It Could Happen Here - Resisting Mass Eviction in Santa Barbara Part 1

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Mia talks with two tenant organizers about a brutal real estate company called Core Spaces' attempt to carry out a mass eviction and how tenants organized to fight backSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's like it happened here uh it's the podcast sometimes hosted by me and mia wong it is uh i guess this is a combination things falling apart thing putting things back together episode

we're doing some more coverage of the u.s's sort of epidemic of mass evictions. But yeah, so with me to talk about this is Max, who's one of the organizers and co-founders of Santa Barbara Tenants Union, and Sam Sapisi, who's another tenant and a member of the union. You two, yeah, welcome to the show. Hi. Hi, thank you.

Yeah, so I guess we should start with talking about the specific mass eviction that is happening, which has been caused by a terrifying and unfortunate product of my hometown, Chicago. A very large company called Core Spaces, who have incredibly suspicious branding for the fact that they're a giant landlord company. Yeah, I think guys bought your building and is attempting to evict everyone is this yeah yeah so core spaces um out of chicago and i believe austin texas have purchased our uh four building apartment complex approximately 243 units i believe over a thousand people, and they just immediately...

Yeah, so I guess this is one of the other things we should talk about first is this thing that landlords do where they either buy a property or they have a property and then they're like, oh, hey, we're doing renovations on it, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't let anyone ever come back because your quote-unquote renovations are just a way to do a price hike, which seems to be what's happening here. Yeah, and renoviction, it's a nice term for that, right?

Renoviction, it's you're renovating to evict, just if listeners are not aware of that term. Yeah, and I think if I'm understanding their plan right, they're trying to basically turn this into luxury student housing? Yeah. Yeah, that's what we presume that's kind of their business model is to buy up uh housing in college towns and do some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically yeah i mean that's definitely a thing that happens there's a lot of colleges in chicago which i don't know presumably people know that

on a sort of abstract level but this is the thing that happens basically everywhere there are colleges yeah yeah we've we've actually talked to other like grad student organizers about this stuff too because it winds up sort of affecting everyone at all sides yeah and so i guess okay so facing facing this eviction um i guess i wanted to talk about how y'all started organizing against it we got our our original notices on march 16th um we had previously um i want to say it was like december or january we had gotten notice that some people will be coming through our apartments, investors to look at it. And I like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It was super.

Oh, no. And so we kind of, I think a lot of us knew at that point, like, okay, something's going on, right? Obviously. And then March, I want to say it was March 15th or 16th, we got a notice that the building was sold from Essex to Core Spaces. And then it was the day after that, we got a notice that said, oh, hey, you're all getting evicted because we got to do renovations. I kind of expected it to be honest, because I've seen what Blackstone has done. Yeah. And, and I, I, I had just heard about it from a lot of properties or, or also tenants, like in LA friends that I had other college students that had had this happen to them but after that basically I mean I don't want to speak for everyone but my own personal like what I did I just kind of went on reddit and was like hey this really awful thing is You know, I went on the UCSB Reddit page,

this really awful thing is happening. There's like a lot of families that live here. There's so many section eight disabled people, elderly and students, but our complex is a little different and that it does have more of the the um marginalized groups and i i went on reddit and was like dude this is this is awful like just yeah so i made a post saying this sucks and um from there i was referenced to contact um santa barbara tenants union which i was like kind of hesitant at first because i was like oh what are they gonna do like I don't know I thought you know it's like one of those resources you get where you're just like are they actually gonna do anything or is this just for me to like waste my time with but I

reached out and I got you know a response back within hours and they're like yes here's a flyer for you we are we have your back. We're going to do this. We will support you. And so from there, I want to say it was within a day or two, we went flyering door to door. And remember, it's 200. And like I said, I think it's roughly 243, 246 units. Yeah, it's a lot of units to knock doors on. I know one of our county representatives, Laura Capps, called it the largest eviction in California history. And I've heard others say the largest eviction in the United states history i don't i don't know if that's uh what they're basing that off of but it's a gigantic eviction there are many people here um but yeah so from there i just went like

