Battling the Gentrification Goliath

Rene Alexzander, a normally feisty renters’ rights activist and resident of the Hillside Villas in Chinatown, wasn’t himself in the days after Thanksgiving last year.

What should have been a post-holiday glow dimmed when he and his neighbors in the apartment complex received a legal notice. Their rental covenant was expiring. The cost of rent in every unit was set to jump between $700 and $1,400 per month.

Rene Alexzander is the president of the Hillside Villas Tenants Association.

Down in the Villas’ small communal laundry room, an elderly tenant walked over tiles marked with black residue that had collected for years, and toward Alexzander with desperation in her eyes. When the woman faced him, Alexzander says, her face looked “swollen, like someone had beat her.” She had been crying all night.

Terrified, she asked, “Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go, I can’t afford to move.”

Then she said to the man who she had seen battle their landlord and remained in his apartment to fight another day: “Help me.”

As Los Angeles County residents receive rent hikes and eviction notices, they go through a range of fears: How will I pay the bills, will I be forced out, where will I go? Once the shock settles they look for a way to respond. A few turn to Alexzander, who seems to be renter David fighting landlord Goliath.

Even before Alexzander first began waking up to notices of rent increases stuck to his door, he had already successfully fought off harassment and false accusations that he failed to pay the rent, all from the building’s owner, Thomas Botz. Alexzander sued Botz twice. The court ruled in his favor both times.

When called for a comment, Botz claimed he could not hear anything and hung up. He did not respond to subsequent calls.

In the eyes of some Hillside tenants, Alexzander is a sort of leader, using words and fighting spirit to fend off forced eviction.

But what the woman in the basement didn’t know, was that Alexzander was just as scared and confused as many of his neighbors. This time, the activist who lives with his husband of 6 years years, didn’t know what to do.

But Alexzander’s fears for himself and his husband quickly turned to anger on behalf of the collective group of tenants who had become like family over a period of many years, decades even.

He has since become an advocate for not only his community, but also hundreds of other tenants facing similar fates around Los Angeles County. Alexzander leads the Hillside Villa Tenants Association and has joined efforts with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, as well as other renters’ organizations.

But while his resilience and perseverance are apparent, the fighting has taken a toll.

Alexzander says he has sacrificed his own health, both mental and physical, while spending the majority of his days in pursuit of fair treatment for tenants. “I have a lot of anxiety and have lost a ton of sleep,” he said. “It is so overwhelming at times that it has made me physically ill.”

This 57-year-old man has been battling AIDS for more than three decades, a disease that took many of his close friends and left him ailing. As a result, he struggles with post traumatic depression.

His life in the housing complex has taken a toll as well. Most recently in April, his apartment became infested with bed bugs, forcing the building to hire professionals to treat his unit.

The infestation turned out to be so severe, that the professionals said they had to come back to complete the job. When they did and he was out to lunch with his husband and dog, he received a call from a neighbor saying there had been an explosion in his unit.

“It was the ultimate disaster,” Alexzander said.

They returned to more than a half-foot of water in the apartment. The flood destroyed 90 percent of their belongings.

They relocated to another unit in the same building.

Despite these and other challenges, Alexzander continues to wake up every morning, slick his salt-and-pepper hair back, and help others as much as his body will allow.

This stands out in places like Chinatown, where it is tempting for landlords to jack up rents for long-time tenants in an effort to market rates. Few tenants can afford the increases. The majority of the Hillside Villa tenants earn just over $20,000 annually, which is a one third of the median annual income in the county. To such people, the proposed increases are often a prelude to eviction.

While Alexzander has become a rock for many community members, providing them with advice, guidance, legal knowledge and support to fend off the threat of eviction, most people facing such difficulties don’t have a human resource like him in their lives.

A Growing Problem

Elena Popp, the executive director of the Eviction Defense Network, has spent the majority of her life defending tenants against forced evictions.

The attorney began her career with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which provides assistance to the poor using grants. Popp quickly became aware of the severe gap in services and access to justice.

When she discovered seven years ago that fewer than one in every 50 households facing eviction in Los Angeles County had access to a lawyer in 2012, she founded the tenant defense network the following year with the hopes of responding to that need.

Having legal aid is necessary, says Popp, as about 98 percent of the tenants who go to court by themselves eventually lose their homes and end up with an eviction on their record, which generally stays there for seven years and makes the process of renting again very difficult.

Having experienced eviction herself as a child, Popp understands how destabilizing it can be, and she has seen, through her work, how much tenant awareness can help change the equation.

“If every tenant in LA County had the consciousness to resist displacement and simply refuse to move, and refuse to pay any increase more than 3 percent, we could stop gentrification in its tracks,” Popp said.

All tenants have rights, but most don’t know them.

The county’s temporary rent stabilization ordinance, put into effect in December 2018, prevents landlords of rent-controlled buildings from raising the rent more than 3 percent annually and requires “just cause” for tenant evictions.

