Speaker 1: It's it's like can happen here? It's the podcast sometimes
Speaker 1: hosted by me and Mia Wong.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: I guess this is a combination things falling apart putting
Speaker 1: things back together.
Speaker 3: Episode.
Speaker 1: We are doing some more coverage of the US's the
Speaker 1: sort of epidemic of mass evictions. But yeah, so with
Speaker 1: me to talk about this is Max Is, one of
Speaker 1: the organizers and co founders of Santa Barbara Tendant's Union,
Speaker 1: and Sam Sapiazi, who's another tenant and a member of
Speaker 1: the union.
Speaker 3: You two, Yeah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Hi, I thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, I guess we should start with talking about
Speaker 1: the specific mass eviction that is happening, which has been
Speaker 1: caused by a terrifying and unfortunate product of my hometown Chicago,
Speaker 1: a very large company called core Spaces, who have incredibly
Speaker 1: suspicious branded for the fact that they're a giant landlord company.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think guys bought your building and is attempting to
Speaker 1: evict everyone.
Speaker 5: Is this Yeah, Yeah, So Core Spaces out of Chicago
Speaker 5: and I believe Austin, Texas have purchased r for building
Speaker 5: apartment complex approximately two hundred and forty three units.
Speaker 4: I believe over a thousand people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they just immediately. Yeah, So I guess this
Speaker 1: is one of the other things we should we should
Speaker 1: talk about first. Is this this thing that landlords do
Speaker 1: where they either buy buy a property, or they have
Speaker 1: a property, then they're like, oh, hey, we're doing renovations
Speaker 1: on it, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't
Speaker 1: let anyone ever come back because you're you know, your
Speaker 1: quote unquote renovation. You're just a way to do a
Speaker 1: price hike, which seems to be what's happening here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And renoviction it's a nice it's a nice term for that, right, renoviction.
Speaker 6: It's you're renovating to evict, just to if listeners are
Speaker 6: aware of that term.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think if I'm understanding their plan, right,
Speaker 1: they're trying to basically turn this into luxury student housing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what we presume. That's kind of their business model,
Speaker 5: is to buy up housing in college towns and do
Speaker 5: some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a thing that happened.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of colleges in Chicago, which I don't
Speaker 1: know presumably really people know that on a sort of
Speaker 1: abstract level, but this is the thing that happens basically
Speaker 1: everywhere there are colleges.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've actually talked to other.
Speaker 1: Like grad student organizers about this stuff too, because it
Speaker 1: winds up sort of affecting everyone at all sides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I guess, Okay, so facing this eviction, I guess
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about how y'all started organizing against it.
Speaker 5: We got our original notices on March sixteenth. We had previously,
Speaker 5: I want to say it was like December or January,
Speaker 5: we had gotten noticed that some people will be coming
Speaker 5: through our apartments investors to look at it, and I
Speaker 5: like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It
Speaker 5: was superward, and so we kind of, I think a
Speaker 5: lot of us knew at that point like, okay, something's
Speaker 5: going on, right obviously. And then March, I want to
Speaker 5: say it was March fifteenth or sixteenth, we got a
Speaker 5: notice that the building was sold from Essex to Core Spaces.
Speaker 5: And then it was the day after that we got
Speaker 5: a notice that said, oh, hey, you're all getting evicted
Speaker 5: because we got to do renovations. I kind of expected
Speaker 5: it to be honest, because I've seen what Blackstone has done. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and I had just heard about it from a lot
Speaker 5: of properties or also tenants like in LA friends that
Speaker 5: I had.
Speaker 4: Other college students that had had this happen to them.
Speaker 5: But after that, basically, I mean, I don't want to
Speaker 5: speak for everyone but my own personal Like what I did.
Speaker 5: I just kind of went on Reddit and was like, Hey,
Speaker 5: this really awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: I went on the u CSB reddit page, this really
Speaker 5: awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4: There's like a lot of families that live here. There's
Speaker 4: so many Section eight disabled people, elderly.
Speaker 5: And students, but our complex is a little different and
Speaker 5: that it does have of more of the marginalized groups.
Speaker 5: And I went on Reddit and was like, dude, this
Speaker 5: is this is awful, Like just yeah. So I made
Speaker 5: a post saying this sucks, and from there I was
Speaker 5: referenced to contact Santa Barbara Sunion, which I was like
Speaker 5: kind of hesitant at first because I was like, oh,
Speaker 5: what are they going to do?
Speaker 4: Like I don't know, I thought it.
Speaker 5: You know, it's like one of those resources you get
Speaker 5: where you're just like, are they actually going to do
Speaker 5: anything or is this just for me to like waste
Speaker 5: my time with. But I reached out and I got,
Speaker 5: you know, a response back within hours and they're like, yes,
Speaker 5: here's a flyer for you. We are we have your back,
Speaker 5: We're going to do this, we will support you. And
Speaker 5: so from there, I want to say, it was within
Speaker 5: a day or two, we went flying door to door.