door-to-door knocking i knew none of my neighbors i am a hermit i stay in my apartment i keep my curtains closed i'm like but the only contact um other like my neighbors make are with my cats just chilling in the windows and stuff but um yeah to be fair neighbor with cat in the window is not the worst rep you can have i mean yeah true but um I mean, yeah, true. But even then, I didn't even want my cats in the windows. I was very, very antisocial. I still am. But I have opened my mind quite a bit and come out of my shell a little bit but that's irrelevant um from there like i said we went flyering we went door to door we found other people that were like oh yeah this is super messed up like we need to fight this um and we by just going door to door telling people hey we can fight this eviction. These eviction notices aren't super valid anyway. We were able to get a gigantic group of our neighbors together. That's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. And it kind of moved from there. I don't know how much further I should explain. There's such a long timeline of the things that have happened in the past two months. So I don't know where you want me to go from there. But that's at least the beginning of it was just us flyering, going door to door, getting's the next steps that you need to do. This is how you become, uh, you know, a union, a tennis association for, for your, for yourselves, right. With their full on support. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley your podcast. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Okay, so there is one thing I wanted to sort of talk about a little bit before we move on which is yeah can you explain what section eight is for listeners who don't know i can explain it based

off my knowledge i i'm not currently on section eight but i know that um resident many residents here are on section eight which i probably couldn't give the best description of it personally. But I know a lot of times it's people that are very low income or disabled individuals, people that can't work for various reasons, get low income housing, meaning they pay maybe, I know some of our residents, for example, pay, like they get section eight vouchers that will pay about $2,500, $2,600 for their rent and their utilities. And then maybe they pay a hundred or 200 because they're unable to get that income otherwise. But Max might be able to describe it a little bit better than me. No, that sounds about right. I grew up on section eight with like a single mom and stuff. And, um, she, yeah, I mean, it's, it's just subsidized housing. It's basically,

it's what public housing or in some countries, social housing would be, but in like the eighties, like the Reagan era, like gutted all public housing. And so the concession was, it's a voucher based system for the poor, like for the low income people. So yeah, it's just the government will pay a portion of it. Sam said it pretty good, I think. Yeah. And I guess, you know, I guess that this is a sort of, yeah, an interesting thing about your building is that there's a very, there's a very wide range of like sort of different backgrounds of people who are involved.

And I was wondering, you know, talk a little bit about like what that's been like. Yeah. So I, I guess I could say we, we have four buildings, so we have, so it's CBC and the sweeps. So it stands for colonial Balboa Cortez sweeps. The sweeps has a lot of students because it rents by the bed. But CBC has a ton of families.

And as we mentioned, you know, Section 8 and lower income. I want to say, I had heard from another representative, like a county representative. I think it might've been lower caps. Don't quote me on this, but that this is like the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in Isla Vista. And so. There's a ton of like large families when, when this happened,

you just, people were just crying everywhere. Like they didn't know what to do. This building is, it's not unlike a lot of buildings where you have a pretty diverse kind of, um, I guess just class composition and, and I'm just like,

so, so, you know, if you think there's, um, disabled people that have caseworkers, you have monoling, so, so, you know, if you think there's, um, disabled people that have caseworkers, you have monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants, you have, um, students and you have some students who are sort of like city college students that are working full-time

or part-time and they're full-time students. So they're sort of worker students. There's like full-time UCSB students who's like parents may be totally loaded or whatever. Um, you have, um, you know, often an immigrant and low income family families, you have like way more people packed into like a one or two bedroom than, than you would want, but it's the only way for you to make rent because rent keeps going up every

year. Um, so, uh, so there's a lot of that. And so I guess I'll just speak to, um, I mean,

I've only, I, you know, I've run into it a bit bit like i'm in the group chats and i've been i've been to the building like a few times but i'm not like there every day and i'm not like firing every day and stuff like sam is living there but like one common kind of like difficult it's like it's it's a beautiful thing and it's a difficulty and that like there's so we need interpreters and like in sbtu we have we're we're a sort of self-funded autonomous tenants union which means we don't get grants from like wealthy foundations or government entities whatever so we can kind of more independently make decisions so um but we

