## Facts

- Hillview Associates owned a Des Moines mobile home park and used a management company and regional manager to operate it.
- Several tenants organized a tenant association to complain about park conditions and rent increases and confronted management over those issues.
- At an April 15, 1987 meeting between tenant representatives and management, a heated exchange ended when tenant Kimber Davenport struck the park manager.
- Hillview served termination notices on several association members (including the Bloomquists, the Swartzes, the Rays, and the Davenports), later followed by sixty-day termination notices and three-day notices to quit.
- When the tenants did not vacate, Hillview filed an equitable forcible entry and detainer action; the tenants raised retaliatory eviction and waiver as affirmative defenses.
- The district court ordered removal of all defendants; the tenants appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether eviction efforts against tenants active in a tenant association constituted retaliatory eviction under Iowa law.
2. When tenants present evidence suggesting retaliation, how the burdens of production and persuasion are allocated, and what evidence rebuts a retaliatory presumption.
3. Whether the landlord waived the right to evict the Davenports under a thirty-day “peaceable possession” doctrine.

## Decision

- The Iowa Supreme Court reviewed de novo and reached a split disposition.
- As to the Bloomquists, the Swartzes, and the Rays, the court reversed, concluding the evictions were retaliatory and the landlord failed to rebut the retaliatory inference with credible nonretaliatory reasons.
- As to Kimber and Reva Davenport, the court affirmed, holding the landlord produced a legitimate, nonretaliatory justification—Kimber Davenport’s assault—that overcame any retaliatory presumption.
- The court rejected the Davenports’ waiver defense because they did not have thirty days of peaceable possession after notice.

## Legal Principles

- Tenants are protected from eviction motivated by retaliation for exercising tenant rights, including organizing and participating in a tenants’ association and making good-faith complaints about conditions.
- Evidence of eviction action taken in close connection with protected activity can create a presumption of retaliatory purpose, requiring the landlord to produce evidence of a legitimate, nonretaliatory reason.
- The landlord’s burden is one of production; the tenants retain the ultimate burden of persuasion that retaliation was the primary motive.
- A landlord may rebut a retaliatory presumption by showing a credible, independent reason for termination, including serious misconduct such as violence against management.
- Retaliatory eviction protection does not confer permanent possession; once retaliatory purpose is no longer operative, termination may proceed for lawful reasons (or, absent restrictions, without stated cause).
- Waiver based on continued occupancy requires the tenant to show the requisite period of peaceable possession after notice; without that period, waiver does not bar eviction.

## Conclusion

The court held that evictions aimed at tenant organizers were retaliatory and therefore improper on the record, but it allowed eviction of tenants whose termination rested on an independent, legitimate basis—an assault—while also rejecting waiver absent thirty days of peaceable possession.


Hillview Assocs. v. Bloomquist, 440 N.W.2d 867 (Iowa 1989)