June 5, 2023 • 36 mins
Mia talks with two tenant organizers about a brutal real estate company called Core Spaces' attempt to carry out a mass eviction and how tenants organized to fight back
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's it's like can happen here? It's the podcast sometimes
hosted by me and Mia Wong.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I guess this is a combination things falling apart putting
things back together.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Episode.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
We are doing some more coverage of the US's the
sort of epidemic of mass evictions. But yeah, so with
me to talk about this is Max Is, one of
the organizers and co founders of Santa Barbara Tendant's Union,
and Sam Sapiazi, who's another tenant and a member of
the union.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
You two, Yeah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
Hi, I thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, So, I guess we should start with talking about
the specific mass eviction that is happening, which has been
caused by a terrifying and unfortunate product of my hometown Chicago,
a very large company called core Spaces, who have incredibly
suspicious branded for the fact that they're a giant landlord company.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I think guys bought your building and is attempting to
evict everyone.
Speaker 5 (01:07):
Is this Yeah, Yeah, So Core Spaces out of Chicago
and I believe Austin, Texas have purchased r for building
apartment complex approximately two hundred and forty three units.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I believe over a thousand people.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, and they just immediately. Yeah, So I guess this
is one of the other things we should we should
talk about first. Is this this thing that landlords do
where they either buy buy a property, or they have
a property, then they're like, oh, hey, we're doing renovations
on it, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't
let anyone ever come back because you're you know, your
quote unquote renovation. You're just a way to do a
price hike, which seems to be what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (01:49):
And renoviction it's a nice it's a nice term for that, right, renoviction.
It's you're renovating to evict, just to if listeners are
aware of that term.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, And I think if I'm understanding their plan, right,
they're trying to basically turn this into luxury student housing.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Yeah, that's what we presume. That's kind of their business model,
is to buy up housing in college towns and do
some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
There's a lot of colleges in Chicago, which I don't
know presumably really people know that on a sort of
abstract level, but this is the thing that happens basically
everywhere there are colleges.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, we've actually talked to other.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Like grad student organizers about this stuff too, because it
winds up sort of affecting everyone at all sides. Yeah,
so I guess, Okay, so facing this eviction, I guess
I wanted to talk about how y'all started organizing against it.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
We got our original notices on March sixteenth. We had previously,
I want to say it was like December or January,
we had gotten noticed that some people will be coming
through our apartments investors to look at it, and I
like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It
(03:11):
was superward, and so we kind of, I think a
lot of us knew at that point like, okay, something's
going on, right obviously. And then March, I want to
say it was March fifteenth or sixteenth, we got a
notice that the building was sold from Essex to Core Spaces.
(03:33):
And then it was the day after that we got
a notice that said, oh, hey, you're all getting evicted
because we got to do renovations. I kind of expected
it to be honest, because I've seen what Blackstone has done. Yeah,
and I had just heard about it from a lot
(03:56):
of properties or also tenants like in LA friends that
I had.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Other college students that had had this happen to them.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
But after that, basically, I mean, I don't want to
speak for everyone but my own personal Like what I did.
I just kind of went on Reddit and was like, Hey,
this really awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
You know.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I went on the u CSB reddit page, this really
awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
There's like a lot of families that live here. There's
so many Section eight disabled people, elderly.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
And students, but our complex is a little different and
that it does have of more of the marginalized groups.
And I went on Reddit and was like, dude, this
is this is awful, Like just yeah. So I made
a post saying this sucks, and from there I was
referenced to contact Santa Barbara Sunion, which I was like
(05:01):
kind of hesitant at first because I was like, oh,
what are they going to do?
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Like I don't know, I thought it.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
You know, it's like one of those resources you get
where you're just like, are they actually going to do
anything or is this just for me to like waste
my time with. But I reached out and I got,
you know, a response back within hours and they're like, yes,
here's a flyer for you. We are we have your back,
We're going to do this, we will support you. And
so from there, I want to say, it was within
(05:31):
a day or two, we went flying door to door.
And remember it's it's two hundred and like I said,
I think it's roughly two hundred and sixteen. Yeah, it's
it's it's a lot of it's a lot of units
to knock doors on. I know one of our county representatives,
(05:52):
Laura Capps, called it the largest eviction in California history,
and I've heard others say at the largest.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
Eviction in the United States history.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
I don't I don't know if that's uh what they're
basing that off of. But it's a gigantic affection. There
are many people here. But yeah, so from there, I
just went like door to door knocking. I knew none
of my neighbors. I am a hermit.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
I stay in my apartment.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
I keep my curtains closed. I'm like, but the only
contact other like my neighbors make are with my cats.
Just chilling in the windows and stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
But I mean, yeah, to be fair neighbor with cat
in the windows not the worst rep you can have.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I mean, yeah, true. But even even then, I yeah,
I didn't even want my cats in the windows. I was.
I was very very antisocial. I still am.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
But I have opened my mind quite a bit and
come out of my shell a little bit. But that's irrelevant.
From there. Like I said, we went flying. We went
door to door. We found other people that were like, oh, yeah,
this is super messed up, like we need to fight this.
And we by just going door to door telling people, hey,
(07:21):
we can fight this eviction. These eviction notices aren't super
valid anyway, we were able to get a gigantic group
of our neighbors together. Yeah yeah, and it kind of
moved from there. I don't know how much further I
(07:42):
should explain. There's such a long timeline of the things
that have happened in.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
The past two months, so I don't know where you
want me to go.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
From there, But you know, that's at least the beginning
of it was just you know, us flying, going door
to door, getting everyone together, getting everyone in a group
chat and then SBTU truly supporting us and telling us, hey,
here's the next steps that you need to do. This
(08:07):
is how you become you know, a union, a tennis
association for your for yourselves right with their full on support.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Okay, so there is one thing I wanted to sort
of talk about a little bit before you move.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
On, which is, Yeah, can you explain what Section eight
is for listeners who don't know.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
I can explain it based off my knowledge. I'm not
currently on Section eight, but I know that resident many
residents here are on Section eight, which I probably couldn't
give the best description of it personally, but I know
a lot of times it's people that are very little
(08:57):
income or disabled individuals, people that can't work for various reasons,
get low income housing, meaning they pay maybe I know
some of our residents, for example, pay like they get
Section eight vouchers that will pay about twenty five twenty
six hundred dollars for their rent and their utilities, and
then maybe they pay one hundred or two hundred because
(09:18):
they're unable to get that income otherwise.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
But Max might be able to describe it a little
bit better than me.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Well, that sounds about right.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
I grew up on Section eight with like a single
mom and stuff and she yeah, I mean it's just
subsidized housing. It's basically it's what public housing or in
some countries social housing would be.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
But in like the eighties, like the Reagan.
Speaker 6 (09:40):
Era like gutted all public housing, and so the concession
was it's a voucher based system for the poor, like
for the over low income people. So yeah, it's just
the government will pay a portion of it. Some said
it pretty big.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
I think yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I guess, you know, like I guess that this is
a sort of Yeah, an interesting thing about your building
is that there's a very there's a very wide range
of like sort of different backgrounds of people who are involved.