have like a fair amount of dues money now just from the the mass membership that we have kind of built and so we can afford to pay uh interpreters to come out basically whenever we need um so there's been interpreters there at almost every one of the Saturday meetings. And without that, it would actually just be impossible. So that's like when there's a language barrier that makes it hard to organize. Or it wouldn't be impossible. There's a handful of bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. If one of them doesn't show up or if the child of a parent, a teenager of a parent isn't there or whatever right like how do you actually get the info across so i'll just speak to lastly on that that it is like it's a really kind of frustrating sad situation and we

could probably elaborate on this in that like um the whether it's the lawyers right now who have been hired by by core spaces which uh they're aaky, slimy piece of shit, evil firm. They're called a Tyne Taylor Fox Howard LLP. Just if you see any of them on the street, just give them dirty looks. Don't do anything violent. Use that against me at some point in the inevitable thing that's probably going to happen. But, but they, whether it's them or the landlords directly,

this happens in labor organizing. It's a divide and conquer strategy. So they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or amongst the families, amongst the disabled, whoever they can get an ear to. They're going to give them certain kinds of information to make them really afraid. They're going to tell them lies and they're going to get people to try to self-evict. So I am jumping a little bit ahead, but that definitely has been a challenge in that if there was a totally linguistically, culturally monolithic group of a thousand people, it would probably be a little bit easier to keep things totally unified. But those demographic differences do present some challenges for sure yeah that makes

it that makes sense i mean we've talked to a couple of other uh tennis associations that have had to uh actually well i mean this one's actually as it is it's like i you know and back when i was doing tennis organizing too like i've i've I've seen worse in terms of like, in terms of like the number of languages, but it's still like never like an enormously easy thing to sort of

have to bridge, like, I mean, just having to bridge linguistic divides too, especially when you're getting, yeah, information,

like misinformation, different languages is a whole thing. I could, I could talk for like seven hours about the effects this has had on Asian-American communities,

Chinese-American communities in particular. Yeah. But instead of doing that, we have to take an ad break. We'll be back after whatever incomprehensible ads are playing. Okay, cool. Great ads.

Bye, bye. Let's stop on the ads hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart

of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. 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. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. brushes with supernatural creatures. 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. 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. And we're back. I hope the ads were short. I don't know.

There are some great ads. I I'm gonna buy that thing whatever it was it's gonna be the Reagan coins again or like one of the casinos okay so yeah so I guess yeah you know we'll just okay having

done a thematic jump i will now go back to chronological jumps which is okay so you you you have you starting this organizing what what starts to happen after you're starting to get people together and you have the tenants uh the senate property tenants union involved yeah so it started from flyering getting everyone just like a basic letting them know that they don't have to move that this eviction is this eviction is bullshit right um oh but by the way we didn't we were never giving legal advice that people shouldn't move uh it was if you don't want to you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacies just because i know that the the slimy piece of human fucking

garbage buyer trash lawyers are going to be listening to this and trying to use us again use it against us but anyway sorry go ahead yeah no thank you for the correction that is entirely yeah they don't have to if they don't want to basically but uh yeah so after we did the flyering we um santa barbara tenants union set us up with some group chats and we just worked together from there. We just started talking to one another. And I think it was it was a new situation for most of us. A lot of I mentioned this before, but a lot of us didn't talk to each other before we didn't go out of our apartments. Um, which I think is kind of normal nowadays. It's not like, you know, the sixties where like, Oh, everyone has a house and knows their neighbors and stuff.

No, people kind of keep to themselves, especially in really large apartment complexes. Um, so yeah, we, we just started going in the group chat and then someone was like, Hey, I can do this. And then the person was, Hey, I can do this. And then eventually we set up, um, a group meeting where we could all come together and, um, basically share our, our feelings, our emotions, our pain about this, but also, but also find a way to like fight against it. So what we learned was, which we fully learned from the Santa Barbara Tenants Union was, oh, if we go in front of the county board, we can convince them, we can share our stories,

we can share our pain and we can tell them hey we need the law to change we can pass something we can use our voices to stop this from not only happening to us but but future residents so so from there it was really in the early stages we um i don't know if this is jumping ahead honestly my my brain is a little foggy right now. There's so much that's happened so quickly. of the Santa Barbara County supervisors, board of supervisors, and telling our stories and sharing that. I think Max could probably also share a little bit. Yeah, I have. So like the dates in my head are like, you know, the March 15th, they bought the building March 16th, they issued the notices. And then April 6th, which is like three weeks from that they passed the new law so that means i mean that that's like three yeah a three-week period from uh the notices to like having i think at least a