Speaker 5: And remember it's it's two hundred and like I said,
Speaker 5: I think it's roughly two hundred and sixteen. Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: it's it's a lot of it's a lot of units
Speaker 5: to knock doors on. I know one of our county representatives,
Speaker 5: Laura Capps, called it the largest eviction in California history,
Speaker 5: and I've heard others say at the largest.
Speaker 4: Eviction in the United States history.
Speaker 5: I don't I don't know if that's uh what they're
Speaker 5: basing that off of. But it's a gigantic affection. There
Speaker 5: are many people here. But yeah, so from there, I
Speaker 5: just went like door to door knocking. I knew none
Speaker 5: of my neighbors. I am a hermit.
Speaker 4: I stay in my apartment.
Speaker 5: I keep my curtains closed. I'm like, but the only
Speaker 5: contact other like my neighbors make are with my cats.
Speaker 5: Just chilling in the windows and stuff.
Speaker 1: But I mean, yeah, to be fair neighbor with cat
Speaker 1: in the windows not the worst rep you can have.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, true. But even even then, I yeah,
Speaker 4: I didn't even want my cats in the windows. I was.
Speaker 4: I was very very antisocial. I still am.
Speaker 5: But I have opened my mind quite a bit and
Speaker 5: come out of my shell a little bit. But that's irrelevant.
Speaker 5: From there. Like I said, we went flying. We went
Speaker 5: door to door. We found other people that were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is super messed up, like we need to fight this.
Speaker 5: And we by just going door to door telling people, hey,
Speaker 5: we can fight this eviction. These eviction notices aren't super
Speaker 5: valid anyway, we were able to get a gigantic group
Speaker 5: of our neighbors together. Yeah yeah, and it kind of
Speaker 5: moved from there. I don't know how much further I
Speaker 5: should explain. There's such a long timeline of the things
Speaker 5: that have happened in.
Speaker 4: The past two months, so I don't know where you
Speaker 4: want me to go.
Speaker 5: From there, But you know, that's at least the beginning
Speaker 5: of it was just you know, us flying, going door
Speaker 5: to door, getting everyone together, getting everyone in a group
Speaker 5: chat and then SBTU truly supporting us and telling us, hey,
Speaker 5: here's the next steps that you need to do. This
Speaker 5: is how you become you know, a union, a tennis
Speaker 5: association for your for yourselves right with their full on support.
Speaker 3: Okay, so there is one thing I wanted to sort
Speaker 3: of talk about a little bit before you move.
Speaker 1: On, which is, Yeah, can you explain what Section eight
Speaker 1: is for listeners who don't know.
Speaker 5: I can explain it based off my knowledge. I'm not
Speaker 5: currently on Section eight, but I know that resident many
Speaker 5: residents here are on Section eight, which I probably couldn't
Speaker 5: give the best description of it personally, but I know
Speaker 5: a lot of times it's people that are very little
Speaker 5: income or disabled individuals, people that can't work for various reasons,
Speaker 5: get low income housing, meaning they pay maybe I know
Speaker 5: some of our residents, for example, pay like they get
Speaker 5: Section eight vouchers that will pay about twenty five twenty
Speaker 5: six hundred dollars for their rent and their utilities, and
Speaker 5: then maybe they pay one hundred or two hundred because
Speaker 5: they're unable to get that income otherwise.
Speaker 4: But Max might be able to describe it a little
Speaker 4: bit better than me.
Speaker 2: Well, that sounds about right.
Speaker 6: I grew up on Section eight with like a single
Speaker 6: mom and stuff and she yeah, I mean it's just
Speaker 6: subsidized housing. It's basically it's what public housing or in
Speaker 6: some countries social housing would be.
Speaker 2: But in like the eighties, like the Reagan.
Speaker 6: Era like gutted all public housing, and so the concession
Speaker 6: was it's a voucher based system for the poor, like
Speaker 6: for the over low income people. So yeah, it's just
Speaker 6: the government will pay a portion of it. Some said
Speaker 6: it pretty big.
Speaker 3: I think yeah, And.
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, like I guess that this is
Speaker 1: a sort of Yeah, an interesting thing about your building
Speaker 1: is that there's a very there's a very wide range
Speaker 1: of like sort of different backgrounds of people who are involved.
Speaker 1: I was wondering, you know, we can talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about like what that's been like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so.
Speaker 5: I guess I could say we have four buildings, So
Speaker 5: we have so it's CBC and the SWEEPS, so it
Speaker 5: stands for Colonial Balboa Cortes Sweeps. The SWEEPS has a
Speaker 5: lot of students because it rents by the bed, but
Speaker 5: CBC has a of families and as we mentioned, you know,
Speaker 5: Section eight and lower income. I want to say I
Speaker 5: had heard from another representative like a county representative.