I was wondering, you know, we can talk a little
bit about like what that's been like.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
I guess I could say we have four buildings, So
we have so it's CBC and the SWEEPS, so it
stands for Colonial Balboa Cortes Sweeps. The SWEEPS has a
lot of students because it rents by the bed, but
CBC has a of families and as we mentioned, you know,
(10:37):
Section eight and lower income. I want to say I
had heard from another representative like a county representative.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
This is I think it might have been more caps.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Don't quote me on this, but that this is like
the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Ila Vista, And so.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
There's a ton of like large families. When when this happened,
you just people were just crying everywhere, like they didn't
know what to do.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
This building is it's not unlike a lot of buildings
where you have a pretty diverse kind of I guess
just class composition. And I'm just like, so, so you know,
if you think there's disabled people that have caseworkers.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You have monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
You have students, and you have some students who are
sort of like city college students that are working full
time or part time and their full time students, so
they're sort of worker students. There's like full time UCSB
students whose like parents may be totally loaded or whatever.
You have you know, often an immigrant and low income
family families. You have like way more people packed into
(11:53):
like a one or two bedroom than you would want,
but it's the only way for you to make rent
because rent keeps.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Going up every year.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
So uh so there's a lot of that, and so
I guess I'll just speak to I mean, I've only
you know, I've run into it a bit, like I'm
in the group chats and I've been I've been to
the building like a few times, but I'm not like
there every day and I'm not like flying every day
and stuff like Sam is living there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But like one common kind of like difficult.
Speaker 6 (12:19):
It's like it's it's a beautiful thing, and it's a
difficulty in that like there's so we need interpreters. And
like in sbtwo we have where we're a sort of
self funded autonomous tenets union, which means we don't get
grants from like wealthy foundations or government, government entities.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Whatever, so we can kind of more dependently make decisions.
Speaker 6 (12:35):
So but we have like a fair amount of dues
money now just from the mass membership that we have
kind of built, and so we can afford to pay
interpreters to come out basically whenever we need.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So there's been interpreters.
Speaker 6 (12:46):
There at almost every one of the Saturday meetings, and
without that it would it would actually just be impossible,
I mean not like so that's like when there's a
language barrier, right, that makes it hard to organize or
it wouldn't be impossible. There's there's a handful of like
bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. It's if if
one of them doesn't show up, or if the child
of a parent, like a teenager of a parent isn't
(13:07):
there or whatever, right, like, how do.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
You actually get the info across?
Speaker 6 (13:11):
So I'll just speak to lastly on that that it
is like it's a really kind of frustrating, sad situation
and we could probably elaborate on this in that like.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
The whether it's the lawyers right now.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Who have been hired by by course Bass, which they're
a snaky, slimy piece of shit, evil firm. They're called
Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard l P. Just if you see
any of them on the street, just give them dry looks,
don't do anything violence use that against me at some
point in the inevitable thing that's probably gonna happen. But
(13:46):
but whether it's them with the landlords directly, there's there's
always a you know, this is happens in labor organizing.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's a divide and conquer strategy.
Speaker 6 (13:53):
So they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or
amongst you know, amongst the families, amongst the disabled, like
whoever they can sort of get an ear to, they're
going to give them certain kinds of information to make
them really afraid. They're going to tell them lies, and
and they're going to get people to try to self evict.
So I'm i am jumping a little bit ahead, but
like that that definitely has been like a challenge in that,
(14:17):
you know, if there was like a totally like linguistically
culturally monolithic group of a thousand people, that would probably
be a little bit easier to keep things like totally unified.
But those those demographic different differences do present some challenges
for sure.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah, that makes it, That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I mean we've talked to a couple of other kinds
of associations that have had to actually well, i mean
this one's actually as like you know, and back when
I was doing tennis to organizing too, like I've I've
I've I've seen I've seen worse in terms of like
like in terms in terms of like the number of languages.
But it's still like never like an enormously easy thing
(14:54):
to sort of have to bridge, like just having to
bridge linguistic divides too. Especially when you're getting information like
misinformation different languages is a whole thing. I could I
could talk for like seven hours about the effects this
has had on like Asian American communities, like Chinese American
communities particular. Yeah, but instead of doing that, we're gonna
(15:14):
we have to take an ad break.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
We'll be back after whatever. Incomprehensible ads are playing.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
Okay, cool, great ads. Bye by the stuff on the ads,
and we're back.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I hope the ads were short.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
I don't know, there are some great ads.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I'm gonna buy that thing whatever.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
The Raking coins again or like one of the casinos.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Okay, so yeah, so I guess.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, you know, well just okay, Having having having done
a thematic jump, I will now go back to chronological jumps,
which is okay. So you have you're starting this organizing
what what starts to happen after you're starting to get
people together and you have the tenants, the center, our
patency need involved.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
So it started from flying getting everyone just like a
basic letting them know that they don't have to move,
that this eviction is this eviction is bullshit right.
Speaker 6 (16:35):
Oh, by the way, we didn't we were never giving
legal advice that people shouldn't move. It was if you
don't want to, you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacies,
just because I know that the slimy piece of human
fucking garbage fire trash lawyers are going to be listening
to this and trying to use us again, use it
against us away, Sorry, go.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
Ahead, Yeah, no, thank you for the correction.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
That is entirely Yeah, they don't have to if they
don't do basically. But yeah, So after we did the
flying we Santa our attendants unions set us up with
some group chats and we just worked together.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
From there.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
We just started talking to one another, and I think
it was it was a new situation for most of us.
A lot of I mentioned this before, but a lot
of us didn't talk to each other before. We didn't
go out of our apartments, which I think is kind
of normal nowadays. It's not like you know the sixties,
(17:35):
where like, oh, everyone has a house and knows the
neighbors and stuff. No, people kind of keep to themselves,
especially in really large apartment complexes. So yeah, we we
just started going in the group chat and then someone
was like, hey, I can do this. Another person was hey,
I can do this, And then eventually we set up
a group meeting where we could all come together and
(17:59):
basically share our our feelings, our emotions, our pain about this,
but also find a way to fight against it. So
what we learned was, which we fully learned from the
center of our Attendants Union, was oh, if we go
(18:19):
in front of the county board, we can convince them,
we can share our stories, we can share our pain,
and we can tell them, hey, we need the law
to change, we can pass something, we can.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Use our voices to stop this from not.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
Only happening to us but future residents. So so from
there it was really in the early stages. We I
don't know if this is jumping ahead. Honestly, my brain
is a little foggrant. There's so much that's happened so quickly,
But I do know the next biggest step was us
(19:00):
coming in front of the of the Santa Barbara County
Supervisors Board of Supervisors and telling our stories and sharing that.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
I think Max could probably also share a little bit.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
Yeah, I have so Like the dates in my head
are like, you know, the March fifteenth they bought the building.
