It Could Happen Here - LA Tenants Expropriate their Landlord

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Mia talks with Janis Yue and Anahy about how Hillside Villa tenants forced the LA city council to agree to buy their apartment building from their landlord.   IG: @hillsidevilla_ Twitter: @hillside_villa Facebook: Hillside Villa Tenants AssociationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where you all keep telling me that we keep doing depressing episodes and we never do any episodes that aren't doomerism. So today this is a podcast about how you can

find the people who are making your life really bad and make bad things happen to them instead. And with me to talk about how this has been done and also can be done is Janet Yu, who is a tenant organizer with the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development in LA, and Anai, who's another tenant organizer and leader at Northside Villa. Anayi, Janice, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Yeah. And it's Hillside Via, not Hillside. Sorry. No worries. This is what happens when I have MRI brain. I guess. Okay. So the first thing I want to sort of walk through is basically, can you two describe the win you all had a couple of weeks ago? Yeah, I can go ahead and start and then Anai if you want to fill in at all.

So a couple of weeks ago, we were able to successfully push our city council to approve a loan to acquire Hillside Via from Slumlord Tombots. And so just to make it clear, this isn't the end of the fight. We have not fully expropriated Tombots at the moment, but this is a huge victory and commitment from the city to take the building from him. So it was really, really exciting for all of us. You know, I guess one thing I want to clarify from the outset is that a lot of the reporting about it seemed like a lot of the reporting about it was saying that the city had voted to use eminent domain and they have not done that, which is my understanding. Yeah, yeah. So to clarify that part two, the motion that was passed, it does include that eminent domain will be used if the landlord does not willingly sell, which he most likely will not, of course.

He's a landlord. Yeah, exactly. So he's not going to willingly sell his building. It does include that it will be used and is part of the pathway, but it does not specifically pass the eminent domain piece. So that will be something that we will probably have to organize around. Yeah. And if I'm understanding correctly, that requires a second vote, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I guess, okay, first off also, congratulations, this rules. This is really exciting. Thank you. Yeah. And I guess the second thing I wanted to ask about was how this organizing process started and how you were able to do this, because this is a rare massive W.

Yeah. Yeah. So this has been a three-year struggle. And I can give a little bit of context around how it got started and then maybe Ana you can take it from there. So basically Hillside Via is part of a massive amount of buildings that were built in the 80s using different kinds of federal and state subsidies. And basically, yeah, it was subsidies that were used to fund private developers to keep buildings affordable for a temporary period of time. So using affordable housing covenants. And so Hillside's covenant expired in 2019 after 30 years of being kept affordable for the tenants. And as soon as that happened,

the landlord, of course, tried to increase the rent to market rate. So folks were receiving up to 200% rent increases. Yeah. So, you know, to actually like talk about what those numbers are, So, you know, to actually like talk about what those numbers are, people who are paying $800 for rent are now being asked to pay like $2,500. So that's a de facto eviction. Right. And as soon as that happened, there's actually this like origin story that I really love is that one of our tenant leaders, Leslie, who's a bilingual like Spanish and English speaker. tenant leaders leslie who's a bilingual like spanish and english speaker she came up to a tenant who is a monolingual cantonese speaker held up one of the rent increases ripped it to shreds the um benson our cantonese tenant leader just said okay and that's like one of the origin stories that really just shows like how um, like oppositional our tenants were from the beginning. Um, and then what happened was that another tenant leader, Louisa,

who actually has since passed away, um, due to COVID, she actually called like all the news stations in LA just blew this the fuck up. And, um, yeah. And then that's how organizers kind of got involved. And maybe you can share your personal experience of going through all of this. Yeah, for sure. So about right a little before the association was started at Hillside Villa, we had been living here for about seven years. And at that time, so I was working with my mom at the time and we went out in the morning for work. We came back around the afternoon to find that we couldn't get into our apartment.

get into our apartment um our keys were actually um they weren't going into the lock so we went to the manager's office and asked them like why our key wasn't working so they sent management up to our our floor and um they told us that we had been evicted and that we couldn't like go back in. Yeah. That we couldn't go back into our apartment. So it's just, just within that one, that one morning, you know, our whole, pretty much our whole life was like flipped upside down. worked uh unfortunately with um and i think this is a very common um thing is that um landlords um work directly with the sheriff's department so the sheriff department came and switched out our lock um so we were pretty much uprooted um that day um we had to figure out like what to do. We were all separated like that day. We all, you know, my sister went to her friend's house. My mom had to go rent a hotel to stay with her husband. And then I went to my partner's house. So that lasted about two to three days. And in those two to three days, we were personally, I started looking up tenant laws, tenant rights, and we found thanks to, to a friend,