Speaker 4: This is I think it might have been more caps.
Speaker 5: Don't quote me on this, but that this is like
Speaker 5: the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in.
Speaker 4: Ila Vista, And so.
Speaker 5: There's a ton of like large families. When when this happened,
Speaker 5: you just people were just crying everywhere, like they didn't
Speaker 5: know what to do.
Speaker 6: This building is it's not unlike a lot of buildings
Speaker 6: where you have a pretty diverse kind of I guess
Speaker 6: just class composition. And I'm just like, so, so you know,
Speaker 6: if you think there's disabled people that have caseworkers.
Speaker 2: You have monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants.
Speaker 6: You have students, and you have some students who are
Speaker 6: sort of like city college students that are working full
Speaker 6: time or part time and their full time students, so
Speaker 6: they're sort of worker students. There's like full time UCSB
Speaker 6: students whose like parents may be totally loaded or whatever.
Speaker 6: You have you know, often an immigrant and low income
Speaker 6: family families. You have like way more people packed into
Speaker 6: like a one or two bedroom than you would want,
Speaker 6: but it's the only way for you to make rent
Speaker 6: because rent keeps.
Speaker 2: Going up every year.
Speaker 6: So uh so there's a lot of that, and so
Speaker 6: I guess I'll just speak to I mean, I've only
Speaker 6: you know, I've run into it a bit, like I'm
Speaker 6: in the group chats and I've been I've been to
Speaker 6: the building like a few times, but I'm not like
Speaker 6: there every day and I'm not like flying every day
Speaker 6: and stuff like Sam is living there.
Speaker 2: But like one common kind of like difficult.
Speaker 6: It's like it's it's a beautiful thing, and it's a
Speaker 6: difficulty in that like there's so we need interpreters. And
Speaker 6: like in sbtwo we have where we're a sort of
Speaker 6: self funded autonomous tenets union, which means we don't get
Speaker 6: grants from like wealthy foundations or government, government entities.
Speaker 2: Whatever, so we can kind of more dependently make decisions.
Speaker 6: So but we have like a fair amount of dues
Speaker 6: money now just from the mass membership that we have
Speaker 6: kind of built, and so we can afford to pay
Speaker 6: interpreters to come out basically whenever we need.
Speaker 2: So there's been interpreters.
Speaker 6: There at almost every one of the Saturday meetings, and
Speaker 6: without that it would it would actually just be impossible,
Speaker 6: I mean not like so that's like when there's a
Speaker 6: language barrier, right, that makes it hard to organize or
Speaker 6: it wouldn't be impossible. There's there's a handful of like
Speaker 6: bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. It's if if
Speaker 6: one of them doesn't show up, or if the child
Speaker 6: of a parent, like a teenager of a parent isn't
Speaker 6: there or whatever, right, like, how do.
Speaker 2: You actually get the info across?
Speaker 6: So I'll just speak to lastly on that that it
Speaker 6: is like it's a really kind of frustrating, sad situation
Speaker 6: and we could probably elaborate on this in that like.
Speaker 2: The whether it's the lawyers right now.
Speaker 6: Who have been hired by by course Bass, which they're
Speaker 6: a snaky, slimy piece of shit, evil firm. They're called
Speaker 6: Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard l P. Just if you see
Speaker 6: any of them on the street, just give them dry looks,
Speaker 6: don't do anything violence use that against me at some
Speaker 6: point in the inevitable thing that's probably gonna happen. But
Speaker 6: but whether it's them with the landlords directly, there's there's
Speaker 6: always a you know, this is happens in labor organizing.
Speaker 2: It's a divide and conquer strategy.
Speaker 6: So they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or
Speaker 6: amongst you know, amongst the families, amongst the disabled, like
Speaker 6: whoever they can sort of get an ear to, they're
Speaker 6: going to give them certain kinds of information to make
Speaker 6: them really afraid. They're going to tell them lies, and
Speaker 6: and they're going to get people to try to self evict.
Speaker 6: So I'm i am jumping a little bit ahead, but
Speaker 6: like that that definitely has been like a challenge in that,
Speaker 6: you know, if there was like a totally like linguistically
Speaker 6: culturally monolithic group of a thousand people, that would probably
Speaker 6: be a little bit easier to keep things like totally unified.
Speaker 6: But those those demographic different differences do present some challenges
Speaker 6: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes it, That makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean we've talked to a couple of other kinds
Speaker 1: of associations that have had to actually well, i mean
Speaker 1: this one's actually as like you know, and back when
Speaker 1: I was doing tennis to organizing too, like I've I've
Speaker 1: I've I've seen I've seen worse in terms of like
Speaker 1: like in terms in terms of like the number of languages.