March sixteenth, they issued the notices, and then April sixth,
which is like three weeks from that, they passed the
new law. So that means I mean that's like three yeah,
a three week period from the notices to like having
I think at least a couple of meetings with like
(19:36):
dozens of people I don't know, thirty to fifty plus
people there, and then like forming you know, deciding to
form the association and voting to call I don't remember
exactly if the vote to call it course basis the
association was before that the county meeting or after.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
But and then they're also because there's there's also.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about
so six weeks before, of course BACES announced a new ownership,
all of us in SBTU had sort of we heard
so many stories on the Santa Barbara City level, and
Santa Barbara City is not the county, right, the county
is like this larger geographical entity, and Santa Barbara City
is within the county.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
On the city level, we've been hearing so many.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
Really terrible stories about people being renevicted, and we just
decided to kind of like throw people at like yo,
go to go to public comment tell the city about
what they're doing, tell them they need to pass a
ban on renovictions. We had like a big rally in
front of city council, and we were just going week
after week, and after about six weeks of this, like
(20:41):
four to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline we
got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovictions,
but it was an amendment to their what's called their
Just Cause Ordinance, which makes it a lot harder for
landlords to renevict and that now that they have to
get permits first, they have to have to put the
permits in the renoviction notices when they're to do it,
they need to there's some language that says that it
(21:03):
needs to be done in good faith, which which is
like really subtle but potentially really important because if your
reason is that you just want to trigger what's called
vacancy de control, which is like kicking people out so
you can jack the rent over the ten percent limit
in California, like like right now, a landlord can raise
the rent about ten percent every year if just just
(21:24):
because they want to. But if you can get people
out of the unit, you can raise it to whatever
you want so on the city level, it was just
it was a really big deal.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We had just won it, and we were like pretty
exhausted from it.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
We're like, shit, that was a lot of work and
we won really quickly, and everybody around us that's been
doing stuff for a while was like, we don't know
how you guys.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Did that shit so fast. That was really amazing.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
And then like I think it was like the week,
like within a couple of days of us like celebrating
that win. Course spaces the core spaces thing, Yeah this
is but this is county jurisdiction. So we were like, okay,
I guess we got to go from city to county.
We got to get to the county to do the
same fucking thing. So we were already really fucking exhausted,
like we were. There was like a sprint sprint, sprint
(22:04):
sprint like every week. So the reason I'm bringing this
up is it just felt like natural for us to
just like and we don't like tell people what to do,
like not to not like correcting you, Sam, but when
it's like okay, do this, do this, do this, it's
sort of like we ourselves are just tenants.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
We're not paid staff.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
We're not like highly trained like nonprofit staffers or something
like that that I think we know everything. We're just
tenants ourselves that are in the struggle just like everyone else,
and we're trying to gain information, share information, and become
collectively smarter and more experience and better at handling.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This shit together.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
And so we were like, hey, we just won some
shit on the city level. If you guys, throw all
of all of you, which is like a lot of
you straight to those county meetings. And the county meetings
are every Tuesday at nine am and they go back
and forth every week between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Santa Maria is like an hour to hour and.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
A half drive from where they live, so that's like
pretty unrealistic for most people to not only get work
off and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
But like that upcoming Tuesday from that meeting.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
We had that Saturday, they just happened to be in
Santa Barbla, which is more like a ten to fifteen
minute drive like down the streets. So we're like, okay,
there's the fucking meeting, Like we want to try to
get people there, and so the you know, the news
there it was like hot off the presses for a
week or two, there was all these articles on on
(23:27):
the crisis, and then so that Tuesday morning, all of
them going and hitting the public comment, hitting the mic,
and and I should say, like public comment is typically
anybody who's like gone to the public comment at a
city or count like a government meeting.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
There's usually one or two people that are just like
really weird, like they are they're like human on, they're.
Speaker 6 (23:46):
Like human on people, or they are like or like
they're like the next door Karen person that's complaining about
like I don't know, some stupid, stupid shit that nobody
gives a fuck about. But like sometimes that person actually
gets something change because they actually complained over and over again.
And then there's actual agenda items in these government meetings,
(24:07):
and having this many people like totally flood of public
comment just for one issue as if it's on the
agenda is like it's kind of jaw dropping, right, So
people just went so.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Crazy with it. People got off of work, they.
Speaker 6 (24:22):
Were monolingual Spanish speakers, they just spoke in Spanish, and
there's a live interpreter that they legally have to have
at the county meeting. So on Wednesday, the county Supervisors
called an emergency meeting for Thursday, and on Thursday they
passed the Emergency just Caused Ordinance, which was just basically
copy pasting the city ordinance that we'd just won after
(24:44):
the six week like marathon.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
So I don't know if you if you caught all that,
but like that's how from our perspectives, like we don't
live in the building. We just like we just try
to make shit happen.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
Like it was insane of like how quickly, because it
took us about six weeks for the city thing, which
was still like everyone told us, like that's rapid fire.
Laws don't get changed that quickly, and this was like
two weeks or some shit.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, I was I was stunned by this when I
was reading about this, like this is one of the fastest,
Like this is one of the fastest campaigns I've ever seen,
Like I don't know, like I we've we've run into
like Chicago City Council before, for example, and they, oh boy,
those people are yeah yeah, so yeah, it was a
(25:27):
really impressive campaign that you all were able to pull off.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
Like yeah, but and this narrative is if we wanted
to like really make this in a curated way. We
could probably have like hopeful, we could have inspirational background music.
Then we could have like horror music we could have
because I mean, I don't know, Sam, if you want
to take it from that.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
But there's also been some very dark turns since that.
Speaker 6 (25:49):
Yeah, like very dark, depressing, scary turns because the minute
well all this, I guess I'll just say it. If
we want to go deeper into it, we can, or
we can skip it. But like as soon as we
were really excited, like, okay, they can't like what we
just did makes it illegal for them to evict everyone
like for now because they don't have permits.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And oh oh and this is this is actually really
like important kind of legal.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
Fact is that that what the law said was that
this notice applies to any current notices posted to tenant
stores like after this date, as well as unlawful detainers.
Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit.
So so basically like any eviction lawsuit that Course Spaces
would try to file against any of the two hundred
(26:35):
and fifty plus people would be they would just be
tossed out in court because they're just like you know,
an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law
and be like, the new law says you have to
do X, Y and Z, and they didn't.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
They be like, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
It's just very there's nothing ambiguous. It's not it's not
a great area. It's not like you can interpret it
this or that way. It's just not you can't.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
You can't.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
There's no like, there's no like the other side we
say like, well what about this and this, there's no,
well there's no other thing. But immediately, like almost immediately,
within like a week or something, the other side started
countering with like insane propaganda, like like disinformation, which I
guess I'm kind of taking up a lot of space now,
(27:19):
but Sam, I don't know if you want to, because
you're actually there with all the people having being foresped
the disinformation but by by Tyne Taylor Fox, Howard Lop
and course spaces vertically integrated private equity.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Piece of shit firm.
Speaker 5 (27:38):
Yeah, so the emergency ordinance passed and we all are like, yay,
this is great, we have protections. But then yeah, that
law firm decided to well that end management. Actually, I
think prior to the law firm's notices on our door.
(27:58):
Management went around.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
Being like like, come pick up your checks.
Speaker 5 (28:02):
These aren't you know, like you need to go take
your checks, you need to sign that you're leaving, et cetera.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
And when that notice from.
Speaker 5 (28:10):
The the Tyne Law Firm came signed by Lacy.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Taylor, it Taylor reported to the bar.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
It basically said, this doesn't apply to you, and if you,
I mean, okay, this is my interpretation of it. When
I read it as a just you know, random human being,
not a law major or anything, it sounded like they
would take our relocation checks and or charge us more
(28:43):
money if we bought back. That's the way it was phrased. Granted,
I know it was like law jargon, but it was
made to almost like, in my opinion, harass us.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Like it felt like, oh.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Everything the core basis tennessization and SBT is saying is
a lie.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
This is the truth.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
If you want to join them and be with them,
well you might not get your relocation assistance check and
or we might charge you more from that.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
At least with that specific notice. It was super confusing.
