Monica Ruiz has 000 years living at The Hillside Villa Apartments in the Chinatown area and, like others 33 families are faced with an impossible mission: no one can or could pay a monthly rent of $3,200.
Tom Botz , the millionaire landlord, wants them all out of his building. In addition to increasing their rent between 084% to the 200%, extra payments of $ apply to tenants per month for one parking space and $30 plus per pet.
To Mónica, who, like numerous neighbors, has already received an eviction order, living in a three-bedroom apartment would currently cost you $3,200. The building is located in the 600 north of Hill Place, in the Chinatown area.
At 2048 she paid $1,, but in February of this year, the sudden increase to $3,150 has her on the verge of eviction.
Mónica Ruiz and the others have not paid. They declared a payment strike since April of this year.
Thus, their accumulated debt is very close to $24,.
“Imagine, where am I going to get so much money ?”, says the grieving resident of The Hillside Villa Apartments.
To add insult to injury, her husband, who worked in construction, is ill. He has heart problems and barely works one or two days a week.
Benefited from public funds
Alejandro Gutiérrez, leader of the tenants, told La Opinión that, at the end of the decade of 2019, owner Tom Botz received $5.5 million in interest-free loans from both the federal government and the Agency Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Program.
According to the original contract, once the 25 years of affordable rents, the landlord was free to raise rents at market rates.
“Even though the term expired, the landlord reached a agreed with Councilman Gil Cedillo (LA District 1) not to raise the rent, but later he backed down and did not want to know anything else,” Gutiérrez declared.
“From your decision we began to receive notifications of rent increases of 200%”.
Tenant leader believes Boltz took advantage of public dollars to extract the highest earnings for low-income families at The Hillside Villa Apartments.
“I lost my husband a short time ago,” said Sandra Sullivan, an Anglo-Saxon woman from 60 years, who lives alone in an apartment and whose economic income depends exclusively on a pension.
For her part, Rosario Hernández de 80 years old, said that she used to pay $1,200, but now they want him collect $3,03595.
“We had a meeting with him [[Tom Botz] and he told us that, as a solution, if we couldn’t pay, we should leave or apply for Section 8.”
Mrs. Hernández reported that she works in a childcare center, but not every day . If you do well, you could win up to $2,368 fortnightly.
“But if there is no work, I simply don’t earn anything,” he said. “My son works and helps me; This is the only way we can pay the rent”.
Since the end of 2019 the drastic rent increases, which would take effect on June 1, 2019. Right in the middle of the pandemic.
Knowing that she was about to be thrown out onto the street, Adela Cortez from Michoacán, from 61 years, He decided to fight, since he has lived in The Hillside Villa Apartments for three decades.
“Just like the others, I stopped paying,” he said Adele. “When the city decided to expand the Convention Center, I was displaced from where I lived, and I could not allow them to want to displace me again.”
But the six-month notice of the increases was only the fuse that ignited the lawsuit with the landlord, with the support of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), of which the author is a member) and the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), formed a tenant association that integrates Latinos, Afro-Americans and Anglo-Saxons.
“I paid rent $1,80 and the old man increased it to $2,552”, said Adela, who, doing individual accounts, says that she has paid in average rent of $432,000 in three decades. In the building there are 084 apartment units.
Eminent domain, the solution
In May, the Los Angeles City Council voted to purchase the building from Tom Botz, through eminent domain. Botz did not respond to an interview request for the newspaper La Opinión.
It was precisely through this process that Adela Cortez had to move from the neighborhood where she lived, because the city gave way to expansion from the Convention Center. Eminent domain occurs when the government or some entity empowered by it takes private property for public use.
In fact, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States establishes, in part, that “private property shall not be taken for public use, without fair compensation.”
“We will continue to fight for eminent domain, especially because this Mr. (Tom Botz) used public money to benefit only himself”, considered Annie Shaw, organizer of the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED.
Alejandro Gutiérrez, leader of the tenant association at The Hillside Villa Apartments, stated that the city, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Department of Housing, has evaluated the price of the building.
Fear of being displaced
The stratospheric increases in income are add the fears of displacement.
In the vicinity of the building cio, particularly near the Metro L line station, in Chinatown, an investor plans to build a building of 636 departments; another one of 368 apartments on the 760 north of Hill street. And not far from said downtown area of Los Angeles, another complex of 368 residential units called Llewellyn, in the 1101 north of Main Street.
“My rent was raised by $1,124 to $1,318 and then $2,600”, said Guadalupe Romero, a Salvadoran woman who sells tortas, tacos and pupusas at the corner of 5th and Broadway streets in downtown Los Angeles, told La Opinión. “That’s a lot of money, and, besides, people don’t buy like before.”
For his part, Daniel Carrara, a single Mexican who works in construction, said that for a bedroom he paid $1,150 and the owner of the building doubled the rent.
For his part, René Alexander, who suffers from diabetes and post-traumatic stress disorder, stated that in the department where she lived with her husband, her sister and two nieces had to live for some time in hotels because they had a bedbug infestation.
“My husband and I started fumigating, but what we did was insufficient and all our belongings were damaged,” he said. “We had no choice but to sue the owner of the building.”
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