It Could Happen Here - How DSA Politicians & the City of LA Betrayed a Tenant Movement

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Mia talks with Janis Yu from CCED and Anahy, a tenant organizer at Hillside Villa, about their organizing against their landlord and the deal LA politicians, bureaucrats, and DSA council reps negotiated behind their backs to sell them out. Follow: @hillside_villaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story

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CallZone Media. everything. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. This is an episode where both happen at the same time. I'm your host, Bia Wong, and we are returning to what I've realized was, I think, one of the earliest things we ever covered on this show in the sort of misty depths of time which is I guess three years ago now we talked to some organizers and tenants from the Hillside Villa Tenant Association and a bunch of stuff has happened since then a lot of it is terrible some of it is cool well okay the stuff the stuff you've been doing is cool the stuff everyone else in this situation has been doing is terrible oh yeah and and with me to talk about this is janice you who's an

organizer from ccud and on a a tenant organizer at a hellside villa or via jesus christ why am i doing villa oh i know more i know more spanish than this i i i i know enough spanish that when people think that i'm spanish and start talking me on the street, I can kind of communicate with them. Abject failure. Yeah, welcome both to the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's both good and bad to be back.

Yeah. I wish circumstances were better. Yeah, thank you for having us and yeah, for staying in contact with us and trying to stay updated with our fight at Hillside Villa. Diana said, unfortunately, five, almost six years in and we're still trying to find a solution to this epidemic of housing in Los Angeles. in Los Angeles. Yeah, so let's start there. For people who don't remember this from many, many eons in the past, can you sort of remind people of what kind of organizing has been happening and the general situation of this building, of these landlords, and of the conditions of people who have to rent stuff in LA? Yeah, I can kind of start with the bigger picture context and then, Ana, you definitely fill in from your personal experience. But basically, Hillside Via is a building that was built in the 80s in Los Angeles, Chinatown, and it was meant to be affordable housing. It had an affordable housing covenant for 30 years up until 2018.

for 30 years up until 2018 and as soon as that expired as would be expected the landlord tom botts immediately tried to raise rent to market rate which for the low-income working-class tenants that work at hillside villa um it was a 200 percent rent increase right yeah which is a de facto eviction like folks who are paying um eight hundred dollars in rent were now being asked to pay 2,500 which is literally impossible for some tenants who are on fixed incomes and so it was a huge issue for one of the largest buildings in LA Chinatown. It has 124 units, multi-ethnic, multi-generational. And so as soon as that happened, I think one of the tenants, Donya Luisa, who is no longer with us, called the news channels and organizers got involved. And yeah, this was six years ago at this point and pretty early on in the fight. I think at the time we were working with the district one council member at the time, Gil Cedillo, who's, you know, an establishment Democrat. And he had tried to negotiate a deal

with Tom Botts, the landlord for a a 10-year extension that ended up falling through because Botts reneged on it. And that was, I think, one of the first moments where tenants realized we cannot trust these politicians to liberate us, right, to actually solve the root issues. And so that's when tenants started actually demanding to use eminent domain, which is the government's power to basically seize land for public use, to actually use that power for affordable housing and to use it as a long-term solution for all of these expiring covenants, which is a citywide issue. It's not just a Chinatown thing. There's actually thousands of buildings where covenants are set to expire in the next few years. So that was how this fight was going. And we had actually successfully pressured our city council in 2021 in May, which was, I think, the first time we came on the show to set aside the funding to actually do that and to actually take bold action for housing.

And yeah, I'll pass it over to Anai to just share from your own experience. Thanks. I don't know how I could follow that, but I'll try my best. Yeah. So like Janice was sharing, the covenant expired in 2018. There was already an attempt to evict my family, as I shared in the previous episode. So after that is when we all started organizing. And then shortly after the pandemic happened and everything shut down during this time, the landlord Tom Botts wasn't stopping. He was going full throttle into his mission of completely evicting and displacing all the families living here in Chinatown, the multi-generational families that have been in Los Angeles, not known nowhere else. You know, this is our home.