Speaker 1: But it's still like never like an enormously easy thing
Speaker 1: to sort of have to bridge, like just having to
Speaker 1: bridge linguistic divides too. Especially when you're getting information like
Speaker 1: misinformation different languages is a whole thing. I could I
Speaker 1: could talk for like seven hours about the effects this
Speaker 1: has had on like Asian American communities, like Chinese American
Speaker 1: communities particular. Yeah, but instead of doing that, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we have to take an ad break.
Speaker 3: We'll be back after whatever. Incomprehensible ads are playing.
Speaker 6: Okay, cool, great ads. Bye by the stuff on the ads,
Speaker 6: and we're back.
Speaker 3: I hope the ads were short.
Speaker 6: I don't know, there are some great ads.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna buy that thing whatever.
Speaker 1: The Raking coins again or like one of the casinos.
Speaker 3: Okay, so yeah, so I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, well just okay, Having having having done
Speaker 1: a thematic jump, I will now go back to chronological jumps,
Speaker 1: which is okay. So you have you're starting this organizing
Speaker 1: what what starts to happen after you're starting to get
Speaker 1: people together and you have the tenants, the center, our
Speaker 1: patency need involved.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So it started from flying getting everyone just like a
Speaker 5: basic letting them know that they don't have to move,
Speaker 5: that this eviction is this eviction is bullshit right.
Speaker 6: Oh, by the way, we didn't we were never giving
Speaker 6: legal advice that people shouldn't move. It was if you
Speaker 6: don't want to, you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacies,
Speaker 6: just because I know that the slimy piece of human
Speaker 6: fucking garbage fire trash lawyers are going to be listening
Speaker 6: to this and trying to use us again, use it
Speaker 6: against us away, Sorry, go.
Speaker 4: Ahead, Yeah, no, thank you for the correction.
Speaker 5: That is entirely Yeah, they don't have to if they
Speaker 5: don't do basically. But yeah, So after we did the
Speaker 5: flying we Santa our attendants unions set us up with
Speaker 5: some group chats and we just worked together.
Speaker 4: From there.
Speaker 5: We just started talking to one another, and I think
Speaker 5: it was it was a new situation for most of us.
Speaker 5: A lot of I mentioned this before, but a lot
Speaker 5: of us didn't talk to each other before. We didn't
Speaker 5: go out of our apartments, which I think is kind
Speaker 5: of normal nowadays. It's not like you know the sixties,
Speaker 5: where like, oh, everyone has a house and knows the
Speaker 5: neighbors and stuff. No, people kind of keep to themselves,
Speaker 5: especially in really large apartment complexes. So yeah, we we
Speaker 5: just started going in the group chat and then someone
Speaker 5: was like, hey, I can do this. Another person was hey,
Speaker 5: I can do this, And then eventually we set up
Speaker 5: a group meeting where we could all come together and
Speaker 5: basically share our our feelings, our emotions, our pain about this,
Speaker 5: but also find a way to fight against it. So
Speaker 5: what we learned was, which we fully learned from the
Speaker 5: center of our Attendants Union, was oh, if we go
Speaker 5: in front of the county board, we can convince them,
Speaker 5: we can share our stories, we can share our pain,
Speaker 5: and we can tell them, hey, we need the law
Speaker 5: to change, we can pass something, we can.
Speaker 4: Use our voices to stop this from not.
Speaker 5: Only happening to us but future residents. So so from
Speaker 5: there it was really in the early stages. We I
Speaker 5: don't know if this is jumping ahead. Honestly, my brain
Speaker 5: is a little foggrant. There's so much that's happened so quickly,
Speaker 5: But I do know the next biggest step was us
Speaker 5: coming in front of the of the Santa Barbara County
Speaker 5: Supervisors Board of Supervisors and telling our stories and sharing that.
Speaker 4: I think Max could probably also share a little bit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have so Like the dates in my head
Speaker 6: are like, you know, the March fifteenth they bought the building.
Speaker 6: March sixteenth, they issued the notices, and then April sixth,
Speaker 6: which is like three weeks from that, they passed the
Speaker 6: new law. So that means I mean that's like three yeah,
Speaker 6: a three week period from the notices to like having
Speaker 6: I think at least a couple of meetings with like
Speaker 6: dozens of people I don't know, thirty to fifty plus
Speaker 6: people there, and then like forming you know, deciding to
Speaker 6: form the association and voting to call I don't remember
Speaker 6: exactly if the vote to call it course basis the
Speaker 6: association was before that the county meeting or after.
Speaker 2: But and then they're also because there's there's also.