Speaker 5 (29:20):
And you know, most people here don't have law degrees.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
They don't they don't know the law. On top of that, you.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
Know, the the law firm intentionally left out the last
part of the ordinance. They said, hey, this doesn't apply
to you because the eviction notices were issued before this, but.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
It left out the unlawful detainer part.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yes, so it was it's lying by omission.
Speaker 5 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
It's like I.
Speaker 6 (29:52):
Wish I had a good like movie example or something,
but like we've all seen this kind of thing, right,
It's like you tell the person everything and then you
kind of black out the last part of the sentence
so that I don't know, I wish, I wish there
was like an obvious movie thing to be like, look
at what the villain did, so the person would like
make the wrong choice like go down the wrong path
in the forest or some shit, right like, so they'd
(30:13):
get attacked, Like like that's what it did.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
That's what they did.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
That was that was exactly what they did.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
They literally quoted the new ordinance and then cut off
the second half and put dot dot dot, which was.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Implying something else was there, right, I mean maybe some
maybe some English major was like, oh, I wonder what's
in the dot dot dot, Like what's the rest of
the quote.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
But that's the thing.
Speaker 6 (30:37):
That's the thing about like using abusing their power as lawyers,
fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing. And this
goes back to like this this kind of diversity of
class composition.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Right.
Speaker 6 (30:47):
If this is a bunch of like super highly educated
uh professionals, like either with law degrees or or whatever,
they'd be like, Oh, I'm just going to jump onto
the county, you know, I'm going to like look up
the ordinance and be like, oh, it's Ordnance.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Five to one whatever, and I'm going to read through
it and be like, ah, they left out the unlawful detainer.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
But like how my guess is almost zero of the
tenants to receive those notices did that. And that was
that was the law firm that was That was Tyne
and Taylor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck
Ellis's is involved in their in their you know, fraudulent
joke of a firm there. Their whole thing was they
wanted to scare people to get to get them the
(31:27):
self evict Right. So if you think about like the
logistics of like like okay, let's say you're a you're
a landlord firm, that works for landlords, and you you
evict people, and you get paid a lot of.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Money to do so.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Right, So you get paid some retainer amount that's like
I don't know, tens of thousands or more just for
just for like being on a call to do stuff
for them.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
And then and then maybe you get paid of other amounts.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
You you're looking at you're looking at a situation like this,
and you're like, Okay, two hundred and fifty units and
then there's somewhere between five hundred one thousand people and like,
you know, you don't need to evict the little kids,
but like you need to evict like every person on
the lease. Like that's a lot of unlawful detainers. Like
that's a lot of filing that we're going to have
to do. Yeah, we're going to have to like get
(32:15):
every single name and every single lease, and we're going
to have to like every individual person on every lease.
We're going to have to file an eviction lawsuit in
the court that we know is going to get tossed out.
Like that's so much fucking work for us to do.
We don't want to do all that work. That's insane, right,
Like we we want to kind of just keep this
retainer money and do like minimal work, like because we
(32:38):
also don't have it's a four person law firm, and
they probably have some legal assistance, but like, do they
really have the capacity to do something of that scale
like this little slimy garbage trash fire of a fucking firm.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Of course not.
Speaker 6 (32:49):
But their strategy was was to was to scare people
through lying with abusing their power as much as possible
to empty out that building so there'd be no need
to file eviction lawsuits and and do the bidding of
their of course spaces without going to court knowing they
would lose. Right, So that's anybody listening, by the way,
(33:12):
this is not like this actually isn't about course spaces
or the time law firm. Like this is just a
strategic set of like a methodology for an industry that
views human beings as obstacles to profit and in a
hyper commodified real estate you know, capitalist market.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Like that's all this is.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
We're just describing like like a normal process that's happening
at this point.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, And something something we've talked about in other like
tenant struggles is that, I mean one of the things
that yeah, I'm not going to I'm not going to
use a specific law firm of doing this, but it's
something we've seen in other places. Is like, you know,
you'll get landlords who will just fire just file like
mass file just illegal evictions. And they do it because
you know, Okay, so if they get caught, like nothing
(33:55):
happens to them, right Like, but if they don't gay
cut you know this, this is an enormous number of
people who you could just throw and not have to
go through any kind of legal process with and so yeah,
these like you know, it's like it's like this goes
back to the old, the old sort of capitalism problem, right,
which is like the easiest way to make money just
by taking it from someone, and the second easiest way
is by is in you know, Like it's like the
(34:17):
one that's even easier than that is you is you
lie to them and trick them into getting either trick
them or intimidate them, and she's giving you the money
without having to like actually fight them. H And yeah,
it's you know what they're doing here, it is legal terrorism.
Speaker 6 (34:31):
Yeah, And I I reported Lacey Taylor to the bar.
I don't know, Lacey. I'm sure you're listening to this,
if you if they even notified you, but it was
it was a bit frustrating because they were just like, yeah,
this isn't really like we can't really do anything about this.
It has to be a matter that's settled in civil court.
And so it's definitely frustrating. So it's like, no, like
this is just straight up lying. This is not like
(34:52):
an interpretation of the law. But I do think like
this is as a side note, like this is the
issue with you can have like evil ass people who
are trying to make people homeless in order to retenant.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
That's the kind of language of the these firms us.
The word is retenant in the building.
Speaker 6 (35:08):
We're just retenanting, right Like that's that's the sort of
real estate capitalist law firm or that's the industry like language,
right that, Like there's just there.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
We got lawyers for that, right.
Speaker 6 (35:17):
Like we have a thing we want to do and
this is just the wild West, and we just want
to make a lot of money, and we just have
like stacks of lawyers just on deck that we'll just
pay to do this. And then you even have like
these state bar associations that are like well Yeah, that's
just how it is.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Man.
Speaker 6 (35:32):
Probably most likely because like on the side of real estate,
I my guess I'm making up this number. The eighty
percent of the lawyers working in real estate are on
the side of landlords. And then maybe twenty percent, probably
way less than twenty two yeah, high on the side
of tenants, right. And then some of the landlord tenants
sometimes will help tenants, right, so they can like brag
it at their little wine and cheese things like, oh,
(35:52):
I help the people or whatever, and I donate to
charities or some garbage. But they at the end of
the day, they're just they're happy to make people die
starvation on the street so that somebody else can make
a shit ton of money.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yeah, this has been nic Could Happen Here? Join us
tomorrow for part two of this interview, in which the
landlords do for bullshit.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (36:17):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, Updated monthly at coolzonemedia,
dot com, slash sources, Thanks for listening.
