EXCERPT - "Hillside Villa Is Our Place, We Will Not Be Displaced”

Written by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis

Excerpted from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket 2024)

In October 2018, Leslie Hernandez stood in the hallway of Hillside Villa, a stucco and concrete complex home to 124 households, trying to communicate with her neighbor Benson Lai, a Cantonese speaker in his early sixties. Bilingual in English and Spanish, Hernandez turned to her hands. She held up an official notice of a rent increase that had been given to tenants throughout the building and tore it in half. Then she took the pieces and tore those too. When Lai nodded in response, Hernandez knew she had started something. Soon, she’d call it a tenants’ association. Though privately owned, Hillside Villa was developed through a combination of state-subsidized loans and tax breaks, tied to a thirty-year covenant to keep rents low. But that covenant ran out in 2018. The landlord, Tom Botz, wanted to see rent doubled.

The primary answer the state provides to the permanent crisis of housing is not public housing, owned and operated by the state, nor rent control, which regulates the amount of rent that private landlords can collect, but privately owned, publicly subsidized housing. Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8, deliver federal resources to private landlords by picking up the often vast difference between what tenants can afford and market-rate rents. Affordable housing underwrites apartment construction; the government subsidizes the cost of development in exchange for establishing, for a limited time, moderate restrictions on rents.

Section 8 serves only one-fourth of those who qualify for it; tenants can wait a decade just to get on the waitlist, then years to get a voucher, then even fail to get a landlord who will agree to take it. Thousands apply for every crop of “Affordable” spots, the majority of which go to the middle class rather than the poor. To serve poor and working-class tenants, the state often has to combine both forms of subsidy. Both programs exclude undocumented residents, and tenants risk losing access if they get more work or a partner. The programs funnel public resources into the pockets of private landlords, inflating the price of rent. This means they don’t just undermine their own budgets, they undermine tenants everywhere.

Since it was built at the edge of Chinatown in 1989, Hillside Villa has been home to tenants whose rents are subsidized by Section 8, restricted by an affordable housing covenant, or both. In 2018, Hillside Villa was thrust into crisis based on affordable housing’s most obvious failure: its rent covenants expire. The landlord was free to kick out all affordable housing tenants and collect market-rate rents in perpetuity. The public benefits were temporary loans; the private gains would be permanent. For almost five years, with the support of organizers from LATU and Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, Hillside Villa tenants have been organizing in three languages—English, Spanish, and Cantonese—to stay put.

Skilled organizers practicing simultaneous interpretation allowed neighbors to communicate with each other across language differences. But as many in the building recall, the main barrier wasn’t language, race, or age, but the different forms of tenancy. When the covenant ran out, those in affordable housing would be instantly subject to the whims of the market: their leases would convert to market rate, with no restrictions on rent increases or guarantees for lease renewals. The Section 8 tenants would get rent increases too, but they wouldn’t experience them, since the government would pick up the difference. They’d been separated from their economic and political leverage, unable to withhold rent to press for repairs and still fearful of jeopardizing their vouchers, which kept many of them in the city and from a life outdoors. Those relying on combining programs had an uncertain mess of bureaucracy to wade through. The Hillside Villa Tenants Association represents not just trilingual organizing but tri-legal organizing. But the tenants had years of history to draw on in forming their association. Marina Maalouf has lived in the building for twenty-five years. She raised three children there, watching them grow alongside the plants she’d planted in the building’s central courtyard: papaya, guava, chilis, avocado, herbs, rue for teas, and an “insulin plant” to treat diabetes. Adela Cortez, a cancer survivor now on disability, has also lived in Hillside Villa for more than two decades, relying on doctors and family close by. Leslie Hernandez has lived there since she was five years old. Knowing her neighbors since she was a child made them family. She explained, “To see them hurting hurts me.”

The tenants also built their association through a shared sense of injustice. Researching their landlord, the tenants discovered that Botz had an ownership stake in at least five other buildings in Southern California, with more than 150 apartments in total. They estimated the value of his home at $3.5 million.10 Ten years before, they learned, a California district judge had determined that one of his companies had systematically discriminated against families with kids.11 They also shared deteriorating living conditions. What were their government subsidies paying for? Their broken elevators, leaking pipes, roaches. Where was the money going? Tom Botz’s Malibu mansion.

As the Hillside Villa tenants began to meet weekly, working through the language and legal divides, they watched new developments crop up across Chinatown, some advertising a small percentage of “Affordable” apartments like theirs. “Affordable for who?” Hernandez balked. In Los Angeles, a single person making up to $66,750 a year—more than double the salary of a minimum-wage worker—could qualify.13 New affordable housing is thus helping to reshape Chinatown and displace its long-time residents, poor and working-class Chinese and Latinx people like them.14 Leslie recognized the destruction in the process of gentrification: “Chinatown isn’t Chinatown anymore.” The tenants of Hillside Villa had shared not just a communal life in their building, but decades in the neighborhood. They wanted to remain a part of Chinatown’s future.