Speaker 6: Two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about
Speaker 6: so six weeks before, of course BACES announced a new ownership,
Speaker 6: all of us in SBTU had sort of we heard
Speaker 6: so many stories on the Santa Barbara City level, and
Speaker 6: Santa Barbara City is not the county, right, the county
Speaker 6: is like this larger geographical entity, and Santa Barbara City
Speaker 6: is within the county.
Speaker 2: On the city level, we've been hearing so many.
Speaker 6: Really terrible stories about people being renevicted, and we just
Speaker 6: decided to kind of like throw people at like yo,
Speaker 6: go to go to public comment tell the city about
Speaker 6: what they're doing, tell them they need to pass a
Speaker 6: ban on renovictions. We had like a big rally in
Speaker 6: front of city council, and we were just going week
Speaker 6: after week, and after about six weeks of this, like
Speaker 6: four to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline we
Speaker 6: got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovictions,
Speaker 6: but it was an amendment to their what's called their
Speaker 6: Just Cause Ordinance, which makes it a lot harder for
Speaker 6: landlords to renevict and that now that they have to
Speaker 6: get permits first, they have to have to put the
Speaker 6: permits in the renoviction notices when they're to do it,
Speaker 6: they need to there's some language that says that it
Speaker 6: needs to be done in good faith, which which is
Speaker 6: like really subtle but potentially really important because if your
Speaker 6: reason is that you just want to trigger what's called
Speaker 6: vacancy de control, which is like kicking people out so
Speaker 6: you can jack the rent over the ten percent limit
Speaker 6: in California, like like right now, a landlord can raise
Speaker 6: the rent about ten percent every year if just just
Speaker 6: because they want to. But if you can get people
Speaker 6: out of the unit, you can raise it to whatever
Speaker 6: you want so on the city level, it was just
Speaker 6: it was a really big deal.
Speaker 2: We had just won it, and we were like pretty
Speaker 2: exhausted from it.
Speaker 6: We're like, shit, that was a lot of work and
Speaker 6: we won really quickly, and everybody around us that's been
Speaker 6: doing stuff for a while was like, we don't know
Speaker 6: how you guys.
Speaker 2: Did that shit so fast. That was really amazing.
Speaker 6: And then like I think it was like the week,
Speaker 6: like within a couple of days of us like celebrating
Speaker 6: that win. Course spaces the core spaces thing, Yeah this
Speaker 6: is but this is county jurisdiction. So we were like, okay,
Speaker 6: I guess we got to go from city to county.
Speaker 6: We got to get to the county to do the
Speaker 6: same fucking thing. So we were already really fucking exhausted,
Speaker 6: like we were. There was like a sprint sprint, sprint
Speaker 6: sprint like every week. So the reason I'm bringing this
Speaker 6: up is it just felt like natural for us to
Speaker 6: just like and we don't like tell people what to do,
Speaker 6: like not to not like correcting you, Sam, but when
Speaker 6: it's like okay, do this, do this, do this, it's
Speaker 6: sort of like we ourselves are just tenants.
Speaker 2: We're not paid staff.
Speaker 6: We're not like highly trained like nonprofit staffers or something
Speaker 6: like that that I think we know everything. We're just
Speaker 6: tenants ourselves that are in the struggle just like everyone else,
Speaker 6: and we're trying to gain information, share information, and become
Speaker 6: collectively smarter and more experience and better at handling.
Speaker 2: This shit together.
Speaker 6: And so we were like, hey, we just won some
Speaker 6: shit on the city level. If you guys, throw all
Speaker 6: of all of you, which is like a lot of
Speaker 6: you straight to those county meetings. And the county meetings
Speaker 6: are every Tuesday at nine am and they go back
Speaker 6: and forth every week between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria.
Speaker 2: Santa Maria is like an hour to hour and.
Speaker 6: A half drive from where they live, so that's like
Speaker 6: pretty unrealistic for most people to not only get work
Speaker 6: off and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But like that upcoming Tuesday from that meeting.
Speaker 6: We had that Saturday, they just happened to be in
Speaker 6: Santa Barbla, which is more like a ten to fifteen
Speaker 6: minute drive like down the streets. So we're like, okay,
Speaker 6: there's the fucking meeting, Like we want to try to
Speaker 6: get people there, and so the you know, the news
Speaker 6: there it was like hot off the presses for a
Speaker 6: week or two, there was all these articles on on
Speaker 6: the crisis, and then so that Tuesday morning, all of
Speaker 6: them going and hitting the public comment, hitting the mic,
Speaker 6: and and I should say, like public comment is typically
Speaker 6: anybody who's like gone to the public comment at a
Speaker 6: city or count like a government meeting.
Speaker 2: There's usually one or two people that are just like
Speaker 2: really weird, like they are they're like human on, they're.
