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Renters' revolt Revisiting City of Quartz to understand Los Angeles’s housing crisis

Renee Tapp

To cite this article: Renee Tapp (2019) Renters' revolt, City, 23:1, 123-127, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2019.1574418

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2019.1574418

Published online: 15 Feb 2019.

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Review Essay Renters’ revolt Revisiting City of Quartz to understand Los Angeles’s housing crisis

Renee Tapp

City of quartz, Mike Davis, Verso, New York, 2018 (1990), ISBN: 9781786635891, $20 USD.

W hat has happened in Los Angeles since City of Quartz first appeared in print in 1990 is nothing short of a

revolution. Renters now outnumber home- owners in a city famed for the single-family ideal. Moreover, they’re angry and they’re organized. They’re blaming homeowners because ‘the rent is too damn high!’ Con- ditions Davis described in the 1980s—the monopolization of land use governance by homeowners to enrich their properties—has incubated a new round of political struggles around property relations.

As the homeowners’ ‘protest against the urbanization of suburbia’—‘a reassertion of social privilege’ (Davis 2018, 198)—is eroding, Verso Books re-released City of Quartz. The book continues to offer readers and scholars of Los Angeles a historical account of the homeowners’ movement that has held the city in a vise for the last forty years, yet it is almost entirely unchanged since the 2006 edition (even the Preface dates back 12 years). Some astute readers will note, however, that the book has a new cover and has been refor- matted to resemble the size and shape of a novel (a change that has serious repercussions for finding your favourite quotes). Aside from the aesthetic refresher, nothing else is new about the 2018 edition of City of Quartz, which begets the question: how relevant is it to understanding Los Angeles today?

Using the recent fight to legalize rent control as evidence of how Los Angeles ‘has changed markedly since the book appeared’, the emergence of a ‘renters’ revolt’ ‘has made Davis’ altogether dark view of Los Angeles look nearly as out-of-date as Reyner Banham’s altogether sunny one’ (Hawthorne 2011). In the essay that follows, I argue that the halcyon days of Davis’ ‘Homegrown Revolution’ are nearing a close as a surge of angry YIMBYs, renters, and socialists (!) storm the institutions home- owners have concocted to protect their prop- erty values.

Making housing unaffordable

An affordability crisis has hit a number of American cities; however half of the top 10 most expensive rental markets are located in the state of California (Jensen 2018). Over the last year, the statewide median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment increased by 4.5 percent, bumping the average cost of rent to an all-time high in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego (Salviati 2018). Renters in California largely have had no protection from rising rents. A statewide law, Costa-Hawkins, made it illegal to implement rent control on the millions of buildings built after 1995.

# 2019 Renee Tapp

CITY, 2019 VOL. 23, NO. 1, 123 – 127, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2019.1574418

Los Angeles has some of the lowest home- ownership rates in the country (Joint Center for Housing Studies 2017), fanning compe- tition in a high demand rental market with dwindling inventory of rent-controlled units and generating the revival of the renters’ rights movements. Surging prices mean tens of thousands of Los Angeles renters have been displaced, fuelling a surge of rent strikes, protests, and citizen-backed ballot initiatives (Kuznia 2018). Typically cast as less politically active than homeowners, the rise of renters’ movements reflects what scho- lars have termed ‘urban struggles against financialization’ (Fields 2017). By taking a stand against financialization—the practice of treating housing as a commodity—these movements reveal how rental markets every- where are quickly becoming fertile grounds for new political fights. In California, the pol- itical battle to regulate rent are based out of Los Angeles, where new renters’ organiz- ations are positioned to confront the looming housing crises on their own terms.

‘Sunbelt Bolshevism’

In November 2018, Californians cast ballots on Proposition 10, a statewide measure to legalize rent control. Prop 10 was the latest solution to the shortage of affordable housing that plagues Californian cities, although it has a longer history in the state’s renters’ rights movements that emerged in and around Proposition 13. Following a period of land inflation where rising property values led to not only windfall wealth but also ‘bloated tax bills’ (Davis 2018, 165) homeowners in Los Angeles helped pass Prop 13, in what was known as the ‘taxpayer revolt’. Supported by the California Apart- ment Association and the California Housing Council, a large part of Proposition 13’s success was that it promised renters that by lowering property taxes on apartment buildings, cheaper rents would trickle down to tenants (Fulton 2001). When lower rents failed to materialize, renters’ rights groups

across the state started to find ways to under- mine the measure at local levels. Renters in Los Angeles, including those in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, worked for several years to implement rent control before the City of Los Angeles finally passed its Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) in the late 1970s.

