Hey, dear listener, it's Maria no Hossam. So today we're going to bring you a story about people who live together and how they organize together. This is from a series called The Tenant Association, produced by Los Angeles Public Press. It tells the story of a group of neighbors, many of them Latinos and Latinas, living in an apartment complex
in LA's Chinatown. It's called Hillside Villa. The series follows these working class neighbors in their fight against their landlord, who dramatically raises their rent in what looks like a strategy to evict them. It's a fight that extended over six long years. Here's the first episode of The Tenant Association.
We're in the courtyard of an apartment building on a hill at the top of Chinatown.
We have one more thing we need to do.
Can we have every buddy who's gotten a three day notice come up?
The courtyard is full of people from all over LA. People walk up to a small stone picnic table in the middle of the crowd. They're young and old, Latino and Chinese, and then one by one they light their eviction notices on fire.
You may be wondering why We have a picture of this guy over here.
Why he has an.
Orange in front of him, and why there's a little kettle here. Jenny's gonna let you know.
There's a red stool set up with a close up photo of this man who looks like he's in pain. It's like he's trying to smile but doesn't know how. It looks more like a grimace. That's Tom Bots, the landlord. The people burning their notices are his tenants. The tenants have set up this whole little ceremony for Bots as though he's dead, even though he's not. And to be clear, the tenants aren't saying they want him dead. This is a symbolic thing.
Here's Jenny explaining, in Chinese tradition, when people pass away, we burn paper money, and since if Tom wants his money, if Tom wants his money, he can have.
That's why.
It's funny, because usually you burn money to give it to your ancestors in the afterlife, and the orange on the stool is also for good fortune. So doing a ceremony like this it's supposed to be an act of love. So the tenants drop their burning eviction notices into a red metal can basically saying, we're not afraid of you. You can get our money in the afterlife.
But what's that we're playing now?
We're going to fight, fight, fight fight.
It feels like you have no, no, no power when you're a tenant in LA. Doing anything that might piss off your landlord feels really scary because they can just decide to evict you for basically no reason. But this group of tenants rejected that. They realized how much power they had together. They weren't season activists or public figures. They were just neighbors. But together they built a movement that changed what we think is possible for tenants in LA.
They shined a light on a crisis affecting over a million tenants just like them all across the country. The Hillside Bill Attendants have been fighting their landlord for six years and they're not done. I'm here to tell you about a landlord who raised the rents on his tenants by hundreds, even thousands of dollars as soon as he thought he could get away with it. I'm here to tell you about the progressive politicians who promised to help the tenants but turn their on them instead. I'm here
to tell you about the Hillside Villa Tenant Association. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to tell you how the Hillside Villa tenants are organized to save their homes and how they showed La what a powerful tenant movement looks like. This is the Tenant Association The Story of Hillside Villa, a Los Angeles Public Press podcast. I'm your host, Phoenix Though, and this is episode one, a ticking time Bomb. The first thing you hear when you walk up to
Hillside Villa are little chirpy birds. I think they're parakeets. They're on someone's balcony facing hill Place, in a couple big cages. They're colorful and loud. And then if you walk through the lobby and out towards the courtyard, you'll probably hear this. The courtyard of Hillside Villa has been a lot of things, a community garden, a gathering place, a communal backyard, and for many years, a makeshift playground.
It was part of why Hillside Villa was such a nice place to live for so many years, especially if you're trying to raise a family there, like Monica.
Ruivez, Monica Luis. You'll think.
Hill Sevilla Monica has lived at Hillside Villa for twenty five years. She used to throw her kids' birthday parties in the courtyard, even her daughter's king signeras they invite the neighbors.
Yes, also.
Coma de quince patio inmos Alos Besino's Jos Beni.
Everything was peaceful. We've spoken to a bunch of tenants who have similar stories about Hillside Villa in its early days. Back then the building was new and clean and the neighborhood was quiet. Because of the courtyard and the way the building was built, Hillside Villa was ideal for families. Annie Shaw, who organizes with the tenants, pointed that out to me.