The group’s first action was a collective letter that announced the formation of their association and demanded a meeting with their landlord. The letter focused not just on the rent increases, but on the landlord’s attacks against the building’s communal life: “Our children used to be able to play outside in the common areas, now they are forbidden. . . . We never had armed security, now we have a renta-cop who routinely interrogates us, despite knowing who we are.” It took months for Botz to agree to meet. When he finally arrived, as tenants recall, he stood cross-armed by their courtyard wall and insisted on his rights to collect market-rate rent. As he’d later reiterate to the press, he had no plans to “coddle” tenants who’d already “been subsidized for thirty-two years.”16 Management retaliated by ignoring the maintenance requests of households who’d organized.

Their lawyers exploited errors in the landlord’s rent increase notices, and the tenants made it through more than a year without losing their homes. But by the spring of 2019, no longer content with buying time, Hillside Villa expanded their focus from the landlord to the state. The tenants affirmed to each other that they wouldn’t be going anywhere; they’d have to evict their landlord instead. They demanded that the city buy the building and sell it back to them to be held in common. Should their landlord resist, they said, the city should use eminent domain to force the sale.18 Their own biographies guided their strategy. Thirty-four years ago, three separate households of current residents had been forced to relocate to Hillside Villa. They’d each been ejected from their homes in downtown Los Angeles when the city used eminent domain to clear their rent-stabilized buildings to make way for the Los Angeles Convention Center. Inaugurated with millions in government subsidies and resulting in the mass displacement of poor and working-class tenants of color, the convention center reflects the policy paradigm of private speculation and property-value inflation, of which affordable housing itself is a part. As Adela Cortez explained, city officials had helped her secure a new apartment in Hillside Villa, but no one told her she was trading permanent protections for temporary ones. The association wanted the city to use eminent domain to protect the same people that power had abused.

At first their city council representative, Gil Cedillo, “wouldn’t give them the time of day,” Hernandez said. So for months they staked out his office and itinerary, disrupting his events and demanding he meet with them. Their goal was to exploit the councilmember’s dependence on a tenant-majority constituency and the landlord’s financial dependence on state subsidy, which included not just regular federal transfers from Section 8, but the city’s own funds that had financed the building in the first place. The tenants were about to lose their housing, but the landlord was still paying off his city loans. Finally, the councilmember relented. But rather than accept the association’s plans, he offered Botz another deal: $12.7 million in forgiven debt to extend the building’s rent caps for ten years.

For a week, the tenants thought they’d won a decade of relief. Then the landlord denied he’d ever made a deal. As he told Fox 11 at the time, government efforts to protect Hillside Villa made him “feel like I’m in Cuba or Venezuela or Sudan but certainly not the United States.” Botz urged the city to secure Section 8 vouchers for the tenants at risk of eviction, a program he praised for delivering subsidized rents “like clockwork.” Understanding the constraints of the voucher system, Hernandez translated, “‘Just go on Section 8’ is landlord for ‘fuck you.’”

The first wave of eviction filings made it clear: the tenants’ presence in their homes stood in the way of their landlord’s profits. They relied on legal challenges to protect themselves from getting thrown out, spun on a yo-yo of dread and relief. Botz continued his threats. They continued to organize. In January 2020, Councilman Cedillo introduced a tepid council motion supporting state purchase of their building: a feasibility study. Meanwhile, the association took their struggle to the landlord’s door. They walked the streets of Malibu, shouting chants written by Hillside resident Alejando Gutiérrez: “Hillside Villa is our place, we will not be displaced!”

The coronavirus pandemic sent members of the association into further precarity. The landlord sent new eviction notices. Marina Maalouf was laid off from her job. Immunocompromised and at further risk, Adela Cortez stretched disability checks. Leslie Hernandez struggled to find work. Two elderly residents died of the virus. But the city’s emergency eviction moratorium brought the tenants a reprieve. It also brought them closer with members of the LA Tenants Union in a demand to cancel—not subsidize—the rent.

In October 2020, rather than continue paying rent for the privilege of being threatened with eviction and denied repairs, a first group of tenants decided it was time to go on rent strike. They could deprive Botz of not just the raised rents he sought, but the rents they were already paying. By February 2021, the rest of the association joined them. Despite the insecurity of the pandemic and their futures, the tenants got a taste of housing that wasn’t just “affordable” but free. In holding up rent extraction by staying put, tenants turned occupying their homes into an occupation.