Speaker 6: Like human on people, or they are like or like
Speaker 6: they're like the next door Karen person that's complaining about
Speaker 6: like I don't know, some stupid, stupid shit that nobody
Speaker 6: gives a fuck about. But like sometimes that person actually
Speaker 6: gets something change because they actually complained over and over again.
Speaker 6: And then there's actual agenda items in these government meetings,
Speaker 6: and having this many people like totally flood of public
Speaker 6: comment just for one issue as if it's on the
Speaker 6: agenda is like it's kind of jaw dropping, right, So
Speaker 6: people just went so.
Speaker 2: Crazy with it. People got off of work, they.
Speaker 6: Were monolingual Spanish speakers, they just spoke in Spanish, and
Speaker 6: there's a live interpreter that they legally have to have
Speaker 6: at the county meeting. So on Wednesday, the county Supervisors
Speaker 6: called an emergency meeting for Thursday, and on Thursday they
Speaker 6: passed the Emergency just Caused Ordinance, which was just basically
Speaker 6: copy pasting the city ordinance that we'd just won after
Speaker 6: the six week like marathon.
Speaker 2: So I don't know if you if you caught all that,
Speaker 2: but like that's how from our perspectives, like we don't
Speaker 2: live in the building. We just like we just try
Speaker 2: to make shit happen.
Speaker 6: Like it was insane of like how quickly, because it
Speaker 6: took us about six weeks for the city thing, which
Speaker 6: was still like everyone told us, like that's rapid fire.
Speaker 6: Laws don't get changed that quickly, and this was like
Speaker 6: two weeks or some shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was I was stunned by this when I
Speaker 1: was reading about this, like this is one of the fastest,
Speaker 1: Like this is one of the fastest campaigns I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, like I we've we've run into
Speaker 1: like Chicago City Council before, for example, and they, oh boy,
Speaker 1: those people are yeah yeah, so yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: really impressive campaign that you all were able to pull off.
Speaker 6: Like yeah, but and this narrative is if we wanted
Speaker 6: to like really make this in a curated way. We
Speaker 6: could probably have like hopeful, we could have inspirational background music.
Speaker 6: Then we could have like horror music we could have
Speaker 6: because I mean, I don't know, Sam, if you want
Speaker 6: to take it from that.
Speaker 2: But there's also been some very dark turns since that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like very dark, depressing, scary turns because the minute
Speaker 6: well all this, I guess I'll just say it. If
Speaker 6: we want to go deeper into it, we can, or
Speaker 6: we can skip it. But like as soon as we
Speaker 6: were really excited, like, okay, they can't like what we
Speaker 6: just did makes it illegal for them to evict everyone
Speaker 6: like for now because they don't have permits.
Speaker 2: And oh oh and this is this is actually really
Speaker 2: like important kind of legal.
Speaker 6: Fact is that that what the law said was that
Speaker 6: this notice applies to any current notices posted to tenant
Speaker 6: stores like after this date, as well as unlawful detainers.
Speaker 6: Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit.
Speaker 6: So so basically like any eviction lawsuit that Course Spaces
Speaker 6: would try to file against any of the two hundred
Speaker 6: and fifty plus people would be they would just be
Speaker 6: tossed out in court because they're just like you know,
Speaker 6: an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law
Speaker 6: and be like, the new law says you have to
Speaker 6: do X, Y and Z, and they didn't.
Speaker 2: They be like, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 6: It's just very there's nothing ambiguous. It's not it's not
Speaker 6: a great area. It's not like you can interpret it
Speaker 6: this or that way. It's just not you can't.
Speaker 2: You can't.
Speaker 6: There's no like, there's no like the other side we
Speaker 6: say like, well what about this and this, there's no,
Speaker 6: well there's no other thing. But immediately, like almost immediately,
Speaker 6: within like a week or something, the other side started
Speaker 6: countering with like insane propaganda, like like disinformation, which I
Speaker 6: guess I'm kind of taking up a lot of space now,
Speaker 6: but Sam, I don't know if you want to, because
Speaker 6: you're actually there with all the people having being foresped
Speaker 6: the disinformation but by by Tyne Taylor Fox, Howard Lop
Speaker 6: and course spaces vertically integrated private equity.
Speaker 2: Piece of shit firm.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the emergency ordinance passed and we all are like, yay,
Speaker 5: this is great, we have protections. But then yeah, that
Speaker 5: law firm decided to well that end management. Actually, I
Speaker 5: think prior to the law firm's notices on our door.
Speaker 5: Management went around.
Speaker 4: Being like like, come pick up your checks.
Speaker 5: These aren't you know, like you need to go take
Speaker 5: your checks, you need to sign that you're leaving, et cetera.
Speaker 4: And when that notice from.
Speaker 5: The the Tyne Law Firm came signed by Lacy.