Linda Tavella and other clients with few other options seek help from the Eviction Defense Network.

Many of the nonprofit’s clients are being forced from their homes via the Ellis Act, which landlords have increasingly used over the last two decades. The act was originally intended to allow “mom and pop” landlords to get out of the business and retire, but many other property owners have used the Act legally evict all their tenants, significantly reducing the amount of affordable housing in Los Angeles County.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project tracked the destruction of Los Angeles’ affordable housing and found that 25,853 individual units have been taken off the rental market since 2001. In the second quarter of 2019, there was an average of seven Ellis Act evictions per day, according to statistics obtained by the Coalition for Economic Survival.

Despite efforts to continue building new affordable housing units, Los Angeles County has lost a net total of more than 5,000 units since 1997 after rents were driven up to market rates, with the total number of affordable homes now down to 97,706, according to the California Housing Partnership. This has been the case even though the need for affordable housing continues to grow along with the population of Los Angeles, and this is at a time when California has the highest poverty rate in the nation.

Experts say that the driving force behind the shrinking and insufficient affordable housing supply is high-speed gentrification washing over large parts of the city.

The Eviction Motor

While new cafés, restaurants, businesses and multi-story metal and glass residential buildings are popping up around much of Los Angeles County, thousands of lifelong residents are being driven out of their homes every year, as highlighted through statistics gathered by Tenants Together, a California-based nonprofit organization for renters’ rights.

The average monthly rent has soared to $2,849 as of April 2019, a 10-percent jump from the previous year, and nearly double the rent eight years earlier. With landlords of rent-controlled buildings understandably eager to push rents to market value, a remarkable number of low-income tenants are at risk of displacement.

Tenants Together cites the California Judicial Council’s statewide data according to which an estimated 1.5 million tenants have faced court evictions over the last three years. The nonprofit’s 2018 study also notes that their data is almost certainly just “the tip of the iceberg when it comes to involuntary displacement” as most evictions never go through the court process and therefore cannot be recorded.

While LA County makes up about 25 percent of California’s population, nearly one in three eviction filings in the state are there. This disproportionate eviction rate comes despite the fact that the county has some of the strictest rent increase restrictions in California.

Whether or not the landlords respect these restrictions is another story.

The Disappearing Solution

Many LA County tenants are particularly vulnerable to their landlords as many renters rely on a variety of government programs to subsidize the cost of rent. Low-income families in particular often rely on the Housing Choice Voucher Program to provide assistance in the form of Section 8 vouchers.

The vouchers are extremely hard to come by, but they are invaluable to tenants who otherwise would not be able to afford housing anywhere in Los Angeles County. Just one in 60 applicants obtain a voucher and find housing that will accept it, if the waiting list even opens.

The waiting list for Section 8 vouchers has been closed since a two-week period in 2017. Prior to that, no names were added since 2004. In 2017, a Los Angeles Times analyst estimated 600,000 people applied during those two weeks. Some 20,000 of them, amounting to just 3 percent, were “placed on the waiting list by random lottery,” according to a Los Angeles-based affordable housing database.

Shortly before the waitlist opened that year, the director of the Assisted Housing Division said those 20,000 on the waitlist would wait 11 years before receiving the vouchers. If the past is any indication, more than half of those lucky few will see their vouchers expire before they can find a landlord who accepts them.

The Rights Fight

The residents of Kingswood Apartments, an affordable housing complex in Los Feliz recently teamed up with the LA Tenants Union whose activists gave them the tools to form a renters' association to protest against the complex’s manager, Griselda Arredondo, and owner, the Michaels Organization.

Despite immediately identifying herself when called by an Annenberg Media reporter, she quickly claimed the journalist had the wrong number and hung up.

The tenants’ fight with the Michaels Organization began in May when they received notices that their rents would increase by between $200 and $500. This came despite the fact that the developers have been getting tax breaks for including affordable housing units in their buildings, according to one Kingswood tenant, Carla Miller.

Miller, a leader in the movement, wrote a formal letter on behalf of the renters’ association to both the company that owns the building and its regional property manager on two separate occasions with no response. The association then hounded the East and West Coast offices with phone calls, which they referred to as “phone zapping.” The goal: to prevent the rent increases.

The Michaels Organization’s explanation was a common one among such property owners: Rising incomes in the area justified an increase in rents, Miller said. But just because the typical income increased doesn’t mean that people on fixed incomes — which describes most of the residents of the Kingswood apartments — have benefitted from any significant rise in the monthly checks they live on.

For Miller, it is a phony justification that she interprets differently. “The real reason for the rent increase was because they could,” she said.

In response to the tenants’ campaign, a regional vice president of the Michaels Organization flew to Los Angeles to deliver their response. They agreed to immediately cancel all rent increases and to credit tenants for the last two months of the increase they had already paid. The company and their tenants are currently negotiating for the yearly percentage increase residents should expect in the future.

The tenants who organized won a battle, but for them and many others, the war continues.