Los Angeles is our home. on the street and be forced to like figure something out last minute for ourselves and move to somewhere in the outskirts of Los Angeles to a place where we're not familiar with. So these are some of the things that we were facing then during the pandemic and also facing a continued rental increases, which were illegal during the pandemic. And it's something that we've been dealing post pandemic and recently in a lot of our more current meetings to is like bringing that to light that these were illegal rental increases that had happened and that he actually asked the city to pay back right yeah so we had applied to erap which is basically a rental relief program to support tenants and what bots did was he asked the government to pay him the increased rent rates the

200 increased rates and the government fucking gave it to him. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. And yet he is still demanding that tenants themselves pay back their rent debt fully. And what happened with the recent deal that was made behind tenants back, which is what we're going to get into is that the government basically took the extra money back and are not applying it to the tenants' rent debt. So that's something that we're pretty pissed off about because basically they took money that was supposed to be for tenants

and just gave it back to the city government, which also doesn't even make sense because it was federal funding. So that's kind of one of the issues. Yeah, so we have a situation where the landlord has stolen this money and then the city has now stolen it from him which they have stolen federal money for themselves oh jesus christ literally literally oh god yeah it's all just like state-sanctioned theft. You know what else is a structural problem that is causing the mass evisceration of most of the population on Earth?

It is the products and services that support this podcast, and we're going to go to them briefly. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job

is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are back so is there anything else from sort of i guess like the background era of this that we want to get to before we move into like what's been happening now yeah i think maybe some additional context we can share is that after that may 2021 council meeting, we ended up really supporting our current council member, Ava Nises, in her campaign to get elected. This was November of 2021. We hosted large forums in Chinatown. We really mobilized our base in CCED to turn out to vote for her. And I think a powerful anecdote is that Richard, one of the longest Vietnamese tenants at Hillside Villa, he's been there for over 30 years. For him, this was the first vote that he ever cast in this country. And I think that, you know, is not a unique story. I think for a lot lot of our elders it was only because of our efforts that they participated in this election so i think a lot of the statistics show that the asian base

the chinatown base was really essential to getting a niece is elected and in 2022 um she officially got an office she was able to beat the incumbent incumbent Gil Cedillo and was the first quote unquote abolitionist, um, DSA. So democratic socialists of America kind of sponsored candidate to win an LAC council. And since then,

we've only seen her maybe two or three times, right, Anai, to address the issues at Hoseid Villa, even though during her campaign phase, she rhetorically supported our eminent domain struggle. She made a lot of promises, as politicians do, around housing in Chinatown. And yeah, I think that kind of brings us up to where we are now. Yeah. So let's get into what is currently happening because dear God, it's really, I don't know, things somehow getting worse. What's been happening in the last, I guess, immediate period? Yeah. So, wow. So much has happened and It's really hard to actually keep track of all of the big things, whether positive, mostly negative things happening. Just so much has happened over the last three years. We've been in the fight for six years so as we were mentioning in 2021 there was a vote that happened at city hall where there would be an evaluation of the building in order for the city to purchase a hillside villa or last resort would be expropriate through eminent domain although that was never something that

the people in power at lahd or that politicians really stood behind and like always wanted to try um something a little less radical. Therefore, going into negotiations, working with the landlord, and having these conversations with the landlord, with LAHD, with us,

somewhat in the picture, but mostly not in the picture, and that was done on purpose on behalf of LAH and tom bots and the politicians at cd1 so because we were waiting for this evaluation to happen at hillside villa i believe lahd needed to do that evaluation well the, the landlord, Tom Botts, didn't allow them to come into the building to do that evaluation because it was private property and they needed some kind of court order like permit or paperwork to allow the city, L.A.H-T, to come into the building to evaluate. That actually halted the process of

