In Los Angeles, a Friendship Grows Out of Housing Strife

Every time Eduardo Jarquin, who has worked for more than 20 years as a janitor, walks out of the front door of his Koreatown apartment building in Los Angeles he sees the future across the street: A geometric white high-rise, completed in the last year, where one-bedroom apartments rent for $2,480.

Jarquin, 58, pays $900 for the studio apartment he shares with his 23-year-old son and a roommate. Jarquin’s aged building is rent controlled, keeping his rent closer to what he paid when he moved in more than a decade ago. He knows that as his neighborhood gentrifies, his low rent makes him a target for landlords hoping to bring in higher-paying tenants.

When tenants like Jarquin leave rent-controlled apartments in Los Angeles, landlords are free to set rents as high as the market will bear. Jarquin said that since a massive real estate investment firm bought his crumbling, neoclassical building in 2020, the new owners have been pressuring rent-controlled tenants to move out. An immigrant from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, Jarquin had felt at home in the 40-unit property when its residents were almost entirely other Mexican and Central American immigrants; now, just six remain.

But as investment firms buy up thousands of rent-controlled housing units intending to raise rents to current rates, something unexpected has happened: The “gentrifiers” are beginning to see themselves as having more in common with their low-income neighbors than with their corporate landlords. The newer tenants who have moved into buildings like Jarquin’s say that when landlords purposefully neglect maintenance or pressure tenants to move out, it affects them too.

The view from Eduardo Jarquin’s door: Across the street, a new development rents one-bedroom apartments for nearly $2,500.

 
An Unexpected Alliance

Ten blocks away, in another building owned by the same investment firm, Sam Trinh, a 28-year-old communications executive, walks out his door to another kind of change in the neighborhood: In the fall, signs went up in front of his building in English and Spanish, declaring in capital letters that “NO PERSON SHALL SIT, LIE, SLEEP OR ALLOW ITEMS TO REMAIN IN THE PUBLIC RIGHT-OF-WAY” — another of what local activists call “homelessness banishment zones.” It’s a daily reminder that not everyone can pay rising rents in high-cost cities like Los Angeles, and of what happens to those who cannot — including people like those who might live down the hall from him. In 2019, he moved into the one bedroom apartment he rents for $1,267. He shares it with his tabby cat, Sandy.

On Sundays, Jarquin walks south and Trinh walks west until they meet at a sloping park — opposite a Korean pavilion called Dawooljong, or “Harmonious Gathering Place” — where the tenant council for buildings owned by K3 Holdings meets over pupusas and sodas.

K3 Holdings — which also operates under the name of its management company, Alpine L.A. Properties, an entity it formed in 2022 — is one of many investment firms buying rent-controlled buildings and turning over tenants. It has acquired at least 41 such properties in Los Angeles in the last four years, snapping up Jarquin’s building in 2020 and Trinh’s in 2021. Trinh and Jarquin both say they are fighting K3’s attempts to remove them from their homes.

K3 Holdings denies that it harasses tenants from rent-controlled units. “These accusations are incompatible with the truth,” the company wrote in a statement when reached for comment.

Amid this conflict, Trinh and Jarquin have dug in, and in their precarious struggle to keep their apartments, they have come to rely on each other.

In 2021, Sam Trinh became Eduardo Jarquin’s ride to tenant meetings and actions across Los Angeles County. Together they attend as many as five meetings in a single weekend.

“Él es mi cuate,” Jarquin said of Trinh. Trinh said the same of Jarquin: “He’s my homie.” As homies, they spend much of their free time together, eating out, listening to live music, discussing Trinh’s dating life and planning next steps for the K3/Alpine Tenant Council. The council covers more than 20 different K3 buildings, making it the largest group of tenants within the Los Angeles Tenants Union to organize under one landlord. With more than 2,000 dues paying members, LATU is the largest tenant union in the United States.

In cities including New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco, long standing, low-income, often immigrant, neighborhoods are being gentrified. But as rents continue to soar, even newer, higher-income residents are feeling threatened by possible displacement. As the Los Angeles Tenants Union has grown, its membership has become more mixed as more “gentrifiers” have joined the side of their longer-term neighbors. Residents who may have avoided each other in the past are now collaborating, and in Koreatown, Los Angeles, the two men have formed a close friendship crossing generational, economic, and cultural lines.
 

‘We Lived in Different Worlds’

Jarquin has salt and pepper hair, a right hand missing two fingers, and an intense, weathered face that jumps into laughter without warning. He wears polo shirts and leather dress shoes. Trinh is a skater who favors baggy khakis and a windbreaker that says “BORNXRAISED Inland Empire.” Black ink tattoos — one an image of his mother’s nail salon — curl up his forearms.