It's it's like can happen here? It's the podcast sometimes
hosted by me and Mia Wong.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
It is.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
I guess this is a combination things falling apart putting
things back together.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Episode.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
We are doing some more coverage of the US's the
sort of epidemic of mass evictions. But yeah, so with
me to talk about this is Max Is, one of
the organizers and co founders of Santa Barbara Tendant's Union,
and Sam Sapiazi, who's another tenant and a member of
the union.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
You two, Yeah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
Hi, I thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, So, I guess we should start with talking about
the specific mass eviction that is happening, which has been
caused by a terrifying and unfortunate product of my hometown Chicago,
a very large company called core Spaces, who have incredibly
suspicious branded for the fact that they're a giant landlord company.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I think guys bought your building and is attempting to
evict everyone.
Speaker 5 (01:07):
Is this Yeah, Yeah, So Core Spaces out of Chicago
and I believe Austin, Texas have purchased r for building
apartment complex approximately two hundred and forty three units.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I believe over a thousand people.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, and they just immediately. Yeah, So I guess this
is one of the other things we should we should
talk about first. Is this this thing that landlords do
where they either buy buy a property, or they have
a property, then they're like, oh, hey, we're doing renovations
on it, so we're evicting everyone, and then you don't
let anyone ever come back because you're you know, your
quote unquote renovation. You're just a way to do a
price hike, which seems to be what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (01:49):
And renoviction it's a nice it's a nice term for that, right, renoviction.
It's you're renovating to evict, just to if listeners are
aware of that term.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, And I think if I'm understanding their plan, right,
they're trying to basically turn this into luxury student housing.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
Yeah, that's what we presume. That's kind of their business model,
is to buy up housing in college towns and do
some renovations and then hike up the rent drastically.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a thing that happened.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
There's a lot of colleges in Chicago, which I don't
know presumably really people know that on a sort of
abstract level, but this is the thing that happens basically
everywhere there are colleges.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, we've actually talked to other.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Like grad student organizers about this stuff too, because it
winds up sort of affecting everyone at all sides. Yeah,
so I guess, Okay, so facing this eviction, I guess
I wanted to talk about how y'all started organizing against it.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
We got our original notices on March sixteenth. We had previously,
I want to say it was like December or January,
we had gotten noticed that some people will be coming
through our apartments investors to look at it, and I
like took pictures of my bathroom and my kitchen. It
(03:11):
was superward, and so we kind of, I think a
lot of us knew at that point like, okay, something's
going on, right obviously. And then March, I want to
say it was March fifteenth or sixteenth, we got a
notice that the building was sold from Essex to Core Spaces.
(03:33):
And then it was the day after that we got
a notice that said, oh, hey, you're all getting evicted
because we got to do renovations. I kind of expected
it to be honest, because I've seen what Blackstone has done. Yeah,
and I had just heard about it from a lot
(03:56):
of properties or also tenants like in LA friends that
I had.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Other college students that had had this happen to them.
Speaker 5 (04:06):
But after that, basically, I mean, I don't want to
speak for everyone but my own personal Like what I did.
I just kind of went on Reddit and was like, Hey,
this really awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
You know.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I went on the u CSB reddit page, this really
awful thing is happening.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
There's like a lot of families that live here. There's
so many Section eight disabled people, elderly.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
And students, but our complex is a little different and
that it does have of more of the marginalized groups.
And I went on Reddit and was like, dude, this
is this is awful, Like just yeah. So I made
a post saying this sucks, and from there I was
referenced to contact Santa Barbara Sunion, which I was like
(05:01):
kind of hesitant at first because I was like, oh,
what are they going to do?
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Like I don't know, I thought it.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
You know, it's like one of those resources you get
where you're just like, are they actually going to do
anything or is this just for me to like waste
my time with. But I reached out and I got,
you know, a response back within hours and they're like, yes,
here's a flyer for you. We are we have your back,
We're going to do this, we will support you. And
so from there, I want to say, it was within
(05:31):
a day or two, we went flying door to door.
And remember it's it's two hundred and like I said,
I think it's roughly two hundred and sixteen. Yeah, it's
it's it's a lot of it's a lot of units
to knock doors on. I know one of our county representatives,
(05:52):
Laura Capps, called it the largest eviction in California history,
and I've heard others say at the largest.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
Eviction in the United States history.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
I don't I don't know if that's uh what they're
basing that off of. But it's a gigantic affection. There
are many people here. But yeah, so from there, I
just went like door to door knocking. I knew none
of my neighbors. I am a hermit.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
I stay in my apartment.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
I keep my curtains closed. I'm like, but the only
contact other like my neighbors make are with my cats.
Just chilling in the windows and stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
But I mean, yeah, to be fair neighbor with cat
in the windows not the worst rep you can have.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
I mean, yeah, true. But even even then, I yeah,
I didn't even want my cats in the windows. I was.
I was very very antisocial. I still am.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
But I have opened my mind quite a bit and
come out of my shell a little bit. But that's irrelevant.
From there. Like I said, we went flying. We went
door to door. We found other people that were like, oh, yeah,
this is super messed up, like we need to fight this.
And we by just going door to door telling people, hey,
(07:21):
we can fight this eviction. These eviction notices aren't super
valid anyway, we were able to get a gigantic group
of our neighbors together. Yeah yeah, and it kind of
moved from there. I don't know how much further I
(07:42):
should explain. There's such a long timeline of the things
that have happened in.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
The past two months, so I don't know where you
want me to go.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
From there, But you know, that's at least the beginning
of it was just you know, us flying, going door
to door, getting everyone together, getting everyone in a group
chat and then SBTU truly supporting us and telling us, hey,
here's the next steps that you need to do. This
(08:07):
is how you become you know, a union, a tennis
association for your for yourselves right with their full on support.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
Okay, so there is one thing I wanted to sort
of talk about a little bit before you move.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
On, which is, Yeah, can you explain what Section eight
is for listeners who don't know.
Speaker 5 (08:36):
I can explain it based off my knowledge. I'm not
currently on Section eight, but I know that resident many
residents here are on Section eight, which I probably couldn't
give the best description of it personally, but I know
a lot of times it's people that are very little
(08:57):
income or disabled individuals, people that can't work for various reasons,
get low income housing, meaning they pay maybe I know
some of our residents, for example, pay like they get
Section eight vouchers that will pay about twenty five twenty
six hundred dollars for their rent and their utilities, and
then maybe they pay one hundred or two hundred because
(09:18):
they're unable to get that income otherwise.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
But Max might be able to describe it a little
bit better than me.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Well, that sounds about right.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
I grew up on Section eight with like a single
mom and stuff and she yeah, I mean it's just
subsidized housing. It's basically it's what public housing or in
some countries social housing would be.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
But in like the eighties, like the Reagan.
Speaker 6 (09:40):
Era like gutted all public housing, and so the concession
was it's a voucher based system for the poor, like
for the over low income people. So yeah, it's just
the government will pay a portion of it. Some said
it pretty big.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
I think yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I guess, you know, like I guess that this is
a sort of Yeah, an interesting thing about your building
is that there's a very there's a very wide range
of like sort of different backgrounds of people who are involved.
I was wondering, you know, we can talk a little
bit about like what that's been like.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 5 (10:15):
I guess I could say we have four buildings, So
we have so it's CBC and the SWEEPS, so it
stands for Colonial Balboa Cortes Sweeps. The SWEEPS has a
lot of students because it rents by the bed, but
CBC has a of families and as we mentioned, you know,
(10:37):
Section eight and lower income. I want to say I
had heard from another representative like a county representative.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
This is I think it might have been more caps.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Don't quote me on this, but that this is like
the lowest one of the lowest income housing apartments in.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Ila Vista, And so.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
There's a ton of like large families. When when this happened,
you just people were just crying everywhere, like they didn't
know what to do.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
This building is it's not unlike a lot of buildings
where you have a pretty diverse kind of I guess
just class composition. And I'm just like, so, so you know,
if you think there's disabled people that have caseworkers.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
You have monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants.