evaluating in order to purchase the building and actually had tenants waiting for this evaluation to happen for months, if not over a year. And you can imagine how tenants felt like if they were like suffocating under these circumstances of waiting for the city to act for tom bots to allow and there was always this resistance with the landlord and with getting lahd to get up off their ass and actually do something. Unfortunately, the chair of L.A.H.D., her name is Ann Sewell. I'm sure a lot of people have heard her name by now. She is not our friend. She's wicked and like in not a cool way. She's actually has like some conflict of interest in my opinion, that shouldn't have allowed her to even be in that position that she's in and to have such power over a case like ours at Hillside Villa,

where she was going into negotiations with Tom bots. And she's also a landlord and a white woman oh jesus christ so it's a double whammy there and yeah she became really buddy buddy friendly with tombots and that is when negotiations began between her and tombots behind the lucha, the fight for housing, behind the organizers' backs, behind communities' back. And so we rallied, we protested, we did phone banks for over a year

and things were so stagnant. Like I can't even express to you how that at least that one year was and and that's part of like since the last time we were here on this podcast was three years ago well a year or more of that was us just waiting around for the city to actually do their job and we can't get them to do their job yeah but we can protest and we can do direct action. And so we did. And we pulled up to Ansel's house, not once, not twice.

We rallied the housing community to go protest at her home and to make her uncomfortable because at any moment, any of us can get kicked out of our home. You know, there's no sense of security here. And we're never there to cause harm, you know, to anyone, no physical harm or anything. But we're there to also like kind of get her to understand how uncomfortable it is and how like safe she is in her own home. Right. So she called cops on us she targeted organizers by name it was

really sloppy on their end and yeah so i think i'll i'll stop there and um janice if you want to kind of add anything i'm sure you have a lot to add no yeah that was a really thorough summary i think all i want to add is that while bots was denying the city access to the building which we you know questioned deeply because why couldn't a tenant just give them access to the building why do they need like special permission from the landlord it's all just smoke and mirrors right delay tactics put on by this trifecta of lhd which is the la housing department so the bureaucrats and then cd1 city council district one the politicians and then bots they're all completely aligned with each other in their end goal of essentially protecting capital protecting landlords right so as he was doing that he initiated the eviction process he started evicting

tenants the you know 35 plus families that are deeply involved in the tenants association he sent eviction papers to all of them so ania maybe you can speak to a little bit of like what that experience was like to get those papers while the eminent domain process wasn't moving forward like it was supposed to definitely well speaking on behalf of like my mom who I live here with and who's lived here for over 12 years and speaking on behalf of other tenants, a lot of them are elders over 50 years old, have lived here for over 20, 30 years. They definitely felt the burden of those eviction papers and the anxiety the heavy emotions that comes with being at fear of like losing your home at any moment yeah the health issues that come up with that so they they definitely felt a lot of that and as much as much as we've been fighting, as much support as we have from the community,

they still felt that insecurity of their housing. For me, as someone in their 20s and where we've been in this fight for over six years or about six years, I felt like we've gone through the eviction process and I don't fear Tom Botts and I don't fear his tactics or his eviction papers. So there's definitely a difference in the way that like a lot of our elders feel, but I do have a lot of trust in the organizing that we're doing the solidarity although things haven't necessarily been all like happy and like we're still not really getting the things that we've been demanding for i have a lot of trust that we're gonna be able to win those evictions and we know how weak tom botts is his way of thinking and how weak their lawyers are so we must keep pushing there's no other way and and we will until this is over if it is ever over unfortunately we need we need to go to ads. Then we will come back with not ads

and instead more incredibly beautiful stories of struggle. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Thank you. what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of

Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet

when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are back. I guess I promised struggle and I didn't. I should have added and also betrayal because that's kind of the next part of this absolutely let's talk about that and the deals that are being cut yeah so at the beginning of this year uh we learned that a deal had been negotiated between LHD and bots completely behind tenants' backs. And we had frustrating meetings with Aeneas, our council member, where she was not willing to take a public stance, you know, against these backdoor negotiations. these backdoor negotiations. And so in April of this year, about four months ago, there was another motion that was heard in LA City Council when the kind of details of this deal were actually revealed. And they are just obscene. Basically, Tom Batts is being paid $15 million by the LA government and having a $5 million loan that he

has owed the city for, I think the 30 years, um, since Lucidio was first bill, he's having that loan forgiven with 0% interest. And all of that is just to extend the affordability covenant for a mere 10 years um which might sound like a lot to some folks but in reality is not a lot at all it just means that the children who are in middle school now will be in college and have to fight this fight yeah another time right and so that happened for bots great for him whereas tenants are being asked to pay back over 1.5 million dollars collectively of back rent with three percent annual interest added on yeah and yeah their eviction cases were not being dropped. They were promised to get their eviction case dropped. But what happened was that this month, one of our key tenant leaders, Adela,

her case was moved forward in the courts by bots. And we believe it was basically like a test case to basically pressure tenants to sign the new contracts, you know, threatening if you don't sign, this is what's going to happen to you too. And she is supposed to have a court date in September or October. So the timing is very obvious, right? You time this so that tenants would sign these new contracts that we were told would come out last week. It ended up being that they didn't come out till a little bit later. And when we actually received the details of the new lease, we were even further taken

aback because some of the details of this lease are just really wild. because some of the details of this lease are just really wild. You know, it's a complete regression from any kind of tenant law or tenant protection against harassment. Some of the things that this new lease includes is that there are behavioral stipulations is what they're being called. Yeah, just that term itself right is so cursed but the stipulations say that if a tenant merely plays amplified sound in any of the public communal spaces of the building or records slash slanders slash harasses the landlord or management they can be immediately evicted without a jury

trial jesus like that is yeah that is insane you know these are clearly anti-organizing policies because these are some of our tools are to amplify sound and to and it's our right to be able to record landlordowner management when they are usually the ones harassing us yeah they are always the ones harassing us right so that's one of the key issues with the new lease also the eviction cases are not even being dropped after tenants sign this new lease they're merely being. And the court actually retains jurisdiction for six years over the eviction cases, which is not something that any of the tenant lawyers we have worked with have ever seen before. And what this means is that if the tenants are late just one day

on the rent plus the debt repayment that bots is asking for they can also be immediately evicted without a jury trial and then finally this one is one of the kickers is that in the lease bots also wrote language saying that the tenants are responsible for paying his lawyer fee what which are up to oh my god are up to thirty thousand dollars and he is also demanding that the tenants pay his lawyer fees with three percent interest jesus christ so he's asking tenants to pay for their own evictions and one of the most wild parts of this whole thing is that a unices is doubling down on calling this a good deal she is caught on recording at a recent protest that we did at her house saying that she would recommend that one of her family members signs this deal which essentially signs their rights away and commits them to paying an

exorbitant amount of money to get evicted. So yeah, this is what we're dealing with. Yeah. And I want to kind of focus in on that last part because that is a DSA elected. Like that is one of the people that she ran. That was also very specifically was you know like

someone who was elected off of your organizing and is now instantly turned around and gone i would tell my own family to pay this guy's lawyer to evict you which is nuts yeah hardly socialist hardly progressive hardly even liberal at this point, right? It's just such naked, blatant protection of neoliberalism. And she not only called this a good deal, when we brought up the behavioral restrictions, she referred to those as simply good neighbor policies that we all have to abide by yeah which is ridiculous what so just completely normalizing the landlord you know maximizing his power gaining more power than any landlord has ever had in this city and completely restricting

the tenants right to organize and to fight against harassment yeah yeah and i think this raises a really important question about what are we actually doing as a movement for people who aren't involved in this like who aren't involved directly in the tenants organizing. Like if the thing that you're doing is putting people like this in power who get elected off of movement and immediately turn on them and side with landlords, what is your political project supposed to be doing, right? And if this is something that you're okay with,