Speaker 2: Taylor, it Taylor reported to the bar.
Speaker 5: It basically said, this doesn't apply to you, and if you,
Speaker 5: I mean, okay, this is my interpretation of it. When
Speaker 5: I read it as a just you know, random human being,
Speaker 5: not a law major or anything, it sounded like they
Speaker 5: would take our relocation checks and or charge us more
Speaker 5: money if we bought back. That's the way it was phrased. Granted,
Speaker 5: I know it was like law jargon, but it was
Speaker 5: made to almost like, in my opinion, harass us.
Speaker 4: Like it felt like, oh.
Speaker 5: Everything the core basis tennessization and SBT is saying is
Speaker 5: a lie.
Speaker 4: This is the truth.
Speaker 5: If you want to join them and be with them,
Speaker 5: well you might not get your relocation assistance check and
Speaker 5: or we might charge you more from that.
Speaker 4: At least with that specific notice. It was super confusing.
Speaker 5: And you know, most people here don't have law degrees.
Speaker 4: They don't they don't know the law. On top of that, you.
Speaker 5: Know, the the law firm intentionally left out the last
Speaker 5: part of the ordinance. They said, hey, this doesn't apply
Speaker 5: to you because the eviction notices were issued before this, but.
Speaker 4: It left out the unlawful detainer part.
Speaker 2: Yes, so it was it's lying by omission.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like I.
Speaker 6: Wish I had a good like movie example or something,
Speaker 6: but like we've all seen this kind of thing, right,
Speaker 6: It's like you tell the person everything and then you
Speaker 6: kind of black out the last part of the sentence
Speaker 6: so that I don't know, I wish, I wish there
Speaker 6: was like an obvious movie thing to be like, look
Speaker 6: at what the villain did, so the person would like
Speaker 6: make the wrong choice like go down the wrong path
Speaker 6: in the forest or some shit, right like, so they'd
Speaker 6: get attacked, Like like that's what it did.
Speaker 2: That's what they did.
Speaker 4: That was that was exactly what they did.
Speaker 5: They literally quoted the new ordinance and then cut off
Speaker 5: the second half and put dot dot dot, which was.
Speaker 6: Implying something else was there, right, I mean maybe some
Speaker 6: maybe some English major was like, oh, I wonder what's
Speaker 6: in the dot dot dot, Like what's the rest of
Speaker 6: the quote.
Speaker 2: But that's the thing.
Speaker 6: That's the thing about like using abusing their power as lawyers,
Speaker 6: fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing. And this
Speaker 6: goes back to like this this kind of diversity of
Speaker 6: class composition.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: If this is a bunch of like super highly educated
Speaker 6: uh professionals, like either with law degrees or or whatever,
Speaker 6: they'd be like, Oh, I'm just going to jump onto
Speaker 6: the county, you know, I'm going to like look up
Speaker 6: the ordinance and be like, oh, it's Ordnance.
Speaker 2: Five to one whatever, and I'm going to read through
Speaker 2: it and be like, ah, they left out the unlawful detainer.
Speaker 6: But like how my guess is almost zero of the
Speaker 6: tenants to receive those notices did that. And that was
Speaker 6: that was the law firm that was That was Tyne
Speaker 6: and Taylor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck
Speaker 6: Ellis's is involved in their in their you know, fraudulent
Speaker 6: joke of a firm there. Their whole thing was they
Speaker 6: wanted to scare people to get to get them the
Speaker 6: self evict Right. So if you think about like the
Speaker 6: logistics of like like okay, let's say you're a you're
Speaker 6: a landlord firm, that works for landlords, and you you
Speaker 6: evict people, and you get paid a lot of.
Speaker 2: Money to do so.
Speaker 6: Right, So you get paid some retainer amount that's like
Speaker 6: I don't know, tens of thousands or more just for
Speaker 6: just for like being on a call to do stuff
Speaker 6: for them.
Speaker 2: And then and then maybe you get paid of other amounts.
Speaker 6: You you're looking at you're looking at a situation like this,
Speaker 6: and you're like, Okay, two hundred and fifty units and
Speaker 6: then there's somewhere between five hundred one thousand people and like,
Speaker 6: you know, you don't need to evict the little kids,
Speaker 6: but like you need to evict like every person on
Speaker 6: the lease. Like that's a lot of unlawful detainers. Like
Speaker 6: that's a lot of filing that we're going to have
Speaker 6: to do. Yeah, we're going to have to like get
Speaker 6: every single name and every single lease, and we're going
Speaker 6: to have to like every individual person on every lease.
Speaker 6: We're going to have to file an eviction lawsuit in
Speaker 6: the court that we know is going to get tossed out.
Speaker 6: Like that's so much fucking work for us to do.