she recommended the Eviction Defense Network who provides free lawyers for tenants facing eviction in LA. So they paired us up with a lawyer and they found that the eviction had actually been an illegal eviction. And then we also had like the paperwork to show that it was an illegal eviction. So we threatened to sue the landlord. And because of that, he dropped the case and let us back in to our apartment after like three or four days or something like that, from what I can remember. But in those days, it was it was really enraging, obviously, like, who wouldn't be, like, super pissed off at this, like, it would boil your blood, you know, and, and it did, um, and that's one of the things that, like, um, kind of made me, um, or very much so more involved in, like, tenant rights and, We're very much so more involved in like tenant rights and, and, um,

organizing. Um, and then also like, just to throw this in a little more detail, um, when we were locked out, um, they actually locked our animals in,

into the apartment. So we couldn't even get our dogs right away. Um, God, did they like, were they okay? Like, did you,

were you able to like, was anyone feeding them? Like they weren't there all three days i think we were we had to like really like push for them to open up the apartment so that we can get them like the day of um but then like we couldn't just like grab all our things um including like medication that was like needed for, for my mom's husband who has diabetes and whatnot. So I think that was like the first time we acted as a family to like not let someone pretty much bully and harass us into a forced eviction that was completely illegal. And that's within that time, it was also happening to all the tenants around us. I mean, there was

the word was going all over the apartment. I mean, you could see management was doing cash for keys, which is also an illegal tactic for landlords to do. Can you explain what that is? Sorry. Yeah. So cash for keys, it's probably going to be like a rough definition of what it is, it's when um when a landlord offers a certain amount of money in order for you to give up your apartment um and this could be a couple thousand um ten thousand twenty thousand sometimes way less than that um so that was a tactic that he was trying to use to evict people from our apartment so that he could remodel and then um move it up to like market rate and get pretty much all of our community out of this apartment which was an affordable apartment um it worked for a lot of some tenants did end up doing that a lot of people didn't want to fight back.

But the ones that did started the association. And there's also a lot of like language barriers with the tenants. Some that only spoke Spanish and didn't understand what was happening. They were trying to get people to sign contracts um for for the increase of the rent um yeah so that was my experience here to begin with um and and why we decided to fight back and not allow this to to happen to our family but also like our community here who are also experiencing the same thing. You know, it wasn't just an ice. I say this all the time.

It felt like an isolated situation at the time, but on the like broader perspective, it was not an isolated thing. And that's what brought our community together. That's A, really powerful, B, incredibly enraging. And yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things there. I mean, one, obviously, the cops doing, the sheriffs helping them do the illegal eviction is just incredibly on the nose. and one other thing i think is really interesting about yeah the way that like i mean okay the the the way the law only exists for rich people if you can like throw it into their faces and make

it embarrassing enough that like the state has to enforce it so i read a lot of media coverage of this and not a single person who who covered this story that that i saw from these articles mentioned that uh the the cash for keys is illegal a lot because a lot of the articles mention it but they don't they don't they don't mention that like you legally can't do this and so yeah i think that's a that that's i don't know i guess it goes to show that like even among the press like whose job it is to do this there's there's such like there's such little knowledge of what what what practices aren't and aren't allowed and that yeah i mean

i think as you're talking about like that that's one of the they're they're relying like in order to do this those landlords are like yeah they're relying on people not knowing their rights they're relying on being able to trick people they're relying on just straight up handing people stuff they can't read and forcing them to sign it which i don't know that my brain's weird but like the thing that reminds me of is like the spanish conquistadors showing up and then read like ask asking people to convert to christianity in spanish language they didn't speak and then shooting them when they didn't do it. It's like... Yeah, that's a fitting analogy, honestly. Yeah.

It's a new form of colonization. Yeah. And one that we're, you know, resisting. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That was one of the other things I wanted to talk about in terms of resisting this kind of stuff is, yeah. What was it like dealing with the kind of language barriers that you get here? Would you have, I don't know, like you, I mean, you've mentioned like at least three languages that people are speaking. There's probably more because that's just,

that's how working class communities work yeah i feel like that's been such a central part of our fight is language justice and the tenant meetings that we've had every single week for the past three years um so that's like about 150 meetings. Every single one of them has included some form of translation. So, yeah, we've had a lot ofual Spanish or English speakers, they're having a headset on where we then have someone who's offering simultaneous translation. And then since we have fewer Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, we'll also have organizers on the side doing consecutive translation for them. So our meetings are run in like usually three, if not more languages. That's awesome. And I guess, I guess that leads into another question that I had, which was, so how, how did, I think from my understanding this, one of the parts of the story is like, is people,