couple meetings with like dozens of people i don't know 30 to 50 plus people yeah there and then like forming you know deciding to form the association and voting to call i don't remember exactly if the vote to call it core spaces to an association was before that the County meeting or after, but, um, and then they're also, cause there's, there's also two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about for us. So six weeks before core spaces announced a new ownership, um, all of us in, in SBTU had sort of, um, we'd heard so many stories on the Santa Barbara city level and Santa Barbara city is not the County, right? The County is like this larger geographical

entity and the, and Santa Barbara city is within the County, but on the city level, we've been hearing so many, um, really terrible stories about people being rent evicted. And, um, and we just decided to kind of like throw people at like, yo, go to, go to public comment, tell the city about what they're doing, tell them they need to pass a ban on renovations. Um, we had like a big rally in front of a city council and we were just going week after week. And after about six weeks of this, like four to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline

we got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovations, but it was an amendment to their, what's called like their just cause ordinance, which makes it a lot harder for landlords to, to renovate. And that now that they have to get permits first, they have to put the permits in the renovation notices when they're going to do it.

They need to, there's some language that says that it needs to be done in good faith, which, which is like really subtle, but potentially really important because if your reason is that you just want to trigger what's called vacancy dec good faith, which is like really subtle, but potentially really important because if your reason is that you just want to trigger what's called vacancy decontrol, which is like picking people out

so you can jack the rent over the 10% limit in California. Like right now, a landlord can raise the rent about 10% every year just because they want to. But if you can get people out of the unit, you can raise it to wherever you want. So on the city level, it was a really big deal. We had just won it and we were like pretty exhausted from it. We were like, shit, that was a lot of work.

And we won really quickly. And everybody around us that's been doing stuff for a while was like, we don't know how you guys did that shit so fast. That was really amazing. And then like, I think it was like the week, like within a couple of days of us like celebrating that win, the core spaces thing happened. But this is county jurisdiction. So we were like, okay, I guess we got to go from city to county. We got to get to county to do the same fucking thing. was like a sprint sprint sprint sprint like every week so the reason i'm bringing this up is it just felt like natural for us to just like and we don't like tell people what to do like not to i'm not like correcting you sam but when it's like okay do this do this do this it's sort of like we

ourselves are just tenants we're not paid staff we're not like highly trained like non-profit staffers or something like that that i think we know everything we're just tenants ourselves that are in the struggle just like everyone else And we're trying to gain information, share information and become collectively smarter, more experienced and better at handling this shit together. And so we were like, Hey, we just won some shit on the city level. If you guys throw all of, all of you, which is like a lot of you straight to those county meetings and, and the county meetings, um meetings are every Tuesday at 9 a.m. And they go back and forth every week between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria.

Santa Maria is like an hour to hour and a half drive from where they live. So that's like pretty unrealistic for most people to not only get work off and stuff like that. But like that upcoming Tuesday from that meeting we had that Saturday, they just happened to be in Santa Barbara, which is more like a 10, 15 minute drive, like down the street. So we're like, okay, there's the fucking meeting. Like we want to try to get people there. And so the, um, you know, the, the news there, it was like hot off the presses for a week or two, there was all these articles, um, on articles on the crisis. And then so that Tuesday morning, all of them going and hitting the public comment, hitting the mic.

And I should say like public comment is typically anybody who's like gone to the public comment at a city or like a government meeting. There's usually one or two people that are just like really weird like they are they're like they're like human on people or they are like or like they're like the the next door karen person that's complaining about like i don't know some stupid stupid shit that nobody gives a fuck about but like sometimes that person actually gets something changed because they actually complain over and over again um and then there's actual agenda items on these government meetings. And having this many people like totally flood a public comment just for one issue as if it's on the agenda is like, it's kind of jaw dropping, right? So people just went so crazy with it. People got off of work. There were monolingual Spanish speakers that just spoke spanish and there's a live interpreter that they legally have to have at the county meeting so on wednesday um the county supervisors called an

emergency meeting for thursday and on thursday they passed the emergency just cause ordinance which was just basically copy pasting the city ordinance that we just won after the six week like marathon so wow i don't know if you if you caught all that but like that's how from our perspective it's like we don't we don't live in the building we just like we just try to make shit happen like it was insane of like how quickly because it took us about six weeks for the city thing which was still like everyone told us like that's rapid fire laws don't get changed that quickly and this was like two weeks or some shit yeah i was i was stunned by this when i was reading about this like this is one of the fastest campaigns I've ever seen.