Taking on two targets at once, the tenants staged a series of actions politicizing the city budget—that skeleton of the municipal state. Outside Disney’s Concert Hall, they enumerated the tax breaks given to developers that had underwritten that project. At LAPD headquarters, they denounced LAPD’s $3.15 billion annual budget, which captures more than a quarter of the city’s spending in a year. And in front of City Hall, LA’s Housing Department, and the homes of city councilmembers, they listed the hundreds of millions made available to the city through federal pandemic relief.

Finally, in May 2022, under the mounting pressure of an all union campaign, LA City Council voted to support the purchase of Hillside Villa—in part. The hours of public comment staged a contest of rights, between Botz’s “right to begin earning his full return on investment” and the tenants’ right to a home. One of Botz’s lawyers argued that to take the building away would create a “chilling effect on any developer ever trusting the city again to live up to its end of the bargain when constructing Affordable Housing,” a threat of capital strike. As the real estate industry knows, public-private partnerships give the industry, not constituents, disciplinary power over the state. The city voted to purchase the building, but refused to rule on eminent domain. Thus, it continued to avoid the largest impediment to that process: the landlord’s refusal to sell.

In July 2022, the landlord retaliated against their win: he hired a crew to destroy the garden in their courtyard. When the crews arrived, they began to tear out the plants and even decades-old trees from their roots, preparing to pour concrete into the beds. Their orders were to rip everything out, with no plans for replacement. Rosa Hernandez explained, “They just want to bother us, because we’re taking the building away.” Any work on the building, she said, should “go to making the apartments livable.” The next day, the tenants organized a picket line to block the contractors from continuing. The building manager called the police. But the picket worked: the crew didn’t take up their tools.

A fight between landlords and tenants was again waged over a garden, a contest between the appropriation of common space as amenity and as something more—a communal base of care and militancy that tenants produce for each other. The garden had long been tended as a shared resource. But after their association formed, it also became the physical location of their weekly meetings, a beachhead for building solidarity. “Plants Vs. Landlords,” one protest flier proclaimed. The threat of poor and working-class tenants is that the seeds of their organizing have taken root. As Botz once put it in disbelief, “We learned that the tenants really had no intention of ever leaving. They wanted to stay there for life.”

Hillside Villa has responded to the unwillingness of the city to intervene on their behalf by strengthening their relationships with other tenants in the LA Tenants Union. In May 2023, members of five local LATU chapters gathered at the building. The group split across the building’s three entrances as perimeter guards, breaking off small contingents for medics and media. One group placed themselves across the staircase, some seated and some standing, filling in the gaps with their bodies. One packed a covered vestibule, shoulder to shoulder. One formed a line in front of the entrance, linked their arms, and knit themselves together to close the space between them. They bent their knees, braced for the attack. This time, the eviction blockade was just practice, but they knew it might not always be so.

Hillside Villa reveals the contradictions of a government run on real estate. In insisting that their claim to their housing is more legitimate than their landlord’s, the tenants have opened the city to a crisis of legitimacy. Reliance on privately owned, publicly subsidized housing has sentenced these tenants to displacement; if the city wanted to protect affordable housing as an ideal and not a technicality, it would have to take the building away from its private owner. In trying to force a state purchase through eminent domain, Hillside Villa offers a model for affordable housing tenants across the country. But without a larger tenant movement, they may become an exception that proves the landlord’s rule. Indeed, a proliferation of their strategy would generate a budgetary crisis too. Nationwide, almost a half a million affordable housing covenants will expire in the next eight years, including almost ten thousand in Los Angeles—that’s twenty-five thousand tenants at risk of displacement in our city. Perhaps one of Botz’s lawyers framed it best: “There are covenants expiring throughout the city. You can’t take all of them.”

Hillside Villa points toward a responsive, transformed state: budgets retracted from developer handouts, buildings put back into tenant control, the overturning of affordable housing policy, which works to inflate rents, displace poor and working-class people, to enrich private landlords. At the same time, the tenants show us how new kinds of housing governance can emerge from the ashes of the old—through occupations of privately owned space that shift the political, legal, and economic ground under the places we live in now. The landlord has refused to let the city’s appraisers onto the property. At the time of this writing, the city is still waiting for a court order to get inside; it can’t appropriate the funds to purchase the building until the building has a price. Meanwhile, Botz has filed thirty-five evictions. The first group of tenants are on their way to court. But in August 2023, the Hillside Villa tenants association gathered in their shared garden once again. Surrounded by food, friends, and union siblings, they started a fire and drew close to the flames. One by one, they threw in their eviction notices and set them ablaze.