And you can see that even with the way it's designed, you know. And if you see the architecture of the building, the balconies face out word and in word in a courtyard, and the balconies are social spaces, you know. There used to be even playground toys and like I think, a barbecue pit.
These days it's hard to find an apartment that's big enough for a family and that isn't expensive. But Hillside Villa has a lot of these tenants have raised their children and grandchildren in these apartments cared for their elderly parents. Here they work as cleaners, construction workers, and food vendors. Hillside Villa was built in nineteen eighty nine, when Chinatown was mostly home to Latino and Asian immigrants, but the
neighborhood has changed a lot since then. New luxury apartments have sprung up, and hip restaurants and galleries have moved into empty storefronts or pushed out longtime businesses. Rents have skyrocketed, and a lot of low income families have been forced to leave. But it's different for Hillside Villa tenants. As Chinatown became more and more expensive, their rents stayed relatively low,
which wasn't because their landlord was a good guy. It's because he had to because the original owner built Hillside Villa using public money. We'll explain more about that a bit later in this episode. For now, what you need to know is that for years the rent at Hillside Villa was cheap until it wasn't.
This Hopefully you don't see me.
That's a good thing about audio. This is Mary Ramos. She's lived at Hillside Villa for fifteen years. She lives with her son in a two bedroom apartment. It was really cold in the day. I met up with Mary for an interview. We met in the courtyard and as I set up the recording, she handed me some Filipino and banadas wrapped in a napkin.
I'm here with Mary Ramos.
She made banadas so sweet. I don't know if you can tell from the recording, but when I said that into the mic that Mary had brought and banadas, she smiled kind of sheepishly, like, Oh, it's no big deal, like I'd put her in a spotlight. She wasn't expecting. It was a small thing. But it kind of shows what Mary's like. She's really warm and generous. Her instinct is to feed people and make them feel welcome. Mary isn't the type a person to take up a lot of space.
I never I never, even when I was young, I never speak. I'm quiet. That's the teaching of my mom. And my mother said, you don't answer back to parents or answer back to older people, and the most important is respect respectful. So me, even I know my mom is wrong, I just cry and go to my room. That's it, because I cannot answer her back.
But there's another side to Mary that you might not see right away quiet rage.
My attitude is the more I'm mad, the more I don't talk. I will just keep quiet. That's why you will get mad at me, because I'm not answering you back. I don't. I just look at you and just that's it.
I don't think Mary ever expected to become an activist. I don't think she ever expected to be making a speech outside the mayor's house or physically blocking a city official from driving away from a protest. But then Tom Botts tried to raise her rent. This is what we know about Tom Botts, the landlord of Hillside Villa. He's in his late sixties and has previously worked as a lawyer. He was married to a woman named Renee Norikoman. They
have three adult children, Peter, Nolan and Chloe. I've interviewed Tom Botts twice over the past couple years. Once he called me back while I was getting lunch. That time he was friendly, but it felt forced.
I'm all their favorite of the government subsidizing tenants who legitimately need it. That's why we have all these Section eight tenants. But what these tenants need to do is they need to mobilize to say to get.
Get that substance, get those subsidies. We are not their enemies. The city needs to step up.
The next time we spoke, he wasn't so friendly. He seemed mad at me for the previous article i'd written. I had interviewed a Section eight tenant who said a majority of Bots's tenants can't afford his rent increases.
All I can do is point out the irony that the CD is determining that she can't pay. And then she says, well, but I can't. I think she's not paying, So I think that ship be pointed out.
That's kind of what Tom Botts is like in my experience. It seems like in his mind, he's the victim. By the way, Tom Botts never responded to her repeated requests for comment for this series. Anyway, if you look up Thomas Botts and his various companies on the LA Superior Court website, you'll find more than seventy eviction lawsuits that he filed against his tenants. The evidence suggests that tom
Bo loves to file eviction lawsuits. Bots lives in a mansion in Malibu, about thirty miles west of Hillside Villa, and his former property manager Sonya Rodriguez used to go there.
She remembers the.
