Full Interview with L.A.T.U.'s Trinidad Ruiz

As seen in abridged and edited form in Tenants Talk - Issue 2

The challenges faced by tenants in Chicago are not unique. Around the country and the world, other tenants take part in the same struggle to maintain dignity, security, and agency as they rent their homes. Because of this, we believe that there is rich potential to learn from and support other tenants' movements. We hope that by providing interviews with people engaged in these struggles we plant the seeds for both solidarity outside Chicago and an improved response to the challenges we face at home. 

This month, we interviewed Trinidad Ruiz, an organizer with the Los Angeles tenant union about the recent events surrounding Hillside Villa, an apartment complex which is pursuing public ownership through eminent domain as a response to drastic rent increases.

To begin, can you tell me a little bit about the LATU?

Sure, I am a member of the LA Tenants Union and I've been a member of the LA tenants union since its founding eight, nine years ago now. It formed back then and we never incorporated into a non-profit. We started out as a small collection of organizers, about 25 people or so, and now we've broadened into a size-able movement in Los Angeles. Since then we've formed these networks of locals within Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a very sprawling city, you know, LA built out not up and so it was difficult for these communities to organize together collectively. If you're all the way on the west side, for instance, you're meeting about an hour away on the East side. So, Locals began to form, I cofounded a local called VBE which stands for Vermont Beverly which is the part of the city that encompasses Echo Park, Silver Lake, Oakwood, Korea Town, East Hollywood used to be, and McArthur Park. And two other locals have taken up some of that, East Hollywood local and McArthur Park local. So in the LA tenants union, there is no hierarchy, you know, everything is lateral. We're sort of an Anarchist type of organization like that. Each local is autonomous and they organize within their geographic area. We've done a number of campaigns through our local VBE, mostly going after the housing department, going after the city, going after the landlords, going after the ways that landlords have been evicting tenants--some of the strategies they've been using--as well as the city that's been complicit in the massive gentrification of Los Angeles which is the other citywide movement. LATU being one of them and the other being gentrification. The movement has been dynamic, it's helped found ATUN which is the autonomous tenants union network, an international network of tenants unions across the country, including Canada and New Zealand. What we've been able to glean from these meetings is that gentrification and displacement has not just been happening at our local level, in cities, but across the country and internationally as well. The tenants union, at least in LA, has risen to meet the moment, and were small players in a big, big movement, not just nationally, but internationally.

Can you describe the Hillside Villa Tenants Association and talk a little bit about the relationship between the two organizations?

So, Hillside Villa was a building that we started to organize in Chinatown, LA, about four years ago now. Hillside Villa is a building that was built in about 1989, 1990, and it was part of a CRA which was the Community Redevelopment Agency, which was a state run agency that was building housing across the state. in LA they built about 10,000 units. Some of the work was based on covenants, and these covenants had a 30 year window to keep the rents low income. Not affordable, because that's something else, but low income. The landlords and developers, in return, would get a chunk of money to build a building, and then they would continue to receive tax breaks and other grants and loans--very very low interest loans from the city, state, county, and federal funds. 

The covenant on this particular building was expiring, and the rents in that building for anyone who wasn't in section 8, which was basically a public housing voucher, (not exactly public housing, but the public housing voucher allows you to live in a regular apartment in the city but the rent is subsidized by the city) were about $700-800 of rent for a one-bedroom, two-bedroom. These families were very low-income, making very, very little money and still scratching by, you know, sort of eking out an existence in Los Angeles. When the expiring of the covenants was happening, tenants became alarmed, and they weren't informed of this building becoming market-rate when they moved in, and so people felt robbed a little bit, and cheated. The rents were going up 200 percent, in some cases 300 percent. So, $850 to $2500, $850 to like $3000. That was the market rate in that area. One of the issues was that the landlord had let the building fall into disrepair over the years, he was very repressive with the tenants, and tenants really didn't know  how to fight back, but out of desperation, one of them  reached out to the press. An elder tenant who since passed away because of COVID. Doña Luisa. She had reached out and some of the press that knows the tenants union reached out to the tenants union. So we started to meet there. So the tenant's union is partnering with an actual organization that's leading it, which is Chinatown Community for Ethical Development, or CCED, and it's their community, so we've been supporting, so VBE has been supporting, another chapter from the west side has been supporting, and another chapter from the East side has been supporting. Between the three local, me being representative of VBE, and the two other other organizers from different locals, including the organizers from CCED, that building has been pretty well staffed in terms of organizing. The building wasn't situated in an area where the VIBE local, or the east side local could organize, because again, we're very geographical--if we start to go too far out of the areas where we're organizing, it's very difficult to maintain a campaign, so we have to stay very local. That's why these three different locals, and CCED, have been helping Chinatown organize. It's been four years and we've accomplished some pretty amazing things.

