conceivably, a potential domestic violence nexus at play. More specifically, the Court noted that the tenant had offered affidavit testimony averring that she had changed her locks because her ex-boyfriend had stolen her keys, which, in the Court’s view, made it impossible to say, as the landlord had contended, that the lock-changing violation noted in the landlord’s amended complaint was unrelated to domestic violence.
As a curious aside, the Court’s decision to reverse and remand with instructions to enter summary judgment in favor of tenant, rather than with instructions to conduct further proceeding not inconsistent with the appellate court’s mandate, was procedurally unusual, since the actual existence of a domestic violence nexus in the case, while colorable, was not conclusively established from the existing record. Moreover, the Court’s focus on the potential domestic violence nexus vis-à-vis the lock-changing violation also did not address the absence of any such nexus vis-à-vis the non-payment violation, which had been the original (and, for a time, only) impetus for the ejectment action.
In any event, unlike Rosewood, Brown is a published decision and is, therefore, a binding precedent on all North Carolina trial courts. Thus, Brown appeared to represent something of a “course correction” by the Court of Appeals from its potentially unbounded suggestion in Rosewood that failure to provide a terminated tenant with the VAWA Paperwork in conjunction with any termination notice, even when the termination has no nexus to domestic violence whatsoever, could be an absolute defense to ejectment for tenants at “covered dwellings”
Most recently, in February 2025, the Court of Appeals in Oxford Housing Authority v. Church again addressed the issue of when a landlord of a “covered dwelling” must provide VAWA Paperwork in the context of termination of a tenancy and further clarified its holding from Brown, making explicit that the VAWA Paperwork need not be issued in conjunction with a termination notice where there is no domestic violence nexus. There, the plaintiff, a public housing authority (PHA), commenced an action in summary ejectment against the defendant tenants for failure to pay retroactively adjusted rent, which was determined to be due and owing because of an unreported interim change in income. The trial court ruled in favor of plaintiff, and defendants appealed.
On appeal, the defendants argued in part that the trial court erred by entering the judgment for ejectment because the plaintiff, as a PHA, was subject to VAWA but did not provide them with the VAWA Paperwork when it provided written notice of termination of their tenancy for non-payment of rent. The Court of Appeals disagreed and concluded that provision of the VAWA Paperwork was not required.
The Court began it analysis by harkening back to Brown and the Court’s rejection of the Brown landlord’s contention that the VAWA Paperwork was not required due to the absence of a domestic violence nexus. By contrast, the Court noted that the Church tenants, unlike the Brown tenant, did not argue they were entitled to receive the VAWA Paperwork because of a potential domestic violence nexus[2] nor was there “anything in the record indicating any present or historical concerns of domestic violence.” Instead, in Church, the tenants put forward the sweeping argument espoused by the Rosewood tenants that, simply because their landlord was subject to VAWA, the landlord was “automatically required” to provide the VAWA Paperwork “when initiating a lease termination on any ground, including nonpayment of rent.” (Emphasis in original).
To support this argument, the appellants in Church cited to a California appellate decision, which explicitly held that the VAWA Paperwork must be provided in connection with every termination of tenancy for a “covered dwelling,” even when there is no nexus to domestic violence, along with the Court of Appeals’ prior decision in Rosewood, which had suggested a similar rule (albeit only implicitly). The Court declined to treat the California decision or its own unpublished decision in Rosewood as persuasive.[3]
The Court unambiguously rejected the tenants’ contention that VAWA mandates provision of the VAWA Paperwork “in all lease termination proceedings.” Looking to the langue of VAWA itself, the Court noted that the statutory text’s “plain meaning and intent . . . is to protect housing applicants and tenants from housing discrimination based on domestic violence[.]” The Court, therefore, held that landlords of “covered dwellings” are not required to provide the VAWA Paperwork when a lease termination is based on non-payment of rent and there is no indication that any tenant has any concerns regarding domestic violence.
What do Rosewood, Brown, and Church mean for landlords of “covered dwellings?” In a broad sense, Brown and Church have gone a long way toward correcting some of the likely unintended confusion stemming from Rosewood’s overly broad language. While Church represents the most full-throated declaration of VAWA’s inapplicability to ejectments unrelated to domestic violence, it, like Rosewood, is an unreported decision, meaning future panels of the Court of Appeals (or trial courts) may make short shrift of its pronouncements, much as the Church panel itself did, when discounting Rosewood’s import. But what Church shouts Brown whispers (if not declares at a standard speaking decibel). Thus, landlords at “covered dwellings” should take some solace in knowing that, when the basis for an ejectment has no nexus whatsoever to domestic violence, provision of the VAWA Paperwork is likely not required, and the failure to furnish it should not constitute a viable defense to ejectment. But when multiple grounds for ejectment exist, and any of them has a colorable or potential nexus to domestic violence, per Brown, failure to provide the VAWA Paperwork may vitiate even those grounds that lack such a nexus.
As always, landlords at “covered dwellings” are encouraged to consult with experienced counsel to ensure that they are complying with applicable law. The experienced attorneys at Blanco Tackabery stand ready to provide such counsel.
[1] In the interest of full disclosure, this firm represented the landlord in Brown.
[2] As a reminder, the Rosewood plaintiffs likewise did not argue that they were entitled to receive the VAWA Paperwork because of any potential or alleged domestic violence nexus, but the Court, nonetheless, validated the legitimacy of their VAWA defense in its unpublished decision.
[3] Notably, Church itself is an unpublished decision. While the Church panel declined to provide any basis for rejecting the rationale espoused in the California case, stating simply that the North Carolina Court of Appeals is not bound by the decisions of California appellate courts, it did offer a distinction from Rosewood. Specifically, the parties in that case had executed a lease addendum stating the lease was subject to the provisions of VAWA, whereas in Church, the parties’ lease had no explicit mention of VAWA or its notice requirements. But, of course, VAWA is a federal law, which applies to “covered dwellings,” irrespective of whether a lease agreement for any particular “covered dwelling” expressly mentions VAWA. Thus, the legal significance of this distinction is suspect. As an interesting aside, Judge Donna Stroud, who has written on the topic of unpublished decisions by intermediate appellate courts, was the authoring judge in both Brown and Church.
Chad Archer brings extensive expertise in state and federal litigation and was recently named to Business North Carolina’s Legal Elite Honorees 2024 as well as the 2024 edition of The Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch® in America. In his civil litigation practice, he advises clients on a wide range of issues, including trusts and estates, appeals, contract disputes, landlord-tenant disputes, commercial and corporate disputes, complex business litigation and employment disputes.