Speaker 6 (11:30):
You have students, and you have some students who are
sort of like city college students that are working full
time or part time and their full time students, so
they're sort of worker students. There's like full time UCSB
students whose like parents may be totally loaded or whatever.
You have you know, often an immigrant and low income
family families. You have like way more people packed into
(11:53):
like a one or two bedroom than you would want,
but it's the only way for you to make rent
because rent keeps.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Going up every year.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
So uh so there's a lot of that, and so
I guess I'll just speak to I mean, I've only
you know, I've run into it a bit, like I'm
in the group chats and I've been I've been to
the building like a few times, but I'm not like
there every day and I'm not like flying every day
and stuff like Sam is living there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But like one common kind of like difficult.
Speaker 6 (12:19):
It's like it's it's a beautiful thing, and it's a
difficulty in that like there's so we need interpreters. And
like in sbtwo we have where we're a sort of
self funded autonomous tenets union, which means we don't get
grants from like wealthy foundations or government, government entities.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Whatever, so we can kind of more dependently make decisions.
Speaker 6 (12:35):
So but we have like a fair amount of dues
money now just from the mass membership that we have
kind of built, and so we can afford to pay
interpreters to come out basically whenever we need.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
So there's been interpreters.
Speaker 6 (12:46):
There at almost every one of the Saturday meetings, and
without that it would it would actually just be impossible,
I mean not like so that's like when there's a
language barrier, right, that makes it hard to organize or
it wouldn't be impossible. There's there's a handful of like
bilingual people, but they're usually super busy. It's if if
one of them doesn't show up, or if the child
of a parent, like a teenager of a parent isn't
(13:07):
there or whatever, right, like, how do.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
You actually get the info across?
Speaker 6 (13:11):
So I'll just speak to lastly on that that it
is like it's a really kind of frustrating, sad situation
and we could probably elaborate on this in that like.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
The whether it's the lawyers right now.
Speaker 6 (13:23):
Who have been hired by by course Bass, which they're
a snaky, slimy piece of shit, evil firm. They're called
Tyne Taylor, Fox Howard l P. Just if you see
any of them on the street, just give them dry looks,
don't do anything violence use that against me at some
point in the inevitable thing that's probably gonna happen. But
(13:46):
but whether it's them with the landlords directly, there's there's
always a you know, this is happens in labor organizing.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's a divide and conquer strategy.
Speaker 6 (13:53):
So they want to spread misinformation amongst the Latinos or
amongst you know, amongst the families, amongst the disabled, like
whoever they can sort of get an ear to, they're
going to give them certain kinds of information to make
them really afraid. They're going to tell them lies, and
and they're going to get people to try to self evict.
So I'm i am jumping a little bit ahead, but
like that that definitely has been like a challenge in that,
(14:17):
you know, if there was like a totally like linguistically
culturally monolithic group of a thousand people, that would probably
be a little bit easier to keep things like totally unified.
But those those demographic different differences do present some challenges
for sure.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah, that makes it, That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I mean we've talked to a couple of other kinds
of associations that have had to actually well, i mean
this one's actually as like you know, and back when
I was doing tennis to organizing too, like I've I've
I've I've seen I've seen worse in terms of like
like in terms in terms of like the number of languages.
But it's still like never like an enormously easy thing
(14:54):
to sort of have to bridge, like just having to
bridge linguistic divides too. Especially when you're getting information like
misinformation different languages is a whole thing. I could I
could talk for like seven hours about the effects this
has had on like Asian American communities, like Chinese American
communities particular. Yeah, but instead of doing that, we're gonna
(15:14):
we have to take an ad break.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
We'll be back after whatever. Incomprehensible ads are playing.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
Okay, cool, great ads. Bye by the stuff on the ads,
and we're back.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I hope the ads were short.
Speaker 6 (15:42):
I don't know, there are some great ads.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I'm gonna buy that thing whatever.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
The Raking coins again or like one of the casinos.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Okay, so yeah, so I guess.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, you know, well just okay, Having having having done
a thematic jump, I will now go back to chronological jumps,
which is okay. So you have you're starting this organizing
what what starts to happen after you're starting to get
people together and you have the tenants, the center, our
patency need involved.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
So it started from flying getting everyone just like a
basic letting them know that they don't have to move,
that this eviction is this eviction is bullshit right.
Speaker 6 (16:35):
Oh, by the way, we didn't we were never giving
legal advice that people shouldn't move. It was if you
don't want to, you don't have to because there's certain illegitimacies,
just because I know that the slimy piece of human
fucking garbage fire trash lawyers are going to be listening
to this and trying to use us again, use it
against us away, Sorry, go.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
Ahead, Yeah, no, thank you for the correction.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
That is entirely Yeah, they don't have to if they
don't do basically. But yeah, So after we did the
flying we Santa our attendants unions set us up with
some group chats and we just worked together.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
From there.
Speaker 5 (17:13):
We just started talking to one another, and I think
it was it was a new situation for most of us.
A lot of I mentioned this before, but a lot
of us didn't talk to each other before. We didn't
go out of our apartments, which I think is kind
of normal nowadays. It's not like you know the sixties,
(17:35):
where like, oh, everyone has a house and knows the
neighbors and stuff. No, people kind of keep to themselves,
especially in really large apartment complexes. So yeah, we we
just started going in the group chat and then someone
was like, hey, I can do this. Another person was hey,
I can do this, And then eventually we set up
a group meeting where we could all come together and
(17:59):
basically share our our feelings, our emotions, our pain about this,
but also find a way to fight against it. So
what we learned was, which we fully learned from the
center of our Attendants Union, was oh, if we go
(18:19):
in front of the county board, we can convince them,
we can share our stories, we can share our pain,
and we can tell them, hey, we need the law
to change, we can pass something, we can.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Use our voices to stop this from not.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
Only happening to us but future residents. So so from
there it was really in the early stages. We I
don't know if this is jumping ahead. Honestly, my brain
is a little foggrant. There's so much that's happened so quickly,
But I do know the next biggest step was us
(19:00):
coming in front of the of the Santa Barbara County
Supervisors Board of Supervisors and telling our stories and sharing that.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
I think Max could probably also share a little bit.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
Yeah, I have so Like the dates in my head
are like, you know, the March fifteenth they bought the building.
