As the downtown development market booms, low-income tenants are being pushed to the bottom of the housing barrel.

Property values are going through the roof in the Figueroa Corridor, and as a result, working-poor families and retired and disabled people who live in residential hotels suffer from rampant abuse. Slumlords, anxious to cash in on the real estate boom, will do almost anything to get poor people out of their buildings. But people like Augustina Ramirez and the tenants at the Morrison Hotel joined SAJE and fought back.

The Morrison Hotel is such a case. Once featured on the cover of a Doors’ album by the same name, the hotel was now home to Black and Latino tenants who face vile living conditions, harassment, and illegal evictions on a daily basis.

Thug-type management practices punished tenants who speak out or try to exercise their rights in any way. Organizers, health promoters, and attorneys were simply not permitted in the building, even when they were clearly guests of long-time tenants.

Tenants who were seen talking to organizers faced immediate consequences:
* Maria Valdevia had her electricity cut off by managers who saw her talking to tenant organizers. She was evicted soon after.
* Sofia Mesa was illegally locked out of the unit for her expressing rights. Other Morrison tenants took her children into their units so they wouldn’t have to live on the street.

And consider this:
* Augustina Ramirez had raw sewage soaking into her carpet for so many months that she and her children now suffer from fungus infections.
* Three other children have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood – high enough to merit L.A. County public health intervention.

Why did residents stay at the Morrison? Because they have no place else to go.

In today’s housing market, minimum-wage and fixed-income tenants are just a slumlord away from homelessness.

Waiting lists for the diminishing supply of subsidized housing are currently four to five years long. This is why SAJE’s priorites in the Figueroa Corridor are to protect and improve the affordable housing stock that we have, to make the business of being a slumlord less profitable, and to generate long-term strategies, such as a community land trust, that generate more community control over development.