Do you think these successes have been because you've been able to focus on a specific landlord, or do you think organizing on a neighborhood level is more important?

Well the thing about this building is that it wasn't a specific landlord, but it was a specific building. I mean, I don't think the building makes it any different from any of the other buildings that are being gentrified in LA. I think this one is unique because it was one of the first buildings to have an expiring covenant of buildings that were built in the 80s and 90s by the CRA. Those covenants are expiring, so with the CRA alone, you have 10,000 units in LA with expiring covenants. The same process that's happening here at this building will happen 10,000 times to 10,000 units in the city of LA alone. So what do you do in a situation where you have, at last count, 68,000 unhoused in the county of LA, nearly 70,000 people, adding another 140 families or so onto the street (because essentially that's what would have happened). The story was compelling. 

A little bit of history for the building was that we had pressure on the city council member to do something about it. Within a couple of years, elections were coming up, so I think the council member had self interest involved because he was helping other buildings (new construction in the area that was causing gentrification as well), and so the council member had reached an agreement with the owner, Tom Botts, for extending the covenant by ten years, and it would have gotten 12 million dollars, so essentially 1.2 million each year on top of the rents, on top of the subsidies, to keep that building low-income. The landlord pulled out of that deal after the handshake deal, and while the contracts were being drafted, decided to break the agreement. This I think benefited us, because the city council member was very upset about it. We had pushed, because this building was built with 90 percent public funds, was being subsidized 70 percent with public funds, that this building should be eminent domain. And so it was put forward to the council member and the council member decided, *Yeah, it was a good idea*. The council member at first, you know, thought it was crazy, but when you have an election not too far into the future and you've been helping assist developers in gentrifying a community, you have to do something big to sort of counter the narrative. So that council member came on board, but kicking and screaming the whole way, dragging out the process the whole way. Now we’re in the process where the city council has at least reached an unanimous vote to offer the landlord a certain amount of money, last it was appraised about $48 million. There's an appraisal going on now, and then the city council will have to vote to offer the landlord with the new amount. If the landlord then says no, then the process of eminent domain will begin and the city council will have to vote again to use eminent domain on the building. 

How did you decide on this particular strategy for Hillside Villa? Was it based on past examples, or did someone in the union realize it was possible?

One of the organizers from west side local named Jacob Woocher was actually in law school at the time, and he was the one that proposed it. The idea was *we have nothing to lose, what do we have to lose?* And in the city of LA, as far as I can tell, this would have been the first time in the 250 years of LA being incorporated as a city that this has ever happened, so there is a lot on the line for this building. I think what is special about this building is that it's managed to change the conversation and the paradigm around how a city manages to keep tenants housed. There needs to be out of the box thinking. That's, I think, the interesting part of it. It required a lot of powers of strategy and really thinking about how best to get a political structure and political apparatus in the city that has been so friendly to developers for decades, since 1978 when rent control was passed in the city, to change something and to really take something back from developers, like this building. And the tenants have been involved every step of the way. They're the political juice, if you will, or the will to get things across the board. I think organizers have just sort of provided some tools to the tenants, but they have been the ones that have been ultimately the ones pushing all this work. Without them, of course, there would be no Hillside Villa. There would be no movement. The credit goes to all of the tenants in that building, at least the ones participating in this struggle and campaign. So here we are. It's definitely been a lot of pressure and a lot of actions. It's been a lot of hours of meetings and planning for those meetings. We're not just dealing with city council members, we're also dealing with housing departments now, we're dealing with county departments. So it's gotten a little complicated in terms of using eminent domain for this building because it's never been done. The first time of anything, the precedent, people sort of lose their mind a little bit, especially in bureaucratic institutions like the housing department of Los Angeles. It's been a bit of a challenge, but we're strategizing to make it happen.