people who'd been doing established tenant organizing uh like getting getting involved with this struggle and i wanted to i guess talk about how that happens and yeah yeah yeah so i think because um that original tenant luisa like really blew this story up um different orgs heard about it and eventually um, LATU, so the LA Tenancy Union, and then CCED, the org that I'm in, we heard about it and got involved long term. And even with that, like I'm a relatively new organizer, I only started volunteering with CCED a couple years ago. So it's really been like one of my first site fights, we like to call them. But there are other folks who have had more, a bit more experience with different buildings

in LA as well. But I think what's important to emphasize is that this fight has really been tenant led. And even though we have like these kind of, have these outside organizers, it's always been the tenant's demands and the tenant's interests first. Yeah. From your descriptions of people showing up with translation equipment, yeah, it seems like a really good way to do this kind of stuff, which is you show up and you give help to people but it's it's you know it's it's them doing the organizing which i don't know it reminds me a lot of like i mean of my experience in union organizing stuff which is like yeah no it's it's some yeah like you have people

who have experience with stuff and they come in and their job is to like help the people who are actually trying to organize the place yeah exactly exactly the people who are actually trying to organize the place. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The people who are like actually directly impacted. Yeah. I feel like our role has really just been facilitating, offering like the technical support, more of that stuff. But Anai, I think you can really talk about how so much of this fight has really been building the tenants power and becoming more and more like militant and radical and just the tenants, like, yeah, really just like feeling their own fire.

Yeah. So we are like super duper grateful for the organizers that have come out for the last three years or however long um they've decided to or have joined the association to help um and a lot of the tenants always always like give thanks and they're super appreciative of the organizers but sometimes they don't give themselves the credit either. They think it's only like they think the organizers, which is obviously like super important and we're super grateful, but they don't realize that they're a huge part of the fight. For example, actually, my mom has been a part of the association for longer than I have.

I've only been organizing for about, well, not only, a year and a half. But she's actually been in the organization for three years. for three years um because not only because she needed the support and the organizers really helped to um to guide her to like learn to use her voice for um for the outcome that we all want to see um and a lot of the uh tenants are um are women they're elders you know third generation elders so um they're very strong people they um a lot of like the elder like um like i guess latina like i don't know how i feel about that term but um you know women um are are natural leaders and with the help of the organizers um they really just helped to to help them to you know use use their voice and to empower them to do what they can naturally do, which is speak up and ask for what they want. So, yeah, my mom has, you know, learned over the last three years how to talk in front of politicians, how to communicate the process and the struggle that we've all been

enduring, but to also demand what we rightfully deserve, which is housing, safe housing, and for politicians to do their job, which is to represent, as they should be, the community that they are working for and not to beg them to do things, but to demand that they take action in the way that we have taken action much more than any politician has in the last three years. It was up to the tenants and it still is. And thanks to them, we have gotten as far as we have. That was, yeah, really well said. And I want to, I guess, shift a little bit into talking about

what specifically y'all were doing, because I guess both that is like, how did you actually do this and then how can other people sort of like how can other people replicate it yeah i don't know that we necessarily have like a model um that other people can apply because i think reflecting about this whole fight it was such a like just dynamic campaign where at first when it started, folks were kind of using more, you know, like legal tactics, just like looking for errors in the rent increases that bots would hand out. And this would, you know, lead to being able to stall the rent hikes for months at a time um

but then that obviously wasn't enough so then people started escalating and um eventually like putting pressure to get this on the radar of um our districts like city council person gil cedillo and eventually through that um they were able to get Cedillo to make a deal with the landlord to extend the covenant, um, and have his like loans be, his debt be forgiven. Um, but the landlord just like reneged on that deal. Right. So classic landlord behavior. Yeah. Yeah. So then, um, I think it's through those experiences that the tenants really learned, like, OK, it's like this politician is not going to save us. So then I think our fight became like more and more militant. So just directly going to the landlord's Malibu villa and shouting like, fuck you.