Before they joined the tenant union, they shared a neighborhood but had little in common. “We lived in different worlds,” Jarquin said through an interpreter.

Trinh was another disaffected millennial with a job in marketing and a master’s degree in public health he wasn’t using. He spent his free time rotating between clubs, warehouse parties, see-and-be-seen bars and underground punk shows. Jarquin worked 60-hour weeks as a janitor at the Westside Pavilion mall and night clubs in Koreatown, places Trinh frequented as a customer.

Just as Trinh was moving into his apartment in 2019, Jarquin lost his job when he fell and broke his wrist operating a pressure washer.

Losing his job disconnected him from his primary relationships — with his fellow workers at the mall. In the ensuing months he left his apartment only for walks around his neighborhood or train rides to the beach, where he spent hours staring at the surf.

“The damn truth is that I didn’t have any friends,” Jarquin said. “I’ve always been alone, alone, alone, alone. That’s the way I live.”
 

‘My Neighbors Are Scared’

Eduardo Jarquin watches as Guadalupe Ramirez speaks with others about whether to accept a cash offer to vacate her rent-controlled apartment in Koreatown.

When K3 bought Jarquin’s building in 2020, a short man began to visit, using different names, Jarquin said — sometimes Angel and sometimes Jacob — and frequently changing his appearance, growing and then shaving beards and rotating haircuts, hoodies and hats. He told Jarquin and his neighbors that they would be evicted if they didn’t accept buyouts, Jarquin said.

The man of different names and faces was a “tenant relocator” hired to buy tenants out of their units, according to the tenant council. Jarquin said the relocators put extra pressure on immigrant tenants who don’t speak English and may be undocumented. He said they falsely tell tenants that other residents have accepted buyouts while implying that the building will be demolished. He said immigrant tenants may also fear being reported to ICE and deported.

“My neighbors were scared,” he said. “They must have thought the worst.”

At another K3 building once filled with immigrants, tenants say a relocator threatened them with deportation. Rebeca Sanchez said a relocator and building manager told her to “beware of ICE”; Marbarita Ortega said the manager told her he could have “everyone in the building deported.” Marcela Aparicio told Los Angeles Housing Department officials in an October Zoom meeting that the man said he would make her leave “one way or another.”

The Los Angeles Housing Department has received 443 complaints from residents in K3 buildings since the company acquired them, records show. Tenants have also filed 140 complaints to the health department. They have documented floods, mold, rats, cockroaches, fires and sewage explosions.

Sixteen immigrant tenants, including Jarquin, are suing the company for allegedly violating the federal Fair Housing Act by targeting Latino tenants for removal from its buildings. On its website, the tenant council accuses K3 of “social cleansing.”

K3 denied the tenants’ allegations and said in a statement that it cares for its buildings and tenants.

“It is in everyone’s best interest to maintain our buildings and treat one another with respect,” the company said. “A minority of tenants pursuing litigation against us fails to speak for most tenants in K3 buildings.”

K3 said “housing officials, regulators, and public records support the fact that our buildings are clean, safe, and in compliance.” The company did not cite examples of those records or official findings. The lawsuit is still being litigated.
 

Cash for Keys Almost Certainly Means Leaving the City

Jarquin said the “cash-for-keys” buyouts offered by tenant relocators are not the good deals they seem to be, because even tens of thousands of dollars is not enough to compensate for forfeiting a rent-controlled apartment in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, low income and undocumented renters often can’t meet landlords’ income and credit requirements in Los Angeles, and thus can’t find housing at all, said Rose Lenehan, a tenant union volunteer who helped organize Jarquin’s building. Accepting a buyout almost certainly means leaving the city.

Jarquin accepted a cash for keys offer of $22,000 in the summer of 2020 but regretted the decision and worked with tenant organizers to rescind the agreement. He said he rejected two more offers over the phone, including one for $50,000, which he said would “go like water.” At today’s rents on his block, the sum would not last two years.

When K3 bought Trinh’s building in June of 2021, the off-site manager stopped returning calls and messages, Trinh said; then the elevator broke, the lobby flooded, a fire broke out on the third floor, and trash accumulated in the halls, bringing rats with it. But Trinh could not figure out who owned the building or how to get in touch with them.

Figuring the place had been abandoned by management, Trinh threw a punk show on the roof in September of 2021. Finally, he heard from his new landlord — in the form of his first eviction notice.

Sam Trinh and tenant council organizer Rosa Arroyo speak with Guadalupe Ramirez about her legal rights as a tenant.

Shortly after he got the notice, Trinh went to a tenant meeting in the lobby of another K3 building. The meeting made a deep impression.

