OP-ED: Downey tells renters to take a hike

Image courtesy Housing is a Human Right

DOWNEY - The City of Downey was incorporated in December of 1956, and it’s hard to think of a more shameful episode in its history than the city council’s recent vote to deny a moratorium request on no-fault evictions through the end of the year.

The issues of California’s lack of affordable housing, and its corresponding rise in homelessness – currently 32,000 in Los Angeles County alone – have been simmering for years, and reached a critical enough boiling point that led Governor Gavin Newsom to sign into law AB1482, which caps rent increases statewide and codifies “just cause” evictions.

There has been an unintended consequence: the law was signed in October and doesn’t go into effect until January 1, 2020. In the meantime, many property owners, landlords, realtors and real estate corporations have leaped into action, rent-gouging by 100% increases or more, and issuing eviction notices to un-troublesome tenants in order to clean house, so to speak, and rent anew in January at considerably higher rates.

The shock waves from these actions have reverberated throughout the state as frightened and near-desperate petitioners, many of whom have already fallen under the axe of eviction or are facing imminent orders to vacate, have flooded city council auditoriums with pleas for help.

Some cities, like Santa Ana, scoff at their claims, saying that the numbers don’t bear out their concerns. Others, like Los Angeles, South Pasadena, Alhambra, and Redondo Beach—three dozen in all statewide, according to the L.A Times—have enacted emergency measures to keep a lid on rent raises and unjustified evictions. On November 1st, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted a 3% maximum limit on rent raises through the end of 2019.

In the meantime, a blizzard of statistics has swirled through the news media, exposing the social and community costs of rising rents and what happens when people can’t afford them. In June of this year, L.A. Curbed reported that 600,000 L.A. residents fork over 90% of their monthly salaries for rent; and that, over the past eight years, for every homeless person moved off the street and into shelter, nearly two take his or her place.

The casualty count rests, as it usually does, mainly on minorities, the poor, people with mental and physical disabilities, and substance abusers. A substantial number, 14%, consists of ordinary middle or lower middle class tenants who have been priced out of their apartments and homes. In other words, over 4,500 hundred residents of what NBC News calls “Streets of Shame,” (a thinly veiled mirror of genteel disdain for the underclass) are stuck in downward-spiraling squalor because they can’t find a place to live. The increasing social division between haves and have-nots is also reflected here, as luxury hi-rises crowd the L.A. skyline at a million dollars a pop for a condo or co-op, while the streets below fill up with the tents of the dispossessed.

The City of Downey began getting into the story when complaints of coercive buyouts at an Eden Roc property on Western Avenue began to reach the antennae of the news media, and tenants complained of bad management and indoor property neglect, followed by the velvet glove of financial inducement covering the hard fist of eviction. It was a complex story that needed sorting out, but it fit in with the ongoing California housing crisis narrative. The Eden Roc tenants were mostly Latinx, at least one of them elderly and inferm.

Soon City Council meetings were filled with aggrieved tenants, advocacy spokespeople, professional blowhards who stood like roosters criticizing the dawn, and in general, angry protesters who cursed and shouted, fed each other’s resentment and directed it at the Council.

Council members suffered them with a mix of cautions and sympathy, until, facing a rising crescendo of abuse, Claudia Frometa lashed back in a magnificent speech that showed both solidarity and a resolve rare for our lawsuit-averse (meaning timid) leadership.

“I have been listening to you,” she reportedly said (in part). “I have been paying attention to your plight, [but] I am not going to be bullied or threatened by any kind of charade you bring…Let me be very clear, this mob mentality cannot continue…It is not us against you and you against us. That is not how it works.”

Added Councilman Sean Ashton, “Your issues are my issues…we’re giving some landlords the opportunity to be greedy and take advantage of the situation. That’s what truly bothers me.”

To his everlasting credit, Ashton was the first on the council to recognize earlier, at least out loud, the source and validity of the protests, and was the only one to call for placing a rent moratorium on the next meeting’s agenda.

In the meantime, Dan Nevarez, president of the Greater Downey Association of Realtors, wrote a letter to Mayor Rick Rodriguez in which he threatened a lawsuit if the moratorium were to go through. On November 20th, in a packed house, the matter came up for a vote, with anguished comment on all sides.

“I realize this is a very emotional issue,” said Councilman Alex Saab. “…It touches people’s hearts involving housing, children, our freedoms, whatever it may be.” He acknowledged the crisis in affordable housing, but added “Owning a property is essentially having a business, and passing an ordinance that usurps that right goes against property rights.”

Aside from the ominous tone of the Nevarez letter to Mayor Rodriguez (who, as a landlord, had to abstain from the vote), one would have thought that the legal eyes of Saab and Pacheco would have sharpened on the phrase, “If the City Council shares our goal to protect the rights of all property owners and the safety of all tenants, you will join us in waiting until…AB1482 goes into effect…”

The phrase echoes the famous line from the Vietnam era, “We destroyed the village in order to save it.” Just how is “the safety of all tenants” maintained by forcing them out with no place to go to?

But Saab and Pacheco didn’t, and by the end of that long night, the city had caved to the realtors. In Alex Dominguez’s tinder dry words in the Downey Patriot, “Ashton made a motion to pass the moratorium but with Mayor Pro Tem Blanca Pacheco and Councilwoman Claudia Frometa aligning with Saab, the motion died without a second or final vote.”

I have great admiration and respect for Councilman Saab, but I find his comments mystifying on this, one of the most crucial issues the city of Downey has ever faced. How does he know, as he said, that rent control hurts the housing market? New York City has had rent control since 1947. Its homeless problem, though as complex as ours, is largely based on a stratified rich vs. poor, tech vs. analogue economy. What evidence is there, as he contends, that a moratorium would create havoc and “reduce the law and order we have in our community, and that just doesn’t make sense.”

It’s Saab’s reasoning that doesn’t make sense. Where’s the evidence that harmful consequences will fall on “property owners, the real estate market, and the community in general” should a mere six-week moratorium go into effect? If criminal penalties are levied on price-gougers in the wake of massive California wildfires, what’s the difference when landlords do it in the lull before a measure becomes law?

You may notice that in all the rhetoric we’ve heard about property rights, no one has mentioned human rights. It’s been depressingly routine, through the years I’ve been observing Downey city life, for the civic community to genuflect to the business community, as if the sum total of society were the enshrinement of the profit motive. It’s not just true of Downey, it’s also part of the modern American grain, as when 1920s President Calvin Coolidge said “The business of America is business” and everyone solemnly nodded, like they did in hearing the 1980s mantra “greed is good,” as if hearing a Delphic utterance.

But the business of America isn’t only business. It’s the just administration of freedom and equality, and the defense and security of its citizens, and yes, their property. There are people out there now, during this holiday season and at decade’s end, that aren’t thinking much about noble abstractions. They’re worrying about where they can find a clean, livable space to sleep and cook a meal in.

All they know for sure is that our little city of magical thinking has let them down.