And, you know, just like, yeah, just like those direct confrontations. And then even Cedillo himself, it has not been, you know, this friendly relationship where we're thanking him for putting our, putting our story into city council. It's been extremely confrontational and oppositional the entire time. And I think thinking about what got us this recent win, it was, as it has been this whole fight, direct action, because we ended up the first day that city council opened up to the public again, a group of us went in, kind of like slid our way through security and went to his office and surprisingly he opened the door um and it was him and not a staffer and of course he saw it was us he hates us so he he immediately tried to close

the door and one of our amazing tenant leaders rosario um who's yeah this elder um latino woman she stuck her foot in the door and refused to let him close it yeah and because of that we were able to just like directly confront him like where the fuck have you been it's been three years um and you haven't seen this through like you said you were going to and we got all that you know um recorded video evidence of him just, yeah, fumbling around. And he sent the cops on us, of course. And yeah, I think that was such a great action because all of the we call them like the mujeres. So the Latino women who have been leading the fight, they were just so defiant towards the cops, not scared at all.

And just, you know, standing their ground and that they're just defending, you know, their human right to housing. And a week after that confrontational action, we got this city council motion passed. So, you know, I think from our experience, trying to go through the nice way and like, you know, doing traditional lobbying, trying to schedule meetings and like texting, calling, all of that. Things didn't happen for years. And then once we did more and more militant actions, things happened really quickly. really quickly. Yeah. Another thing I'd like to add onto that, um, that I actually heard was something that not a lot of, um, other associations, um, that are fighting for their housing, um, do often was, um, to bring the community together. Um, and like, I mean, really coming together. I mean, we're meeting every week for the last three years. And even during the pandemic, we weren't in person. We actually were on Zoom for a really long time.

And that's one of the biggest things was the consistency that we all pushed through, even during the pandemic, from the beginning was meeting every single week and some other organizers also meet more than once a week you know we're meeting multiple times a week to kind of talk over like the fine detail of of you know the next steps but definitely consistency has been one of the biggest things in the last three years that has gotten us where we are today yeah that that makes a lot of sense it's i i know i keep going back to this because this is the sort of well i mean i guess i did some tenant organizing but um this is this thing that i know now it was like yeah it reminds me a lot of

just like the way the way that union campaigns campaigns that work run of just you have to keep you have to keep getting people together to do the thing. Yeah, most definitely. Yeah. I don't know. Have you all seen like how did that change like your relationship with just like the other people in the building? I'll give you an example from like my mom. I think for her, it's been changed a little more drastically than it has for me because a lot of the tenants here are a little older. So before the association was started, she's kind of like a person that keeps to herself a lot you know um

but since that um since the association she's actually made like so many friends here now like and she's actually made like a best friend here um one of our neighbors and they like yes and they've become like really good friends um they even go you know have breakfast together um like almost multiple times a week um the other day i saw them like i saw um my mom's best friend adelita or adela um giving her some sugar and i was like oh i should have gotten a picture of that like that's you know that's so cute like yeah posted it on like instagram so that you know like everyone knows like what it looks like when community comes together consistent and see the same kind of vision that we, like, have to keep this building affordable.

building affordable. And yeah, not everyone, not all the tenants here have been supportive of our fight. Some, you know, participated for a few months and then immediately gave up. But one of the things that my family has done is to keep fighting, even for the ones that don't want to show up or don't want to do the work, which is hard work. That we're not just doing it for ourselves, but we're doing it for everyone, whether they're supportive or not. You know, this is going to benefit them and it's going to benefit the whole community and hopefully the city, the whole city in the future. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcast. like i have no idea who any like literally who anyone who lives around me is like no like there's they'll be like the one person you see at three in the morning coming back to their apartment and it's like oh i vaguely remember this person but like yeah like i think i don't know just this this being something that just on a broad level not just just about, like, I mean, you know, is it, like, this is something that's a solution to both, like, an immediate fight and then also this sort of, like, broader, just, I don't know, like, nightmarish isolation that everyone's, like, not everyone, but, like, is a huge part of a lot of our lives now. I don't know. That struck me, guess yeah yeah i feel like this just makes me think of um to celebrate the recent win we had this party at hillside um just last week and you know it was like potluck style everyone brought their own food um someone had a connection with like a mariachi band so we

had mariachi playing um one of the tenants owns a food truck and just wanted to cook for the community so she's whipping up these like amazing tacos and um bacon wrapped hot dogs and then someone had brought this pinata of the landlord and people were just like fucking destroying it. Like one of the tenants, Rudy, was just like fist fighting it and cracking it open. The kids were just like grabbing as much candy as they could from this broken Tom Potts pinata. And like I feel like that was just like exemplifies the sense of community that there is now at Hillside. And I think as Anu was talking about, those personal connections have been so key to keeping this fight going for three years. Because it's hard.