Speaker 6: We don't want to do all that work. That's insane, right,
Speaker 6: Like we we want to kind of just keep this
Speaker 6: retainer money and do like minimal work, like because we
Speaker 6: also don't have it's a four person law firm, and
Speaker 6: they probably have some legal assistance, but like, do they
Speaker 6: really have the capacity to do something of that scale
Speaker 6: like this little slimy garbage trash fire of a fucking firm.
Speaker 2: Of course not.
Speaker 6: But their strategy was was to was to scare people
Speaker 6: through lying with abusing their power as much as possible
Speaker 6: to empty out that building so there'd be no need
Speaker 6: to file eviction lawsuits and and do the bidding of
Speaker 6: their of course spaces without going to court knowing they
Speaker 6: would lose. Right, So that's anybody listening, by the way,
Speaker 6: this is not like this actually isn't about course spaces
Speaker 6: or the time law firm. Like this is just a
Speaker 6: strategic set of like a methodology for an industry that
Speaker 6: views human beings as obstacles to profit and in a
Speaker 6: hyper commodified real estate you know, capitalist market.
Speaker 2: Like that's all this is.
Speaker 6: We're just describing like like a normal process that's happening
Speaker 6: at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And something something we've talked about in other like
Speaker 1: tenant struggles is that, I mean one of the things
Speaker 1: that yeah, I'm not going to I'm not going to
Speaker 1: use a specific law firm of doing this, but it's
Speaker 1: something we've seen in other places. Is like, you know,
Speaker 1: you'll get landlords who will just fire just file like
Speaker 1: mass file just illegal evictions. And they do it because
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, so if they get caught, like nothing
Speaker 1: happens to them, right Like, but if they don't gay
Speaker 1: cut you know this, this is an enormous number of
Speaker 1: people who you could just throw and not have to
Speaker 1: go through any kind of legal process with and so yeah,
Speaker 1: these like you know, it's like it's like this goes
Speaker 1: back to the old, the old sort of capitalism problem, right,
Speaker 1: which is like the easiest way to make money just
Speaker 1: by taking it from someone, and the second easiest way
Speaker 1: is by is in you know, Like it's like the
Speaker 1: one that's even easier than that is you is you
Speaker 1: lie to them and trick them into getting either trick
Speaker 1: them or intimidate them, and she's giving you the money
Speaker 1: without having to like actually fight them. H And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know what they're doing here, it is legal terrorism.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I I reported Lacey Taylor to the bar.
Speaker 6: I don't know, Lacey. I'm sure you're listening to this,
Speaker 6: if you if they even notified you, but it was
Speaker 6: it was a bit frustrating because they were just like, yeah,
Speaker 6: this isn't really like we can't really do anything about this.
Speaker 6: It has to be a matter that's settled in civil court.
Speaker 6: And so it's definitely frustrating. So it's like, no, like
Speaker 6: this is just straight up lying. This is not like
Speaker 6: an interpretation of the law. But I do think like
Speaker 6: this is as a side note, like this is the
Speaker 6: issue with you can have like evil ass people who
Speaker 6: are trying to make people homeless in order to retenant.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of language of the these firms us.
Speaker 2: The word is retenant in the building.
Speaker 6: We're just retenanting, right Like that's that's the sort of
Speaker 6: real estate capitalist law firm or that's the industry like language,
Speaker 6: right that, Like there's just there.
Speaker 2: We got lawyers for that, right.
Speaker 6: Like we have a thing we want to do and
Speaker 6: this is just the wild West, and we just want
Speaker 6: to make a lot of money, and we just have
Speaker 6: like stacks of lawyers just on deck that we'll just
Speaker 6: pay to do this. And then you even have like
Speaker 6: these state bar associations that are like well Yeah, that's
Speaker 6: just how it is.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 6: Probably most likely because like on the side of real estate,
Speaker 6: I my guess I'm making up this number. The eighty
Speaker 6: percent of the lawyers working in real estate are on
Speaker 6: the side of landlords. And then maybe twenty percent, probably
Speaker 6: way less than twenty two yeah, high on the side
Speaker 6: of tenants, right. And then some of the landlord tenants
Speaker 6: sometimes will help tenants, right, so they can like brag
Speaker 6: it at their little wine and cheese things like, oh,
Speaker 6: I help the people or whatever, and I donate to
Speaker 6: charities or some garbage. But they at the end of
Speaker 6: the day, they're just they're happy to make people die
Speaker 6: starvation on the street so that somebody else can make
Speaker 6: a shit ton of money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this has been nic Could Happen Here? Join us
Speaker 1: tomorrow for part two of this interview, in which the
Speaker 1: landlords do for bullshit.
Speaker 4: It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 5: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 5: find sources for It Could Happen Here, Updated monthly at coolzonemedia,
Speaker 5: dot com, slash sources, Thanks for listening.