How do you see the relationship you mentioned, between organizers and tenants, as part of the broader goal that the union is trying to accomplish?

I think at the core of the relationship is trust. I think with the tenants that are organizing with the organizers, there is first and foremost trust. There is also friendship. It's a very much "digging down to work", getting into the *granular* stuff in terms of a campaign, and so the relationship, and keeping tenants engaged, is not too difficult when their housing is on the line. Ultimately it's not our housing, it's their housing that is at risk. So when you have someone who's coming in from the outside who's not getting paid to be there, who's not getting any stipend or anything, who's just volunteering their time to help the tenants keep their housing, I think it's motivational for the tenants. So sometimes we do these celebrations as part of the relationship building, not just between tenants and organizers, but between tenants and tenants. In that building [Hillside Villa], you have three different languages being spoken. You have Spanish, you have English, and then two dialects of Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese. So in our meetings we have this interpretation equipment. We're interpreting these meetings in like three different languages. The most important part of a meeting, of course, is participation. We cannot prefer one language over another. For 100 percent participation you have to understand what's being said, and so we practice this thing called "Language Justice". Part of that Language Justice is to ensure that people can understand what's being said, but also be understood when they speak. That's another thing that goes back to trust; it goes back to just fully engaging tenants, and that has helped a lot.

So a way that we built trust, just between us and between tenants, is like I said, we'll do celebrations, and in the beginning when we had to build trust, we would do some barbecues. Food has a way of bringing people together. Breaking bread together, it doesn't matter what language you speak, when you go, "Mmm!", you're understood when something tastes good. That would be a way that we exchange food and recipes. Little gatherings, *convivios*, barbecues. So slowly, over time, building trust. 

Also being consistent. Another way we were able to maintain that trust is every Thursday for the last four years we've been meeting with the tenants. *Every Thursday*. And you know, no one is paying us to be there. We're there because we care about the movement, we care about housing, and what happens to one tenant happens to me as a tenant collectively, it happens to all the tenants. I think the Hillside Villa Tenants Association is well aware of that, and so the relationship is really, really healthy. It's really great. Of course there are challenges sometimes that are personal, and that structure that we've built--or that we've helped build--through the tenant's association helps mitigate some of the conflict that tenants would normally have. A community that stands together stays together, despite whatever challenges there are.  We've been consistent about it and consistent about being there, present, so the relationship is really healthy and it's been an incredible journey for sure.

Looking at the bigger picture, do you see a connection between the broader aim of tenant organizing and city politics in general?

Well, those two things couldn't be further apart. Politically, the way the tenants union is organized, around "housing is a human right", and we say that in a city that is the unhoused capital of the country, I mean, probably the world. It's like that for a reason. You hear all kinds of excuses, like "Oh, there's people coming in from other places!" and "Unhoused people coming into our city and it's all their fault!" It's ridiculous. That someone who's unhoused is going to be able to buy a plane ticket, or buy a ticket to come into another city that they know no one in. They have come in here with no resources and leave all of their belongings and all their networks from the city they're leaving? It makes no fricking sense. Those two political divides couldn't be further apart. I think some of the challenges have been to bridge that. How have we bridged it? We haven't. What we have done is by organizing tenants in the city of LA, we have been able to sort of begin to awaken a political consciousness among tenants. Because we are the majority of voters in Los Angeles, so that's real political power. With recent elections we've managed to remove a couple of city council members which has been unheard of in LA city politics. I think it's been a political earthquake that these council members have lost their seats. That has brought the council members of the political apparatus closer to us. I mean there's still always this fight. Protesting and using the press to reveal a lot of the corruption and a lot of the harmful policies that the city has against tenants is how we've really changed how tenants see themselves in Los Angeles. That has been a large part of how we managed to basically build a movement within LA. A city-wide movement. I don't know if you understand the dynamics of LA, but it's *so* different. It's made up of 13-14 different cities, I guess you could say 30 different little cities to make up LA alone, and all those little communities have their own interests. But the tenant's union has managed to really change the political landscape in LA. That's how we've bridged the gap, is that we haven't been involved directly in politics. We did one of the years of organizing, maybe about three or four years into the tenant's union, we decided to support a fellow candidate for city council. It was a disaster. Because it distracted us from the organizing, and we didn't really win anything. We decided again to focus on organizing, on making people aware that you *have* to vote for your interests as a tenant. Nobody is really safe from displacement. Gentrification happens in waves. The first wave, you know, you remove all the very low income tenants. Usually people of color, black, and brown tenants, and then the second wave comes and the lower or middle income people are displaced, and then another wave comes in until you have like a very rich, very white community. So tenants are waking up to the fact that their interests are to vote in their interests as tenants and not as individuals, in housing. Now people think about housing, they're very conscious of what a politician is saying, and so we've been able to change the political landscape in LA. 

