The Tenacity of Tenants

An eviction moratorium in the county would be more modest than it sounds.

According to the Office of County Counsel, essentially the county government’s legal office, it would not be a ban on evictions, which landlords could still initiate in court. Tenants would have to invoke its protections to both their landlords and potentially in court, where their eligibility could be challenged. And after all this, even if they avoided eviction, tenants would still owe back rent. At a September 16 meeting, assistant county counsel Pete Bollinger explained to the board that a moratorium was effectively just giving tenants facing eviction for failing to pay rent the legal defense of saying: yes, I did it, but I had a good reason.

That’s why the measure’s supporters often say it’s the “bare minimum” the county board can do. For them, a moratorium has two key benefits: it’s an obvious response to a long-standing affordability and homelessness crisis exacerbated by January’s wildfires, which destroyed more than twelve thousand properties; and it’s a tangible way to push back against the turbocharged presence of federal immigration agents in the city, which has seen residents lock themselves in their homes and lose days and weeks worth of wages.

“The expectation was this would not go on all summer long, that people would return to work and there would be a return to normalcy,” says Chelsea Kirk, another LATU organizer. “But it became apparent that wouldn’t be the case by mid-July.”

According to a September report from the Rent Brigade, the coalition of tenant organizers, activists, and others cofounded by Kirk to document landlord rent gouging in the wake of the wildfires, immigrant renters’ weekly earnings on average plunged 62 percent after the raids. Twenty-eight percent of respondents say they owe their landlord more than one month’s rent, and 71 percent of immigrant renters say they have returned to work out of fear of eviction

These claims, together with widespread local outrage at the raids, have helped propel the idea up the county board’s priorities. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath’s presentation on September 10 in favor of a state of emergency prominently featured the Rent Brigade’s research, alongside Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent two days earlier, which charged that the highest court in the land had effectively legalized racial profiling by federal agents.

But arguably most important has been the tenacity of the city’s well-organized tenants’ unions, who “hijacked,” in Corrales’s words, a September 10 meeting of supervisors’ staffers and demanded the moratorium be placed on the agenda on top of the $10 million in rent relief the board was weighing up. As Supervisor Horvath explained at a September 16 meeting, hearing “dozens of members of the public tell their stories, how they are terrified they are going to fall into homelessness” that day pushed the board to explore “all possible options” for a moratorium.

“I don’t think the board has been confronted before with the machine that is the tenant union in the city,” says Kirk. “They seemed tripped up and surprised.”

The tenants’ unions and other housing and immigrant groups have been a fixture of the board’s public discussions of the measure since, drawing up draft ordinances and motions to provide to the supervisors, and barraging them with speaker after speaker who insisted they go beyond just rent relief.

One LATU member, a seventy-two-year-old cancer survivor with ongoing health issues, pleaded with the board for a moratorium. A street vendor whose husband suffers from heart issues talked about the stress on both of them from lacking money for rent as a result of staying home; another, the mother of two young kids, similarly recounted how her savings had been drained after three months of fearfully not leaving the house. Several were actively going through the eviction process, like Maria Lopez, a well-known tenant organizer fighting her landlord’s yearslong efforts to kick her out of her home using a loophole.

One mother of three young children described how her husband and his coworkers shut themselves in the body shop they worked at because ICE had surrounded them. “Money’s not coming in, and we’re not able to pay rent, to buy our children the shoes that they need, the braces that they might need, the health care access that they might need,” she said.

Another speaker, Lexie Nguyen, pointed to George Retes, a US citizen and Iraq War veteran who had been arrested at the cannabis farm he worked at north of Los Angeles before being held in a detention center for three days, as evidence that all LA tenants needed a moratorium under the raids. “No one is safe from a loss of income from detainment,” she said.

“A Rock and a Hard Place”

The campaign in LA is already reverberating beyond the city. In Chicago, another major target of of Trump’s escalated immigration raids, tenants’ unions have now also taken up the demand, with the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance (ACTA), the Belden Sawyer Tenant Association, and Rogers Park residents represented by the tenant union Fuerzas Activas de la Damen all calling for an eviction moratorium in the city. It’s a small number for now. But the LA campaign similarly started with a trickle before suddenly gaining momentum in the last month and a half.