Despite being likened to Marx’s description of the French peasantry, as ‘a ‘sack of pota- toes’, constitutionally incapable of any large- scale coherence of interest or social action’ (Davis 2018, 194), homeowners and develo- pers who were unsettled by the renters’ momentum began crafting a statewide law to protect the real estate industry from ‘radical rent control ordinances’ (Dreier 1997). A bipartisan effort led by Jim Costa (Democrat) and Phil Hawkins (Republican) passed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995 to preempt local rent control measures at the statewide level, making it more difficult—if not impossible—to regulate rising rent costs. However, Costa-Hawkins couldn’t undo the rent control measures already adopted by a handful of cities, so it instead froze rent control to units constructed before these ordi- nances were adopted. This means that although Los Angeles is undergoing the largest building boom since the 1920s (Chiland 2017), no building built after October 1978 (the year before the city’s RSO was passed in 1979) is eligible for rent control.

In addition to tethering rent control to the age of a structure, Costa-Hawkins prohibited single-family homes and condominiums from rent control measures. This became a particu- lar concern after the wave of foreclosures in 2008 transformed mortgaged homes into single-family rentals (SFR); Los Angeles’ nearly 185,000 SFRs are not protected by rent control. As a consequence, the price of SFRs rose 6 percent more than apartment rentals, fuelling unaffordability across all rental submarkets (Balint 2018).

Costa-Hawkins has also generated a set of predatory behaviours among developers and property owners when managing tenants in

124 CITY VOL. 23, NO. 1

rent-controlled buildings. Because the legis- lation allows ‘vacancy decontrol’, landlords are legally able to raise the rent as much as they want any time a tenant leaves a rent-con- trolled unit. In Los Angeles, property owners began eviction-for-speculation tactics against tenants residing in rent-controlled buildings as a way to increase the profitability of the property. From 2001 – 2016, nearly 22,000 rent-controlled units were removed from Los Angeles’ rental market.1 Given the com- pounding issues renters face, it is no surprise that rent control advocates blame home- owners and Costa-Hawkins for high prices.

‘Renters’ revolt’

Renters began their most recent round of organizing in 2015. The first citywide tenants’ organization, Los Angeles Tenant Union/Sindicato de Inquilinos de Los Angeles (LATU/SILA), was established to fight rent hikes. As an ‘anti-landlordism’ organization, LATU stands against the finan- cialization of housing across the city, enga- ging 8 different local chapters from the Valley to the Westside in direct action includ- ing rent strikes and protests. At the same time, Abundant Housing LA, a yes-in-my- back-yard (YIMBY) group, was also formed to lower the costs of renting and displace- ment. Using local chapters made up of middle-class renters from all over Los Angeles, Abundant Housing LA advocates at City Hall and Neighborhood Councils for the construction of more housing to lower rental costs. Other organizations like the Crenshaw Subway Coalition and Demo- cratic Socialists of America LA Chapter (DSA-LA), who formed a Housing and Homelessness subcommittee, have public platforms around affordable rent. Despite the varied political leanings of these groups, lowering the price of rent has been a central strategy that these organizations have used to expand their membership base and increase their political capacity, forming temporary strategic alliances with other renters’ groups.

By late 2016 as the price of renting contin- ued to spiral out of control, Michael Wein- stein, director of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) spent $4.6 million backing a March 2017 ballot measure— Measure S—to restrict speculative develop- ment that was driving up housing prices in the city. Measure S would slow growth by placing a two-year moratorium on projects that required a zone change, a height district change, or an amendment to the city’s general plan. In effect it would halt all devel- opment in Los Angeles. The ‘Yes on S’ coalition included renters’ rights movements like LATU, the not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) movement, and gained the support of the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Association, a homeowners association notorious for launching the tax revolt in 1976 and organizing the Valley’s attempts to secede from Los Angeles (see Purcell 1997, Keil 2000, Davis 2018). Renters argued that Measure S would offer a pause from the relentless development that replaced rent- controlled properties with luxury apart- ments. Derided as ‘draconian’ by critics, Measure S failed 70 percent to 30 percent. While development proceeded as planned and rents continued to rise, the measure unleashed a wave of renters’ rights activists determined to reform the political terrain of the city.

