These Los Angeles Tenants Are Saying No to Rent Hikes
In 2018, Monica Ruiz and her neighbors found letters from their landlord taped to their doors. They were notifications of rent hikes—in some cases, increases of over 200 percent.
Ruiz had lived at Hillside Villa, a large apartment complex overlooking Los Angeles’ gentrifying Chinatown, for more than 20 years. She had raised five children there. Her youngest daughter attended the nearby elementary school, where she had taken Mandarin classes since kindergarten. She didn’t want to give them up or leave her friends.
“I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I just said, ‘No, we aren’t going to move,’” Ruiz recalled.
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The complex had started as a triumph of Reaganomics. President Ronald Reagan demonized public housing as a budgetary blight. Through a series of reforms, his administration instead floated tax credits to incentivize private developers to build low-income housing where rents would be capped, typically for three decades or more. The policy essentially created a network of affordable housing with an expiration date, one that would kick the low-income housing can down the road to a future generation of politicians.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/los-angeles-hillside-villa-rent-strike-tenant-organizing/