It's so hard to keep showing up. And it's those personal connections that keep you coming. Yeah, most definitely it's almost uh like a support system that um like my mom and like some of the neighbors have um created like adelita or one of our um second generation tenants leslie you know she's they can confide with one another. They can vent with one another. And yeah, yeah. So they've definitely like created strong bonds. And I think that's one of the reasons why they keep showing up.

You know, it's it's women supporting women. And, you know, they're the protectors of the family they're the nurturers and that's what my mom taught me so that's why definitely one of the reasons why I continue to fight um for Hillside to keep the housing not only for my mom because I'm like her protector and she's mine but we're also like here to protect the community from from harassment or from literal bullying yeah that is really powerful so i guess looking forward um i think at the beginning of the interview, you said, yeah, it looks like there's going to be another fight over sort of forcing the city to actually use eminent domain. Yeah. Do you have.

Well, OK, I don't know if you, if people want to support what y'all are doing and put pressure on the city, what are the best ways for them to do that? Yeah, I think just following our socials and staying updated about the fight and any action items that we put out is a great way to support and just amplifying the struggle um yeah in terms of our specific strategy for holding the city accountable um we actually haven't haven't yeah gotten super into the weeds of it yet because we are just taking a break for a while to yeah you know you know yeah to celebrate celebrate this win and um yeah kind of have folks get perspective i think our um our view is that because the city has now approved the funds to make this happen that um yeah that there shouldn't be any barriers to them seeing it

completely through. Um, yeah, I think we can, we can maybe, um, apprehend some like ideological barriers because actually using eminent domain to expropriate a landlord is not something that's been done before. Um, but but yeah we'll see what happens yeah i mean like if if if they can displace tenants with eminent domain they can they can they can use it to keep tenants in their homes like exactly i guess the other question i have with that is what is okay so like say like i don't know a miracle occurs occurs and your landlord is visited by three ghosts at night who show him increasingly horrible features and he decides to sell it to the city. What does the city owning the building look like? Yeah, I can start with that and then Ana you can chime in. But I think the vision of the tenants has always been collective stewardship and tenant ownership of the building. So the fight definitely does not stop at the city taking the building, but there will also be a push for actual tenant stewardship of the building too. Yeah. And I think the exact structures of that aren't so clear yet. There's still a lot of like discussions and work to be

done around that. But yeah, in the conversations that we've had with folks from the housing authority, which is going to be the agency that's actually purchasing the building, they have expressed openness to us actually, yeah, having another nonprofit take over and eventually building towards like a co-op kind of structure. That'd be really cool. Yeah, I know I've heard a lot of talk among, well, I think some people have done it in Detroit about things like community land trusts

as a way to have tenants actually control their buildings. Yeah, that's definitely been part of the discussion. Yeah, that's awesome because this is a much better solution than the state is now your landlord.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that's what we hope for in the future um like janice said we still have a lot to work through and this isn't um done obviously uh we wouldn't like you said want the state to be landlords here they wouldn't be the best landlords um but yeah um yeah we we are like jenna said taking a a pause and we will reconvene um to plan out um future steps to take but this was a really really great win um it was such a relief off of so many yeah people um back and um something we've been fighting for over three three and a half years now

um so it's good to finally get somewhat of positive news and it's been such an emotional journey for the last three years. Um, I mean, that doesn't even justify how, how much of an emotional rollercoaster it has been for a lot of these tenants or for a lot of our families here. for a lot of our families here um when we got the news um everyone broke out in tears and joy and and and everyone was so surprised i mean i couldn't help myself but to like cry and smile and ugly cry some more for like the whole day just yeah so um yeah we're hoping for um for the process to be um somewhat smoother um now that that we've done a a large portion of the fight. But yeah, we're still at the tail end of things. Yeah. So where can people find y'all's organizations and groups and stuff to go follow them or yeah, help them in places? For CCED, which does post a lot of Hillside content, I think all of our socials are just at ccd la

and then for hillside i think um there's different handles for all the different different platforms unfortunately but if folks just look up hillside via or hillside tenants they should be able to find it and if you just uh send me the social media handles you can put them in the description yeah yeah for sure yeah well thank thank you both so much for so much for talking to us this was this was awesome i'm so happy for you this is great thank you yeah thanks for thanks for listening yeah this has been huge. Yeah, and I guess for everyone out there, you too can start taking back your cities and

yeah, with any luck and with a lot of struggle, this is going to be the first of many. And yeah, fuck landlords. We can beat them. Hell yeah, fuck them. Yeah, we got this. Hell yeah. Fuck them. Yeah, we got this.

Hell yeah. Communities first. Yep. Landlording is not a job. No. We're here to take it back. Hell yeah. 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, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.