In the fall of 2017, renters’ organizations were abuzz with news that Weinstein and AHF were building a coalition to support a new campaign to overturn Costa-Hawkins, an effort that eventually became Proposition 10. What began in Los Angeles quickly expanded across California as tenants between cities recognized their collective right to affordable housing had been con- strained by a de facto alliance between home- owners and capital to control city- and state- wide legislation. The AIDS Healthcare Foun- dation united over 160 different organiz- ations for ‘Yes on 10’ including the LATU, local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Oakland City Council, and the Crenshaw Subway

REVIEW ESSAY 125

Coalition. They stood in opposition to the ‘No on 10’ coalition, which included large private equity firms like Blackstone Group and Essex Property Trust, and the ultra-rich like Donald Sterling, as well as building and trade councils, business interests, and both gubernatorial candidates, Gavin Newsom (Democrat) and John Cox (Republican).

Proposition 10 failed in the statewide elec- tion 60 percent to 40 percent. However, the vote fell along urban and rural lines with San Francisco and Alameda counties (Bay area) voting yes on 10. Only a 1 percent differ- ence separated the yes (49.5 percent) and no (50.5 percent) vote in Los Angeles County. While the particular laws and regulations that govern rental markets vary locally, Prop 10 built a statewide coalition of renters that remains committed to realizing rent control. Its most significant achievement was introdu- cing new word into the urban political lexicon—rent control—an unfamiliar term in most other US cities, save New York. Wein- stein and his coalition vowed to continue to put rent control on the ballot while other organizations are looking to the state legisla- ture for an overhaul of Costa-Hawkins. Renters and activists in Los Angeles also are pursuing another strategy: building social housing2, a concept the city ‘virtually out- lawed’ in 1952 (Davis 2018, 62).

Centering urban politics on Los Angeles

What Davis couldn’t predict—and that many scholars after him have failed to realize—is that the land use politics that he described with great precision laid the foundation for Los Angeles’s renters’ revolt. Homeowners proved to be a relatively stable regime, ruling cities as if they were suburbs. However, foreclosures, financial crisis, and restrictions on construction aggravated an already intense rental market. Increasingly, housing issues have moved from the back- yard to City Hall, although as Prop 10 indi- cated, the local scale isn’t the exclusive political arena where these fights are waged.

Statehouses and ballot measures have now been enrolled in popular fights to make cities affordable. Senator Harris from Cali- fornia has even proposed federal legislation to tackle the affordability problem.3

Fights for affordable housing radiating from Los Angeles—echoed all over from New York, to Boston and Seattle—reveal a shift in the spaces, scales, discourses and tactics of urban politics that geographers and social scientists must heed. As both the economy and notions of property morph in Los Angeles, the hege- mony of the city’s homeowners is being erased (Cheng 2013; De Lara 2018; Gibbons 2018). In order to build new theories that cor- respond to the epochal changes we are witnes- sing, we must first contend with the concepts we’ve inherited from the past.

Presciently Davis’ warns, ‘the past gener- ations are like so much debris to be swept away by the developers’ bulldozers’ (2018, 394). With City of Quartz, Davis swept away Reyner Banham’s 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which he lamented was ‘adopted universally as the textbook on Los Angeles’ (2018, 73). Ironic, because now not only does City of Quartz face a similar demise, but it is Banham who saves Davis from irrelevancy. Banham pleads that we should continue to hold the factors that built Los Angeles ‘in constant historical view—and since it is manifestly dangerous to face backwards while at the steering wheel, the common metaphor of history as the rear-view mirror of civilization seems necessary, as well as apt, in any study of Los Angeles’ (Banham 1971, 24). In re-releasing the City of Quartz, Verso asks us to place Mike Davis in the perpetual rear-view, especially as the Los Angeles that lies ahead is unrecognizable.

Notes

1 http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ losangeles.html.

2 http://www.tenantstogether.org/updates/solution- social-housing.

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3 https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press- releases/amid-rising-costs-of-housing-harris- introduces-bill-to-provide-rent-relief.

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Renee Tapp is a Pollman Postdoctoral Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She received her PhD in geogra- phy from Clark University. Email: ctapp@ gsd.harvard.edu

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