“Most housing organizations were unwilling to endorse this as a demand,” says Corrales. “Slowly more and more started to put it on their list. Now that it’s on the table and moving forward, the coalition is growing.”

The need is there. Last Friday, ACTA held a press conference with the residents of a North Side apartment building who have been on rent strike since February over what they say is new owner Drew Millard’s attempts to push them out and turn the property into expensive luxury apartments. The tenants — some of whom had lived in the building for decades and seen their kids born and grow into adults there — charged that Millard, who has been a focal point of protests against gentrification in the city, had avoided carrying out necessary repairs on their apartments, which they say lack smoke detectors and leak when it rains, and had turned the heat off. Millard did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, outside of their apartments, these tenants faced the prospect of ICE and other federal agents’ increasingly aggressive operations in the city. Anay Herrera, forty-two, described how tenants had been raising money for the legal defense of one tenant union member, whose son is paralyzed and who had been arrested by ICE. “We go to work to make money, and then we get grabbed,” said Herrera.

Like tenant unions in LA, organizers and tenant union members point to the precedent of Illinois’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium, enacted and renewed via executive order by the current governor, J. B. Pritzker, to make the case for a new one to deal with the emergency created by Trump’s raids. ACTA members argue that Pritzker, who is shoring up his anti-Trump credentials in advance of a likely 2028 presidential run, can do the same again. Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The urgency of that moratorium was made clear that Friday afternoon. Mere blocks from ACTA’s press conference and just hours before it was set to begin, masked federal agents packed into an SUV after having failed to chase down a resident, beating a hasty exit the wrong way down a one-way street as locals blew whistles and hurled verbal abuse. It was part of a blitz of federal raids on Chicago’s North Side that day that at one point saw federal agents yet again gas the city’s residents in a residential neighborhood.

One More Hurdle

Whether the demand catches fire in Chicago and elsewhere may well depend on what happens in Los Angeles County in the coming weeks. There LATU organizers are currently working on a legal memo to counter the county counsel’s insistence that an eviction moratorium must involve self-certification by tenants, which would force them disclose their immigration status in open court, potentially endangering them.

“It’s a political decision to insist on including self-verification,” says Laura Matter, a lawyer and Rent Brigade member working on the counteranalysis. She argues that given the broad, regionwide impacts of Trump’s raids outlined in the board’s emergency proclamation — affecting not just undocumented people but citizens too, and disrupting both businesses and institutions like schools and  hospitals — there is no explicit requirement for self-certification. She and a group of lawyers are working to present the county with a suite of alternative options, which could include simply increasing the threshold amount required for a landlord to use for an eviction.

The eviction moratorium needs three votes to pass. Its proponents are confident they have two, in the form of supervisors Horvath and Hilda Solis. Kathryn Barger, the chair and sole Republican on the board, has been a reliable no vote at every stage of the process.

That leaves the board’s two remaining members, Holly Mitchell and Janice Hahn, who are considered swing votes. (Neither responded to a request for comment). Organizers say that Mitchell, who tends to side with small landlords and backs rent relief measures because it helps put money in those small landlords’ pockets, met with LATU members in her district over the past month, where she sympathized with those calling for a moratorium on one hand but also suggested it would hurt mom and pops.

Hahn, meanwhile, represents some of the areas hardest hit by Trump’s raids and has taken political risks to push back against them, including introducing a motion to ban ICE agents from wearing masks and coauthoring the state of emergency motion. In board meetings, Hahn has expressed concern that past moratoriums have “been a severe hardship on the landlords too” but has also spoken with empathy about the plight of residents who are afraid to leave their homes and have lost their incomes.

“We will use every tool at our disposal in this fight,” she said at an October 14 board meeting. “I want our immigrant communities to know that we are in this emergency with them.”

Whether Hahn will count an eviction moratorium as one of those tools remains to be seen. If it does become law, it will be not just a marker of the increasing centrality of housing and renter issues in national politics, but more specifically a measure of the growing political influence of tenant unions in one of the city’s worst hit by America’s unaffordability crisis.

“Months ago, their staffers said ‘This isn’t happening,” says Kirk. “Now look how far we’ve gotten.”