you need to sit down and reevaluate what you actually believe. And it's something that you're not okay with. You need to sit down also and ask yourself how did it come to this and why is this something that you think is acceptable yeah a thousand percent so far even though we protested a unisa's last weekend we haven't really heard from dsa folks in terms of actually publicly um supporting us and publicly holding a unisa's accountable um so that's something that we would like to see ideally yeah it's like like again like i know there are dsa people at la listening to this show like please come collect

your trash like this is this is this is your problem and you also have to be part of the solution to dealing with it, because right now what you have is a situation where a bunch of tenants and a bunch of tenant organizers are fighting your people at the same time as they're also fighting the landlords and the rest of the city government and the city bureaucracy. city government and the city bureaucracy and this is this is a situation that i think is just absolutely unacceptable and that can be intervened in by people who are supposed to be doing this and haven't been yeah speaking on that i have a lot of feelings around that and um as someone that has experienced a lot of displacement in echo park and now happening in chinatown um it's something that's followed me my whole life and dealing directly with the problem of like gentrification and the people coming into our neighborhoods or mostly like like liberal folks i know a lot of them benefit from the displacement and gentrification and it's really easy for them to look away or just kind of like shrug their shoulders and just go have brunch at a new echo park or highland park cafe so definitely um thank you for calling that out. And yeah, we really need to think radically and reimagine what it would look like to find a different solution where we're not relying on these politicians or the city to find those solutions because it's evident that six years into our fight at hillside villa

it's been cyclical with their we're asking our council members to represent us and again and again they give us false promises and disappoint us and there's complete hypocrisy and backstabbing um on behalf of the politicians and um you know all these are tactics with the lahd making us wait for so long with tombots working with them i think that's a tactic is making the people the community wait for so long yeah that they get tired they get tired of fighting they get tired of waiting and unfortunately that has been a tactic that i've seen like has gotten to a lot of our elder folks or people that are just fed up having to deal with the bureaucracy of it all that a lot of them kind of not everyone for example me i'm still believe eminent domain could have been like a more radical solution and

a way for us to take that power back from the city and the way that they use these laws to benefit them and that we could use like eminent domain to help us for once. But eminent domain was completely given up on, on with like certain tenants that were tired of fighting and wanted to reach an agreement and wanted to reach a deal. So then we have this 15 year deal that is then turned into 10 years because those five years that we had been fighting is included into that 15 years not only that but yeah he gets 15 million dollars plus his his debt to the city forgiven or extended i forget which one it is but this fool's a millionaire yeah he has a bunch of houses in malibu he doesn't need any more money and it's just really disappointing that in a time like this where where we know that things aren't working anymore and that things need to change,

that again, the city and the politicians are continuing to side with the landlords and continue the cyclical oppression of lack of housing and lack of accessibility to housing that affected me as a child and that is gonna affect the children that are around me now and the teenagers and the single parents so that's why we we need these uh better solutions and yeah like um jenna said for the two or three years that unices has been around in office we've only seen her two or three times she doesn't know what's going on half the time and she is actively supporting shops here in chinatown that are gentrifying the community, not only herself, but her office is actively trying to divide our organization and our tenant association. Yeah, I think even during her initial meetings with us, she would kind of use this line of, I don't want to hear from organizers, especially one of our most committed organizers is a white male lawyer. He's there with

us every single week. She would specifically scapegoat him and say, oh, I don't want to hear from a white lawyer. I'm here to hear from the tenants. And that dynamic actually really got got entrenched in our organizing where some tenants then began to weaponize that and so division and she continues to use that as a talking point like we saw during the most recent protest at her house she continued to use both of these tactics, weaponizing identity politics, which was really ironic because as she was saying that, you know, from one side of her mouth on the other side, she's receiving advice from this white hipster musician that she appointed to her office. Who's literally telling her every two minutes, like what is actually on this contract because she clearly has not read it. So it was just really ironic to see that play out in real time. She continued to say that she only wants to hear from tenants, even though tenants are saying the same exact things that the organizers are, but she's infantilizing them, right? By saying like, oh, you wouldn't believe these things if these organizers weren't