March sixteenth, they issued the notices, and then April sixth,
which is like three weeks from that, they passed the
new law. So that means I mean that's like three yeah,
a three week period from the notices to like having
I think at least a couple of meetings with like
(19:36):
dozens of people I don't know, thirty to fifty plus
people there, and then like forming you know, deciding to
form the association and voting to call I don't remember
exactly if the vote to call it course basis the
association was before that the county meeting or after.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
But and then they're also because there's there's also.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Two like pretty crazy facts here too, where like about
so six weeks before, of course BACES announced a new ownership,
all of us in SBTU had sort of we heard
so many stories on the Santa Barbara City level, and
Santa Barbara City is not the county, right, the county
is like this larger geographical entity, and Santa Barbara City
is within the county.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
On the city level, we've been hearing so many.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
Really terrible stories about people being renevicted, and we just
decided to kind of like throw people at like yo,
go to go to public comment tell the city about
what they're doing, tell them they need to pass a
ban on renovictions. We had like a big rally in
front of city council, and we were just going week
after week, and after about six weeks of this, like
(20:41):
four to six weeks, I forget the exact timeline we
got the city to pass. It wasn't a ban on renovictions,
but it was an amendment to their what's called their
Just Cause Ordinance, which makes it a lot harder for
landlords to renevict and that now that they have to
get permits first, they have to have to put the
permits in the renoviction notices when they're to do it,
they need to there's some language that says that it
(21:03):
needs to be done in good faith, which which is
like really subtle but potentially really important because if your
reason is that you just want to trigger what's called
vacancy de control, which is like kicking people out so
you can jack the rent over the ten percent limit
in California, like like right now, a landlord can raise
the rent about ten percent every year if just just
(21:24):
because they want to. But if you can get people
out of the unit, you can raise it to whatever
you want so on the city level, it was just
it was a really big deal.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We had just won it, and we were like pretty
exhausted from it.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
We're like, shit, that was a lot of work and
we won really quickly, and everybody around us that's been
doing stuff for a while was like, we don't know
how you guys.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Did that shit so fast. That was really amazing.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
And then like I think it was like the week,
like within a couple of days of us like celebrating
that win. Course spaces the core spaces thing, Yeah this
is but this is county jurisdiction. So we were like, okay,
I guess we got to go from city to county.
We got to get to the county to do the
same fucking thing. So we were already really fucking exhausted,
like we were. There was like a sprint sprint, sprint
(22:04):
sprint like every week. So the reason I'm bringing this
up is it just felt like natural for us to
just like and we don't like tell people what to do,
like not to not like correcting you, Sam, but when
it's like okay, do this, do this, do this, it's
sort of like we ourselves are just tenants.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
We're not paid staff.
Speaker 6 (22:20):
We're not like highly trained like nonprofit staffers or something
like that that I think we know everything. We're just
tenants ourselves that are in the struggle just like everyone else,
and we're trying to gain information, share information, and become
collectively smarter and more experience and better at handling.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This shit together.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
And so we were like, hey, we just won some
shit on the city level. If you guys, throw all
of all of you, which is like a lot of
you straight to those county meetings. And the county meetings
are every Tuesday at nine am and they go back
and forth every week between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Santa Maria is like an hour to hour and.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
A half drive from where they live, so that's like
pretty unrealistic for most people to not only get work
off and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
But like that upcoming Tuesday from that meeting.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
We had that Saturday, they just happened to be in
Santa Barbla, which is more like a ten to fifteen
minute drive like down the streets. So we're like, okay,
there's the fucking meeting, Like we want to try to
get people there, and so the you know, the news
there it was like hot off the presses for a
week or two, there was all these articles on on
(23:27):
the crisis, and then so that Tuesday morning, all of
them going and hitting the public comment, hitting the mic,
and and I should say, like public comment is typically
anybody who's like gone to the public comment at a
city or count like a government meeting.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
There's usually one or two people that are just like
really weird, like they are they're like human on, they're.
Speaker 6 (23:46):
Like human on people, or they are like or like
they're like the next door Karen person that's complaining about
like I don't know, some stupid, stupid shit that nobody
gives a fuck about. But like sometimes that person actually
gets something change because they actually complained over and over again.
And then there's actual agenda items in these government meetings,
(24:07):
and having this many people like totally flood of public
comment just for one issue as if it's on the
agenda is like it's kind of jaw dropping, right, So
people just went so.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Crazy with it. People got off of work, they.
Speaker 6 (24:22):
Were monolingual Spanish speakers, they just spoke in Spanish, and
there's a live interpreter that they legally have to have
at the county meeting. So on Wednesday, the county Supervisors
called an emergency meeting for Thursday, and on Thursday they
passed the Emergency just Caused Ordinance, which was just basically
copy pasting the city ordinance that we'd just won after
(24:44):
the six week like marathon.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
So I don't know if you if you caught all that,
but like that's how from our perspectives, like we don't
live in the building. We just like we just try
to make shit happen.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
Like it was insane of like how quickly, because it
took us about six weeks for the city thing, which
was still like everyone told us, like that's rapid fire.
Laws don't get changed that quickly, and this was like
two weeks or some shit.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, I was I was stunned by this when I
was reading about this, like this is one of the fastest,
Like this is one of the fastest campaigns I've ever seen,
Like I don't know, like I we've we've run into
like Chicago City Council before, for example, and they, oh boy,
those people are yeah yeah, so yeah, it was a
(25:27):
really impressive campaign that you all were able to pull off.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
Like yeah, but and this narrative is if we wanted
to like really make this in a curated way. We
could probably have like hopeful, we could have inspirational background music.
Then we could have like horror music we could have
because I mean, I don't know, Sam, if you want
to take it from that.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
But there's also been some very dark turns since that.
Speaker 6 (25:49):
Yeah, like very dark, depressing, scary turns because the minute
well all this, I guess I'll just say it. If
we want to go deeper into it, we can, or
we can skip it. But like as soon as we
were really excited, like, okay, they can't like what we
just did makes it illegal for them to evict everyone
like for now because they don't have permits.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And oh oh and this is this is actually really
like important kind of legal.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
Fact is that that what the law said was that
this notice applies to any current notices posted to tenant
stores like after this date, as well as unlawful detainers.
Unlawful detainer is a fancy term for an eviction lawsuit.
So so basically like any eviction lawsuit that Course Spaces
would try to file against any of the two hundred
(26:35):
and fifty plus people would be they would just be
tossed out in court because they're just like you know,
an eviction defense attorney would just point to the law
and be like, the new law says you have to
do X, Y and Z, and they didn't.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
They be like, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
It's just very there's nothing ambiguous. It's not it's not
a great area. It's not like you can interpret it
this or that way. It's just not you can't.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
You can't.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
There's no like, there's no like the other side we
say like, well what about this and this, there's no,
well there's no other thing. But immediately, like almost immediately,
within like a week or something, the other side started
countering with like insane propaganda, like like disinformation, which I
guess I'm kind of taking up a lot of space now,
(27:19):
but Sam, I don't know if you want to, because
you're actually there with all the people having being foresped
the disinformation but by by Tyne Taylor Fox, Howard Lop
and course spaces vertically integrated private equity.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Piece of shit firm.
Speaker 5 (27:38):
Yeah, so the emergency ordinance passed and we all are like, yay,
this is great, we have protections. But then yeah, that
law firm decided to well that end management. Actually, I
think prior to the law firm's notices on our door.
(27:58):
Management went around.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
Being like like, come pick up your checks.
Speaker 5 (28:02):
These aren't you know, like you need to go take
your checks, you need to sign that you're leaving, et cetera.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
And when that notice from.