I don't know. We've run into Chicago City Council before, for example. And they, oh boy, those people are... Yeah, so it was a really impressive campaign that y'all were able to pull off like yeah but and this narrative is if we wanted to like really make this in a curated way we could probably have like hopeful we could have inspirational background music then we could have like horror music we could have because i mean i don't know sam if you want to take it from but there has also been some very dark turns since that yeah um like very dark depressing scary turns

because the minute well i'll just i guess i'll just say it if we want to go deeper into it we can or if we can skip it but like as soon as we were really excited like okay they can't like what we just did makes it illegal for them to evict everyone for now because they don't have permits. Oh, and this is actually a really important legal fact. What the law said was that this notice applies to any current notices posted to tenant stores after this date, as well as unlawful detainers. Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit. unlawful detainers. Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit. So, um, so basically like any eviction lawsuit that core spaces would try to, um, file against any of the 250 plus, um, people would be, uh, they would just be tossed out in court. Cause they're just like,

you know, an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law and be like, the new law says you have to do X, Y, and Z. And they didn't, they'd be like, yeah, you're right. Um, it's just very, there's nothing ambiguous. It's not, it's not a gray area. It's not like you can interpret it this or that way. It's just not, you can't, you can't, there's no, like, there's no, like the other side would say like, well, what about this and this? There's no, well, there's no other thing, but immediately, like almost immediately within like a week or something, the other side started countering with like insane propaganda, the disinformation, but by, by Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard, LLP and core spaces, uh, vertical vertically integrated private equity piece of shit firm. Uh, yeah. So the emergency ordinance passed and we all were like, yay, this is great we we have protections but then um yeah that law firm

decided to well that and management actually i think prior to the the law firm's notices on our door management went around being like like come pick up your checks these aren't you know like you need you need to go take your checks you need to sign that you're leaving etc and when that notice from the um the tyne law firm came signed by lacy taylor it lacy taylor reported to the bar it basically said this doesn't apply to you and if you, okay, this is my interpretation of it. When I read it as a just, you know, random human being, not a law major or anything, it sounded like they would take our relocation checks and or charge us more money if we fought back that's the way it was phrased granted i know it was like law jargon but it was made to almost like in my opinion harass us like it felt like oh everything the core spaces tennis association and sbtu is saying is is a lie this is the truth if you want to join them and be with them well you might not get your

relocation assistance check and or we might charge you more from that um at least with that specific notice it was super confusing and you know it most people here don't have law degrees they don't they don't know the law on top of that you know the the law firm intentionally left out the last part of the ordinance they said hey this doesn't apply to you because the eviction notice were were um issued before this but it left out the unlawful detainer part yeah so it was it's it's lying by omission right yeah yeah it's like i wish i had a good like movie example or something but like we've all seen this kind of thing right it's like you tell the person everything and then you kind of black out the last part of the sentence so that um i don't know i wish i wish there was like an obvious movie thing to be like look at what the villain did. So the person would make the wrong choice, go down the wrong path in the forest or some shit.

So they'd get attacked. That's what they did. That was exactly what they did. They literally quoted the new ordinance and then cut off the second half and put dot, dot, dot. Which was the part that I was into. They're implying something else was there right i mean maybe maybe some maybe some english major was like oh i wonder what's in that dot dot like what's the rest of the quote but that's the thing that's the thing about like using abusing their power as lawyers with their like fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing and this goes back to like this this kind of diversity of class composition, right? If this is a bunch of like super highly educated professionals, like either with law degrees

or whatever, they'd be like, oh, I'm just going to jump onto the county. You know, I'm going to like look up the ordinance and be like, oh, it's ordinance 5-1 whatever. And I'm going to read through it and be like, aha, they left out the unlawful detainer. But like my guess is almost zero of the tenants who received those notices did that. And that was the law firm. That was Tyne and Taylor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck else is involved in their fraudulent joke of a firm. Their whole thing was they wanted to scare people to get them to self-evict, right?