putting them into your brains. No, these tenants very much have the ability to make their own decisions and their own critical thinking. And we're offering them information that they are then taking in themselves. And then ultimately with the most recent protest, she just completely gaslit us for demanding more than she's giving. The whole vibe was basically like, why aren't you guys grateful for the 10 year extension? Why aren't you grateful to me for finding $250,000 runs out, tenants who are on fixed incomes are immediately vulnerable to eviction. And they're vulnerable to eviction even before that, if they even just blast their music too loud in the patio based on this lease. So yeah, we are very, very pissed off at CD1 right now. Yeah. We are very, very pissed off at CD1 right now. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think, you know, people listen to the show a lot. Like, you should all recognize these tactics because these are all incredibly standard union-busting tactics. Like, the whole, like, dragging out the first contract negotiation, trying to do divide and conquer between the union, and, you know, doing the, oh, these are outside organizers, like, the union's an outside organizer. This is all just straight-up union- 101 stuff exactly yeah i'm so glad you brought that word up because that's what we've been calling it the past year um exactly like

you said third partying the union dragging out contract negotiations and, I think the sad thing is that tenant organizing has a lot less protections than labor organizing or a lot less, you know, formalized law. So we don't have things like the NLRB that can maybe give us a little bit more teeth in fighting against unfair labor practices. So that could probably be a whole other conversation a comparison between tenant and labor organizing um but so many parallels as well and then like also she made so many promises and sweet talk so many of us and there's this like respectability politics that a lot of even tenants became divided within our movement because they put so much trust into her office and in their hands, whereas other tenants were still very critical and very hard on Eunice's anytime she was around. We really questioned them

and a lot of the tenants didn't like that and they demanded that we not question them and that we behave in an educated manner. But look at what we have now. We have a contract that completely has sold all of us out. And what for? For these promises and fooling the people into believing her, into trusting those promises or that she would actually have our best interest. promises or that she would actually have our best interest. So here we are. And these are some of the things that we've also been dealing with in the association. Yeah. And just to quickly add on to the point you were just making, Anai, I think we've really learned these past few years about the insidiousness of these so-called progressive electeds right who come from some kind of left-leaning background um a and uses comes from law defensa which is a non-profit that has organized for you know certain kinds of reforms within prison spaces and so she would constantly refer to herself as an organizer and weaponize that right like as an organizer like i know what i'm doing and you guys can trust me

whereas with sadio the previous council member the contradictions were just obvious like we knew this guy was bullshit um and you know we would just be openly fighting him all the time. But in a lot of ways, us getting her elected, I think, made our organizing harder because of the way that she would, you know, call us her fam, which should have been a red flag from the beginning. Right. That's also another. Yeah. Yeah. Our whole family. All your co-workers your family. But yeah, I think that's definitely been a huge lesson the past few years.

Yeah, and that's, I think, something that's not very well understood about the way that sort of campaigns are destroyed. Is that someone who is nominally on the same side of you is significantly more dangerous of an opponent than someone who isn't right and i mean like you can look at immediately after world war ii in italy in in 1919 1920 there's this thing called the benio rosso this is the two red years the two red years culminate in what becomes known as the occupation of the factories this is these mass sort of workers movements sort of accumulating from all of the effects of the war and all of the factories is these mass sort of workers movements sort of accumulating from all of the effects of the war and all of the sort of oppression that's been happening for centuries in italy and what happens is instead of calling a conventional general strike in which

you know workers leave the factories and allow bosses to hold on to them workers instead just seize control and occupy the factories they work and this is why it's you know it's called the occupation of the factories and in this period, these workers have the capitalists on the ropes. Without control of the factories, the bosses can't restart production with scabs. And more importantly, it puts the workers in the position to simply drive the bosses out entirely and restart production under the control of the workers who work in these places and who literally built the entire economic system that these capitalists have been profiting from and this was the best chance any country in europe was ever going to get to defeat the capitalists once and for all right this was this was the