“People were in the stairwell. People were hanging off the stair railings to hear what was going on,” Trinh said. “There were multiple floors of people listening to this meeting. People were chiming in left and right: ‘They’re telling us we have to leave.’ ‘They’re telling us they’re going to demolish the building.’”

A tenant organizer told attendees that wasn’t the case. “The looks on everyone’s faces — it was very striking,” Trinh recalled. “You feel the tension in the room and everyone collectively realizing they’re being taken advantage of.” He met Jarquin there.
 

‘The Political Education of Our Lives’

Trinh and Jarquin began talking for hours after the meetings ended. Trinh speaks Spanish, thanks to a semester abroad in Argentina. Soon, he became Jarquin’s ride to different events and the pair began a friendship rooted in a seemingly endless dialogue about union tactics and tenant power.

Jarquin talks about how their situation is bigger than what is in front of them, that their plight mirrors the history of Latin America because, like colonists, he said, their landlord is trying to force renters from their homes so it can extract profits from the land they live on. Trinh devises strategies for influencing government offices and agencies, representatives of which he meets with regularly.

“We’re connecting the dots,” Trinh said. “It’s the political education of our lives.”

On a fall evening, they walk from Jarquin’s apartment past the former site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, to a Korean bar called the Prince. There, they share fried chicken, corn cheese, pickled radishes and soju, and Trinh pays.

Tenants protest outside a building owned by investment firm K3 Holdings in Koreatown. They say the landlord neglects repairs while offering tenants cash buyouts from their rent-controlled leases.

Eighty years ago, the Prince, then known as the Windsor, was a high-end supper club for the Hollywood elite. By the 1990s, after Koreatown filled with Mexican, Central American and Korean immigrants, the place was renamed by new Korean owners and became a hidden gem. Now, the bar is filled with people Trinh would call ”gentrifiers.”

“In my building, the new tenants aren’t united with us,” Jarquin said, slouched in a leather booth. “But Sam is becoming an icon, always going on TV. He’s supporting the union and also learning himself. He facilitates everything.”

Trinh glances at a pack of nose-ringed hipsters across the room.

“As a younger, market rate tenant, you need to really understand that whoever lived in your apartment was someone like Eduardo,” he said. “You have to learn that the space that was carved out for you was taken from someone like Eduardo.”
 

Nothing Like Being a Landowner

Eduardo Jarquin was born on a coffee plantation 10 hours by car from Oaxaca City, the only son of the plantation owner and an itinerant farmworker (“You know how it is,” Jarquin said). His mother left when he was young.

Jarquin was raised by his paternal grandparents and their cousin on a compound in Oaxaca City, where Jarquin’s father treated him more like his tenant than his child. “Sometimes, when I walked around the corridors [of our home], I would try to talk to him and he would just ignore me,” Jarquin said. “My grandfather was more caring — or at least, he acknowledged me.”

Trinh and Jarquin in discussion on the steps of a Koreatown building. They say their friendship is one long, rolling conversation on tenant organizing and life.

As an adolescent, Jarquin read Vladimir Lenin’s State and Revolution (the photograph of factory workers on the cover caught his eye), and in 2000, he named his own son Lenin after the Communist leader. In 2001, he immigrated to the United States, hoping to make enough money to build a house in Mexico.

“There’s nothing really like your own land,” he said.

Inside a Koreatown Starbucks, his favorite place in Los Angeles even though it was a coffee picking machine that removed two fingers on his right hand, Jarquin said his childhood taught him that “the rich people who own all these buildings have already made their riches.

“Maybe we shouldn’t even have to pay rent,” he said.
 

‘To the Strike!’

When a 36-year-old Eduardo Jarquin settled in Los Angeles, Sam Trinh was a first grade student reading Harry Potter books behind the pedicure baths at Tammy’s Nails, his mother’s salon in a Riverside, California, strip mall.

Trinh’s parents met digging ditches in Vietnam as the country rebuilt itself from rubble after the war. In the 1990s, they settled in the post-industrial Los Angeles suburbs of the Inland Empire, where Trinh’s father worked the night shift at the post office.

Until Trinh was 6, his family lived in a two bedroom, federally subsidized Section 8 apartment. Trinh shared a bed with his mother and sister. His older brother got the other bed and his dad slept on the floor.

Trinh’s upbringing “absolutely” influenced his involvement in the tenant union, he said. But he worries about the commitment of his fellow gentrifiers to the cause.

At an ornately bricked building located between a three-story Korean mall and the century-old El Cholo restaurant, a rent strike of immigrant and market-rate tenants is testing that commitment.

K3 Tenant Council organizers tell fellow tenants that buyouts offered by the landlord — often around $6,000 — are not enough to forfeit a rent-controlled apartment.