Speaker 5 (28:10):
The the Tyne Law Firm came signed by Lacy.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Taylor, it Taylor reported to the bar.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
It basically said, this doesn't apply to you, and if you,
I mean, okay, this is my interpretation of it. When
I read it as a just you know, random human being,
not a law major or anything, it sounded like they
would take our relocation checks and or charge us more
(28:43):
money if we bought back. That's the way it was phrased. Granted,
I know it was like law jargon, but it was
made to almost like, in my opinion, harass us.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Like it felt like, oh.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Everything the core basis tennessization and SBT is saying is
a lie.
Speaker 4 (29:05):
This is the truth.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
If you want to join them and be with them,
well you might not get your relocation assistance check and
or we might charge you more from that.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
At least with that specific notice. It was super confusing.
Speaker 5 (29:20):
And you know, most people here don't have law degrees.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
They don't they don't know the law. On top of that, you.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
Know, the the law firm intentionally left out the last
part of the ordinance. They said, hey, this doesn't apply
to you because the eviction notices were issued before this, but.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
It left out the unlawful detainer part.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yes, so it was it's lying by omission.
Speaker 5 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
It's like I.
Speaker 6 (29:52):
Wish I had a good like movie example or something,
but like we've all seen this kind of thing, right,
It's like you tell the person everything and then you
kind of black out the last part of the sentence
so that I don't know, I wish, I wish there
was like an obvious movie thing to be like, look
at what the villain did, so the person would like
make the wrong choice like go down the wrong path
in the forest or some shit, right like, so they'd
(30:13):
get attacked, Like like that's what it did.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
That's what they did.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
That was that was exactly what they did.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
They literally quoted the new ordinance and then cut off
the second half and put dot dot dot, which was.
Speaker 6 (30:26):
Implying something else was there, right, I mean maybe some
maybe some English major was like, oh, I wonder what's
in the dot dot dot, Like what's the rest of
the quote.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
But that's the thing.
Speaker 6 (30:37):
That's the thing about like using abusing their power as lawyers,
fancy letterhead and all this shit of knowing. And this
goes back to like this this kind of diversity of
class composition.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Right.
Speaker 6 (30:47):
If this is a bunch of like super highly educated
uh professionals, like either with law degrees or or whatever,
they'd be like, Oh, I'm just going to jump onto
the county, you know, I'm going to like look up
the ordinance and be like, oh, it's Ordnance.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Five to one whatever, and I'm going to read through
it and be like, ah, they left out the unlawful detainer.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
But like how my guess is almost zero of the
tenants to receive those notices did that. And that was
that was the law firm that was That was Tyne
and Taylor and Fox and Howard and whoever the fuck
Ellis's is involved in their in their you know, fraudulent
joke of a firm there. Their whole thing was they
wanted to scare people to get to get them the
(31:27):
self evict Right. So if you think about like the
logistics of like like okay, let's say you're a you're
a landlord firm, that works for landlords, and you you
evict people, and you get paid a lot of.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Money to do so.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Right, So you get paid some retainer amount that's like
I don't know, tens of thousands or more just for
just for like being on a call to do stuff
for them.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
And then and then maybe you get paid of other amounts.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
You you're looking at you're looking at a situation like this,
and you're like, Okay, two hundred and fifty units and
then there's somewhere between five hundred one thousand people and like,
you know, you don't need to evict the little kids,
but like you need to evict like every person on
the lease. Like that's a lot of unlawful detainers. Like
that's a lot of filing that we're going to have
to do. Yeah, we're going to have to like get
(32:15):
every single name and every single lease, and we're going
to have to like every individual person on every lease.
We're going to have to file an eviction lawsuit in
the court that we know is going to get tossed out.
Like that's so much fucking work for us to do.
We don't want to do all that work. That's insane, right,
Like we we want to kind of just keep this
retainer money and do like minimal work, like because we
(32:38):
also don't have it's a four person law firm, and
they probably have some legal assistance, but like, do they
really have the capacity to do something of that scale
like this little slimy garbage trash fire of a fucking firm.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Of course not.
Speaker 6 (32:49):
But their strategy was was to was to scare people
through lying with abusing their power as much as possible
to empty out that building so there'd be no need
to file eviction lawsuits and and do the bidding of
their of course spaces without going to court knowing they
would lose. Right, So that's anybody listening, by the way,
(33:12):
this is not like this actually isn't about course spaces
or the time law firm. Like this is just a
strategic set of like a methodology for an industry that
views human beings as obstacles to profit and in a
hyper commodified real estate you know, capitalist market.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Like that's all this is.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
We're just describing like like a normal process that's happening
at this point.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, And something something we've talked about in other like
tenant struggles is that, I mean one of the things
that yeah, I'm not going to I'm not going to
use a specific law firm of doing this, but it's
something we've seen in other places. Is like, you know,
you'll get landlords who will just fire just file like
mass file just illegal evictions. And they do it because
you know, Okay, so if they get caught, like nothing
(33:55):
happens to them, right Like, but if they don't gay
cut you know this, this is an enormous number of
people who you could just throw and not have to
go through any kind of legal process with and so yeah,
these like you know, it's like it's like this goes
back to the old, the old sort of capitalism problem, right,
which is like the easiest way to make money just
by taking it from someone, and the second easiest way
is by is in you know, Like it's like the
(34:17):
one that's even easier than that is you is you
lie to them and trick them into getting either trick
them or intimidate them, and she's giving you the money
without having to like actually fight them. H And yeah,
it's you know what they're doing here, it is legal terrorism.
Speaker 6 (34:31):
Yeah, And I I reported Lacey Taylor to the bar.
I don't know, Lacey. I'm sure you're listening to this,
if you if they even notified you, but it was
it was a bit frustrating because they were just like, yeah,
this isn't really like we can't really do anything about this.
It has to be a matter that's settled in civil court.
And so it's definitely frustrating. So it's like, no, like
this is just straight up lying. This is not like
(34:52):
an interpretation of the law. But I do think like
this is as a side note, like this is the
issue with you can have like evil ass people who
are trying to make people homeless in order to retenant.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
That's the kind of language of the these firms us.
The word is retenant in the building.
Speaker 6 (35:08):
We're just retenanting, right Like that's that's the sort of
real estate capitalist law firm or that's the industry like language,
right that, Like there's just there.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
We got lawyers for that, right.
Speaker 6 (35:17):
Like we have a thing we want to do and
this is just the wild West, and we just want
to make a lot of money, and we just have
like stacks of lawyers just on deck that we'll just
pay to do this. And then you even have like
these state bar associations that are like well Yeah, that's
just how it is.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Man.
Speaker 6 (35:32):
Probably most likely because like on the side of real estate,
I my guess I'm making up this number. The eighty
percent of the lawyers working in real estate are on
the side of landlords. And then maybe twenty percent, probably
way less than twenty two yeah, high on the side
of tenants, right. And then some of the landlord tenants
sometimes will help tenants, right, so they can like brag
it at their little wine and cheese things like, oh,
(35:52):
I help the people or whatever, and I donate to
charities or some garbage. But they at the end of
the day, they're just they're happy to make people die
starvation on the street so that somebody else can make
a shit ton of money.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yeah, this has been nic Could Happen Here? Join us
tomorrow for part two of this interview, in which the
landlords do for bullshit.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (36:17):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, Updated monthly at coolzonemedia,
dot com, slash sources, Thanks for listening.
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