House being very big, two floors, a pool, a water fountain, maybe a vienna. Sonya and her now ex husband managed an apartment building that Bots owned in North Hollywood on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Bots would have Sonya drive all the way to Malibu to drop off rent checks. Here's my colleague Martine Massius translating go.
There because she would have to leave cash from the tenants from the rent or if it was paiding checks. You know, they would leave the checks. They would say, who hasn't paid.
Sonya mainly did cleaning jobs for Bots the North Hollywood property, even though she worked for him and was driving to his house all the time. Sonya said Bots barely ever spoke to her, except for sometimes he'd tell her she did a good job cleaning the building. But Sonya also stood up to Bots, like one day when Bots raised rents on the North Hollywood tenants by seventy five dollars instead of the usual twenty.
Five does.
Loss personas local persona.
Para.
Sonya worked for Bots, but she had a lot more in common with the tenants of the building than she did with him, she felt loyal to them. At the time. Sonya also worked a night shift for a cleaning company. She knew the tenants of the building had similar jobs and that some were earning even less than she was. She knew they couldn't afford the increase.
Pisa and Lance Yosa persona ra Mucco a ton said persons persona.
The so Sonya told Bots she wouldn't hand out those notices. She just couldn't.
Yes, Tarvej, here's Martine again translating, so you know.
That day where you know she confronted him. She said, like, you know, I'm not gonna agree to giving this rent increase out to people because you know, I have reason to think that this is not right. But he said, this is your job, like you have to do it.
Six months later, Bot sold the building. Sonya thinks this was already in the works when he raised everyone's rent.
It's gone, is como ke non import lcentimiento de la persona.
Sonya's seen how Bots treats people over the years. She says, it's like he doesn't know how to be grateful for what he has. When Bots sold the North Hollywood apartment building, Sonya suddenly had to look for new housing, and she found it a two bedroom apartment at Hillside Villa. She was safe for almost a decade. And then remember how rents at Hillside Villa stayed low while the rest of
Chinatown gentrified. That was because when the original landlord constructed the building, he signed a contract or covenant, agreeing to keep rents low for the next thirty years because the city gave him money to help build Hillside Villa. Lots of cities signed deals like this with developers around this time. It was the eighties and Reagan had decided that public housing was bad and that the government shouldn't invest in it anymore. So they came up with a very eighties idea,
give money to landlords to build affordable housing. They wanted the market to take care of it. But thirty years goes by fast, and by the way, we found that there are close to a million apartments like this across the country. We're going to get way more into that in episode three. But this is a national crisis because of course, as soon as these covenants expire, landlords are trying to raise people's rents by as much as they possibly can, which is how the system was designed to work.
Tom Boss was doing exactly what he was incentivized and legally empowered to do, raising people's rents by over one hundred percent, basically overnight. This is the problem with the market providing affordable housing is that the market doesn't actually want to provide affordable housing. The market wants housing to make as much money as it possibly can. So what Sonya and our neighbors didn't know is that there are four rents were only temporary. The covenant protecting them would
one day expire. It was a taking time bomb. And in twenty eighteen that bomb went off. Can you tell me, like, what was it like, you know, getting informed of this like covenant expiring and the rent increase.
Oh yeah, because the manager, the owner sent us a letter.
At first Mary said she got a letter that our apartment wasn't low income anymore. And then she got another letter, but.
He didn't say how many percent, so usually we know the percent is like five percent, likefty dollars or twenty dollars, so we were not worried about it. And then he sent another letter, and then the third letter was the amount was there, which is at that time I was already paying one thousand and four for the two bedrooms, so he wants the rent to be two thousand, six
hundred and fifty. Oh God, so we are like, am I paying two thousand, six hundred and fifty for a two bedroom which is an old building and there's no amenities.
Mary later found the rent increased notice and sent it to us. It was actually two thousand, four hundred and fifty, not two thousand, six hundred and fifty, but still a ton of money. Monica Luiz remembers a paper notice attached to her door. Monica is a tenant who threw her daughter's kinsens in the courtyard, and when she got that rent increased notice, her first thought was her kids and what would happen to them if they had to move.