On a chilly Sunday evening, the cement courtyard of a building on Western Avenue is clearly divided in two. Mexican and Central American tenants, mostly women jiggling toddlers on their knees, sit in a cluster of folding chairs by a table full of Domino’s pizza and Oaxacan tlayudas. Ten feet away, a group of 20-somethings stands in a tight circle, vaping.

Then Jarquin and Trinh arrive with a bottle of El Sabio Eterno from Oaxaca.

“Is that Mezcal?” Rebeca Sanchez asks in Spanish. “Let me get some.” Shots are poured into tiny paper cups and passed around. “I just turned 21,” giggles Kaitlyne Rivera. She and her friend Brynlee Grossenbach film themselves doing shots with Marbarita Ortega, whose family lives in a studio that she said flooded four different times in 2022. A Los Angeles tenant union organizer holds his head in his hands in mock despair as Norma Jimenez, a woman too short for most roller coasters, returns from her apartment with her own bottle of Mezcal.

“To the strike!” Jarquin cries in Spanish.
 

Gentrifying Tenants Join Rent Strike

More than 25 tenants in the Western Avenue building are on rent strike. About half of them are gentrifiers.

When many of the building’s previous occupants took buyouts and left, tenants like Rivera and Grossenbach replaced them.

Rivera lives with her boyfriend above Marcela Aparicio, an immigrant renter who is part of the housing discrimination lawsuit filed against K3. Rivera said she was horrified to learn that her shower was leaking into Aparicio’s apartment and spurring the growth of mold.

“I went and looked at it myself and it was just awful,” Rivera said. “Their walls were just black. She was showing me the text messages with the manager she sent for months and got nothing back. It could have killed them.”

Guadalupe Ramirez shows Trinh damage inside her unit.

Rivera joined the growing rent strike, begun in May 2022 when eight immigrant tenants stopped paying to protest English-language rent-increase agreements they say they were coerced into signing.

On March 31, Los Angeles County pandemic eviction protections will expire, and landlords will be able to evict tenants who don’t pay their rent. All the rent strikers at Western Avenue will be vulnerable to removal. Three market rate tenants have already received eviction notices, including Rivera and her boyfriend.

Trinh said gentrifying tenants like Rivera are needed “more than ever” as their immigrant neighbors risk homelessness — and even deportation. They have U.S. citizenship, speak English and have more financial and political capital.

Jarquin worries many newer tenants cannot comprehend the stakes. “They do have less to lose,” he said. But, ultimately, “We’re all sort of in the same boat. We’re in the same situation, as renters,” he said. “Paying a lot, paying a little — we’re renters.”
 

‘He Would Have Had Support’

At 7 a.m. on November. 10, a tenant in a Hollywood apartment building shot and killed himself after sheriff’s deputies served him an eviction notice. His neighbor, Trevor Marsh, told KABC that the landlord had recently raised the man’s rent.

That evening, Trinh and Jarquin discussed the man’s death on a local radio show. They talked about how the first step in tenant organizing is to knock on your neighbor’s door; and they said that the power of the tenants’ union is the way it brings strangers into each other’s lives.

“If he had had a tenants union, he wouldn’t have killed himself,” Jarquin said. “He would have had support.”

Jarquin and Trinh joined the tenants union to fight for themselves, but they stuck around to fight for other people. The union connected Trinh to lawyers who helped him fight eviction after the punk show, and again in 2022, after he blocked construction workers from entering the building to remodel units.

Relocators stopped coming to Jarquin’s door in 2021 after he turned down the $50,000 buyout. He is always tempted to return to Mexico, where he is slowly building a house, yet he has stayed.

“I like organizing,” Jarquin said. “That’s why I’ve stayed around. Because I’ve made friends.”

Trinh and Jarquin enjoy ice cream together at a favorite spot near Jarquin’s apartment.

It’s the same for Trinh, who said the goal of the Los Angeles Tenants Union is not just to win repairs, but to “discover our kinship with one another, transform our social relations and transform our ways of seeing.”

In their neighborhood, where Trinh and Jarquin once saw anonymous buildings, they now know who owns them, who manages them, how much money they were bought for and which banks financed the acquisitions. They know which buildings have mold and which buildings have cockroaches. They know the layouts of their rooms and the locations of their fire exits, and they know which fire alarms don’t go off.

And, most importantly, they know the people who live in the buildings: They know where they came from and how they got here and what they do for work, and they know their families, their favorite foods, mezcals and songs. They know how they laugh and they know how they dance. The struggle to keep their homes has, for them, turned their neighborhood into the home it never was, even when the rents were lower and the living was easier.

All photos by Barbara Davidson.

Copyright Capital & Main 2023.