Earlier, you mentioned the implementation of rent control in the '70s. Do you see your current struggle as connected to that movement?

That's one of the things that we've been pushing for in LA. There have been multiple fronts we've been organizing around. One of them is updated housing and rent control laws. 1978, yeah, the city was going through some sort of similar rent gouging, gentrification, and in '78 the city passed rent control. So any building that was built in 1978 and earlier is considered rent controlled, and any building built after 1978 is not rent controlled. So we're sort of living off the legacy of what organizers did in the late '70s. Because we haven't won any new and updated rent control laws because city council just won't do it. There's definitely a relationship there because those tenants are the most protected, and really it's the actual low income housing. If you're living in a building for 20-30 years, if the building was built in the late '70s or '60s but you moved in in the '80s or '90s. You're paying a considerable amount less money for that unit than everybody else is if they just moved into their unit. So I guess you could say that our low income housing is rent control. What's been happening is that developers know that if they evict a tenant who's paying 500-600 dollars for a one bedroom, once that tenant is gone and there is no vacancy control, that landlord can jack up the rent up to $3000 on the new tenant coming in. So that's a lot of what the economics of developers have been built on. Buy a building where tenants pay low income, and they're usually overpaying for the building, and so it's in their financial interest to evict the tenants that are currently there. And so there's been a whole industry that's popped up in LA that's focused on, they call them "professional re-tenanters" but they really just evict them. That's kind of what they're doing, and they really go after the elderly first, undocumented tenants, especially the elderly. They're health-wise the most vulnerable. They do a lot of harassment. We've had some people *die* of the harassment: massive heart attacks, some people being evicted, die shortly after because they're in the streets or they go live with family. It just breaks them. So there definitely is a relationship between what was won in 1978 and what is happening for tenants now because we're trying to save the rent controlled housing stock, and the more that disappears in LA the more you're seeing the unhoused community go up in terms of numbers. The city has a long way to go. They should update rent control. The state has tried a couple of times to pass rent control. Organizations have tried to pass rent control in the state, aware of the massive rent increases that were hitting tenants who weren't in rent control. In LA, rent control is, you only get your rent raised once a year, and it's only max 3-4 percent. If you don't live in a rent control, that rent can go up 300 percent, it doesn't matter. Or the landlord has every right to evict you if they just don't even like you. They just give you 60 day notice and you have to be gone. But rent control has things like just cause protections, they have a cap on how much the landlord can raise the rent. So yeah, those units are prized in LA. So there's definitely a relationship and  that's the reason why there's been such a rapid growth in the tenants unions. Because these buildings are located all throughout Los Angeles, and this gentrification has been a city-wide thing. I think it's like 2/4 to 3/4 of housing stock in LA is rent controlled.

Although past measures such as the CRA developments and rent controls have started to fail, do you see a bright future for tenant organizing in LA? Do you think things are moving in the right direction?

Organizing in LA? Yes. We have these gatherings of all the locals. We have conferences where we all come together and exchange *What kind of tactics have been used against tenants?* *What are the ways that we can begin to rethink how we engage the housing question?* *What new policies can we push to ensure tenants remain housed, tenants are protected?* and we push more towards this idea of canceling rent. Because we say, "Rent is theft" and not just "housing is a human right". We're always pushing the envelope about what can be done, what policies we can push. 