So, you see.
Missijs vuela meaninga sai messia. I know you Knowue castellar Us, Brendo mandarins a king Mandarin, Yes, Brenda josa pena la mas pegna.
Anica didn't know where she'd go, especially with children who are still in school. Her fifteen year old daughter was distraught. She'd been taking Mandarin classes at Castellar Elementary in the neighborhood since kindergarten. She didn't want to leave because she was afraid she'd have to.
Stop mesia no no, no, pero pero si fu momento.
Monica reassured her daughter that they weren't going to have to move, but she didn't know if that was true. When the tenants of Hillside Villa talk about this day, I always think about how isolating it feels to get that kind of letter on your door. I once got a sixty day notice and remember feeling so ashamed, like how could I have let this happen? And where am
I supposed to live now? Even though as a housing reporter I know that getting that kind of notice is one of the most universal experiences in Los Angeles.
Soon after the.
Notices went out, Bots started pressuring the tenants to leave. The pressure came from Madardo via Toro, the property manager, and Chloe Bot's Tom's daughter. They came to the tenants stores with cash for keys, offers money in exchange for the tenants voluntarily moving out. By the way, we also reached out to Madardo and Chloe for comment on the cash for keys process, and neither got back to us
on that point. Anyway, these kinds of offers are often tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes as my which is one hundred thousand dollars, because it's so lucrative for the landlords to get rid of low income tenants and replace them with people who can pay market rate. But Bots offered his tenants just around five thousand dollars to leave,
and they say, you put a clock on it. Tenants say they were told that the cash amounts would decrease by one thousand dollars for each month they continued to stay. Thousands of tenants across LA are targeted by similar rent increases, faced with landlords who look at their homes with nothing but dollar signs in their eyes and harrassed tenants into leaving. And it's easy to do because the power is on the landlord's side. There are a low to squeeze as
much money as they can from their tenants. Housing them is beside the point.
Like either welieve or restay.
Once Mary realized how much her rent would go up, she felt like she had no choice but to move out.
Because I was planning to leave already because I don't like to be here because the rent is too high. I cannot avoid that yeah, and it's my son who's paying.
You spend some neo some star look save and susechus.
Monica says, Bats and the others were like, these tenants are poor, they don't know their rights. They'll just accept whatever.
She said.
They figured they could just scare people out of their homes.
Stan inrentees no saving jeose o keosi.
Yes, moi diferente in porto quarto.
Luperomero is another long time tenant of Hillside Villa. Everyone calls her Lupita. She runs a food truck called Lupita's hot Dogs. She has a similar memory of that.
Time almanni la yea re are cossa.
Lo benziero, Oh no, yeah, what is.
Being Lupito said that Madaro and the others would aggressively push the cash for keys offers, saying they had to accept them. Some tenants left. Lupita says they must have felt defeated, but not everyone did. And this is the moment where the story of the Hillside Villa tenants really begins, because this is when they decided to fight. On the next episode, how the tenants of Hillside Villa organized to save their home.
You know what you got Now the whole world has to know what kind of asshole we have in the building.
That's next time on the Tenant Association. The Tenant Association is hosted and recorded by me Phoenixell. Carla Green is our editor and executive producer. Translation, production and additional reporting from Martine Macias Junior. Our fact checker is Marina Penya. Sound engineering by Philip Kimp, Legal review by Professor Susan E. Seger and the uc Irvine Press Freedom Project. Art direction and illustrations by Alison Yet Our theme song is by
Eduardo Arenas. Editing help and other support from our publisher Matthew Tinoko and our audience director Maria Castanetta. Thanks to the rest of the LAPP staff Engagement reporter Amanda Delsa, Luco reporters Ashley Rona and Elizabe joe An, Engagement editor Brolli Dave Special thanks to Gabe Schneider, Nolan Downs, and all the tenants and organizers who spoke to us for this series. And to Boyle Heidspeed, where we recorded this podcast.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week.