Their whole thing was they wanted to scare people to get them to self-evict. So if you think about the logistics of... Okay, let's say you're a landlord firm that works for landlords and you evict people. And you get paid a lot of money to do so. So you get paid some retainer amount that's like, I don't know, tens of thousands or more, just for being on a call to do stuff for them. And then, and then maybe you get paid other amounts. Um, you, you're looking at, you're looking at a situation like this and you're like, okay, 250 units. And then there's somewhere between 500 and a thousand people. And like, you know, you don't need to evict the little kids,

but like you need to evict like every like person on the lease. Like that's a lot of unlawful detainers. Like that's a lot of filing that we're going to have to do. We're going to have to like get every single name and every single lease. And we're going to have to like every individual, uh, person on every lease, we're going to have to file an eviction lawsuit in the court that we know is going to get tossed out. That's so much fucking work for us to do. We don't want to do all that work. That's insane, right? We want to just eat this retainer money and do minimal work. Because we also don't have... It's a four-person law firm, and they probably have some legal assistance. But do they really have the capacity to do something of that scale? This this little slimy garbage trash fire of a fucking firm.

Of course not. But their strategy was to scare people through lying with abusing their power as much as possible to empty out that building so there'd be no need to file eviction lawsuits and do the bidding of their, of course, course spaces without, uh, going to court knowing they would lose. Right. So that's anybody listening, by the way, this is not like, this actually isn't about core spaces or the time law firm. Like this is just a strategic set of like, of methodology for an industry that views human beings as obstacles to profit in, in, in, in a hyper commodified real estate,ified real estate capitalist market. That's all this is.

We're just describing a normal process that's happening at this point. Yeah. Something we've talked about in other tenant struggles is that – I mean, one of the things that – I'm not going to use this specific law from doing this, but it's something we've seen in other places. It's like you'll get landlords who will just fire, which is file like mass file,

just illegal evictions. And they do it because, you know, okay. So if they get caught, like nothing happens to them. Right. Like,

but if they don't get caught, you know, this, this is an enormous number of people who you could just throw out and not have to go through any kind of legal process with. And so, yeah, these like,

you know, like it's like, this, this goes back to the, the old, the old sort of capitalism problem right which is like the easiest way to make money is just by taking it from someone and the second easiest way is by is in you know like the the one that's even easier than that is

you is you lie to them and trick them into getting either trick them or intimidate them into giving you the money without having to like actually fight them and And yeah, it's, you know, what they're doing here. It is legal terrorism. Yeah. And I, uh, I re I reported, uh, Lacey Taylor to the bar. I don't know Lacey, cause I'm sure you're listening to this. If you, if they even notified you, but, um, it was, it was a bit frustrating cause they were just like, yeah, this isn't really like, we can't really do anything about this. Uh, it has to be a matter that's settled in civil court. And, um,

so it's definitely frustrating. So it's like, no, like this is just straight up lying. This is not like an interpretation of the law. But I do think like this is, as a side note, like this is the issue with, you can have like evil ass people who are trying to make people homeless in order to re-tenant. That's the kind of language that these firms use.

Where is re-tenanting the building? We're just re-tenanting, right? Like that's the sort of real estate capitalist law firm. God, that's the kind of language that these firms use where it is retenanting the building um we're just retenanting right like that's that's the sort of real estate capitalist law firm or that's the industry like language right um that like there's just there we got lawyers for that right like we have a thing we want to do and this is just the wild west we just want to make a lot of money and we just have like stacks of lawyers just on deck that will just pay to do this and then you even have like these state bar associations that are like, well, yeah, that's just how it is, man. Probably most likely because like on the side of real estate, I, I,

my guess I'm like making up this number, the 80% of the lawyers working in real estate are on the side of, of landlords. And then maybe 20%, probably way less than 20%. Yeah. That's like, that's so tight. And then some of the landlord tenants sometimes will help tenants. Right. So they can like brag at their little wine and cheese things. Like, oh, I help the people or whatever.

And I donate to charities or some garbage. But at the end of the day, they're happy to make people die of starvation on the street so that somebody else can make a shit ton of money. Yeah. This has been Nick Hadappan here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview

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