I'll tell you the most recent one we've done. One of the ways that landlords evict tenants is, they get tenants to self-evict. So they'll make the conditions, or they'll allow the conditions of a building to be *so* poor and *so* awful that tenants can't bear it. And they leave. They *self-evict*. Once that tenant's gone, you can slap a coat of paint on, and maybe superglue a few things and then that unit is 3000-4000 dollars, 2000 dollars a month, rent. Technically the landlords, when they're not fixing something, they're breaking the law, and there is no penal code for when landlords break the law against tenants. There's like a slap on the wrist with a fine, but if a tenant is in a building without paying rent, they're forced to evict, they'll lose in court, they can go to jail if they're still there, for trespassing. So that has given landlords a way to get tenants to leave on their own. So with the lack of repairs. without maintenance of the building, they allow these buildings to just fall into disrepair and it's really demoralizing for tenants. I think the most crucial thing is developing a little community within every building to support each other as part of forming a tenants association, when those buildings fall into disrepair, it affects the emotion, it affects the energy of the meetings, and so we realized that was a major issue. From the very get go, we had been trying to figure out a way to deal with how do we get landlords to follow the law, to do their job, to obey the law. So what we've started to do now is create a campaign of doing the repairs ourselves. We hire people certified, you know, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, within our own network to do the repairs. Then we deduct those repairs from the rent. Of course there's a whole bunch of things we have to do. We have to send notice to the landlord saying, "hey, this is gonna happen if you don't fix the repairs in a reasonable time". So we bypassed the landlord and waiting for them to do the repairs. Or even for the city to come in and say, three months down the road, to do an inspection and say, "oh well you have to do these repairs,", and then another two months where the tenant is waiting and says "Oh the landlord hasn't done it." "Oh we'll let's slap them with another fine and we'll wait another two months,". A year will go by before anything happens, if that. So now we're doing our own repairs and we're deducting it from the rent, so the landlord is still paying for it. So that's one of the ways we decided we could best effect change and ensure the tenants stay in their homes.

Another thing we've been pushing for is right to counsel. So right to counsel, if you're arrested and you have to defend yourself in court and you can't afford a lawyer, what do they tell you? You have a right to a lawyer, you have a right to an attorney. If you can't afford one, one will be provided for you. Well we want that now for tenants in court, because a tenant has to hire a lawyer, and that is daunting. I think it's 90% of cases where if a tenant is not represented by a lawyer in court, they lose their case. So we're pushing for a right to counsel. If a tenant has an unlawful detainer, which is legal jargon for an eviction in court, that if they cannot afford an attorney that an attorney is assigned to them, as their right. That's another thing we're pushing for. So we just try to find ways in which tenants are evicted. I don't know what policies there are in Chicago which give landlords *carte blanche* to just evict a tenant, but it's just strategizing and finding ways that tenants can reclaim agency and take power for themselves. So in terms of the future in LA, I think it's really promising, and I think we'll eventually have a city council that is not represented by mostly landlords. Right now there are eight landlords in the city council that are landlords, and there's fifteen. We'll get to the point where we'll have nothing but tenants on the city council. I think that's one thing that would be great to have. We are the majority, we should be represented on the city council. I see a foreseeable future where that will happen. 

Is there anything you would like to bring more attention to?

One thing that tenants unions across the country could do is join ATUN, autonomous tenants union network, because that is a movement that is nationwide, it is international, and it's sort of a brain trust of tenant unions around the country. It's a really great place to understand how housing is being affected in other places as well as your own city. And that gives you perspective on what is possible, since we're always sharing ideas, we're sharing strategies, we do workshops, we've introduced language justice into some of the organizing. So it's really about getting plugged in, not just within the city, but on a national level. Again, the tenants union when we started, was very small, 25 people, and now paying members alone we have like 2000, and that's only been six or seven years for that. And that's just paying members that pay $1-5. There's double or triple that number that aren't paying but that are organizing. So that's really the thing I could say is build tenants associations within each building, and get plugged into a larger network. I think that's the way we'll really build this, because the movement has to be national, it can't just be local because this is everywhere. It's happening all at once. And finding ways to fight back and build agency as a movement will be essential and the way to do that is through engaging other organizers and tenants across the country