best they were ever going to have but the workers oldest allies these are the socialists and social democratic politicians in the socialist party opposed the occupations and these these socialist party politicians these are their friends these are their comrades these are these are the people who lead their unions i mean these are people who you know a lot of these people have spent 30 years organizing with these people just to carve the workers movement out of sort of the stone of history these are the people you know who in a lot of cases like they had gone to war with so when the social democrats told them to mobilize and told them to go home and told them to you know just give the fact the factories back to the capitalists and give up all of their leverage the workers listened and once they've been totally

demobilized there was no way for them to resist the fascists mussolini marched on rome the next year and in the wake of the socialist betrayal the fascists would rule italy for 25 years you have to be incredibly weary of of these people who who take power from you know like the most personal example to me is we have this with brandon johnson who is like a you know the the big he was the mayor of chicago where i i guess technically now i don't live there but i lived there for ages who was you know quote our quote-unquote movement mayor and then immediately started just fucking putting migrants that had been like bust up in just like these fucking horrible conditions in camps people were dying people were getting fucking terrible diseases like buildings with mold in

them like stuff that was been condemned like all of this stuff happens and you know and it really kind of in a very similar way because this was you know this was supposed to be one of us the resistance to it has been really neutered and that's a dynamic that you know we haven't had as much in the u.s because there hasn't been a left in this country until really the last maybe decade, and that's stretching it. And now, you know, we need to actually get back to understanding how this kind of stuff works, because more and more of the people who are going to be arresting you are people who, you know, you used to be organizing with, people who you used to know and people who,

even when you put a mic in front of their face, will claim to be on your side. Yeah, no, those are some really great comparisons to draw to. And yeah, I think we've definitely learned to be more vigilant collectively this year. Yeah, is there anything else that you two wanted to say before we wrap up?

Yeah, I think it's really important to hold people accountable always as much as they don't want to be held accountable uh they had they still they probably won't but they still have a responsibility to the community and yeah i think we need to to stick to direct action and less working alongside politicians because at the end of the day, the same always will be the solution and that's something that I've learned more recently and the way that things have kind of unfolded with Hillside Villa and lastly I know there are some key demands for CD1 that we can share too. So yeah, I think picking up on what you were saying, Anai, direct action has always been our bread and butter to actually get meaningful results. And we're already seeing it after this recent protest at AUNISIS's house where CD1, the city council district, is now completely changing their tune and saying oh this this lease was just

a draft like you don't have to feel pressured to sign it you can put together a counter proposal and that is completely not what they were saying at all before the protest they were really really pressuring us to sign the lease and even at the protest, right? AUNICE is recommending that a family member would sign it. So we're already seeing the results. And in our counterproposal, we plan to really highlight a few demands. First and foremost, that the rent debt is turned into consumer, non-evictable debt, no behavior stipulations.

Those are bullshit. The eviction cases actually get dismissed and not suspended in court for six years and finally no 15 million for bots until a fair deal is reached and that's a key point of leverage because cd1 is acting as the escrow of the 15 million meaning that they're supposed to yeah see if um both parties so us and bots quote unquote like fulfill what we're supposed to with the deal before giving bots the 15 million and so they have so much power over this situation they keep throwing their hands up and saying they don't have power but they can withhold the 15 million from him until he actually responds to some of these demands.

So that's what we really want to highlight in this moment. And for folks who, you know, want to kind of stay updated on the struggle, our handle on both Twitter and Instagram, I believe is hillside underscore via. So feel free to check us out there and stay updated. Yeah, we'll put the link down in the description too.

And on that note, thank you two both so much for coming on. And yeah, fuck them. Fuck the DSA electeds. Fuck the landlords. Fuck the housing department. Hope you crush them all.eds. Fuck the landlords. Fuck the housing department. Hope you crush them all. Absolutely. Fuck them all.

Thank you so much for having us. And yeah, definitely the city a lot needs to be dismantled and reimagined and reconstructed, starting with housing and so much more. But thank you again. Yeah. And I encourage everyone listening to the show. Give them hell. Whoever them is in this scenario, give them hell. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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