LESLIE,

TENANT

LEADER

Interviews have been edited for clarity. 

Introduction

Well, I, the reason why I'm so attached to this place, because I been here since 1991, so I was around five years old when I, when I first lived there. This is the only place that I recognize as home. You know, I've been here, like my roots are here. So that's the reason why it's very important for me to fight. You know, I'm just like here, like a lot of us here have lived here for more than 20 years. Um, you know, is just, we with neighbors, you know, a lot of them, I no longer have my parents with me, they’re both passed away. I just have an older sister. Living here honestly has been, how do I explain it? It's just, it gives me the feeling of having family around, you know, I have family, I know that I could count a lot on these ladies. Um, you know, and it hurts me too. It hurt me that a lot of these ladies may be their, their illegal status here. A lot of them are not legal. Right. So it hurt me when I, when all this started, like to see them crying, to see them so worried about what's going to happen. Um, that that's the reason why we decided, like I decided like, no, it's not, it's not, um, it's not okay. It's not okay for a landlord, like he's very comfortable at his Malibu home to come and tell us, take as what you need to pay more rent with him knowing our income. Yeah, because before, before they actually gave us the eviction notice, they asked us for information of our income, you know, so he knew how much we're making a month and for him still not to care. And just say like, Hey, you know what? Well, you're going to get a rent increase of like more than $200, $300 for a lot of these neighbors. For a lot of these neighbors their rent increase was going to be a thousand dollars from one month to the other. So that's the reason why I started fighting.

"Living here honestly has been, how do I explain it? It's just, it gives me the feeling of having family around, you know, I have family, I know that I could count a lot on these ladies. And [to see them crying] hurts me too."

You know, like I told myself, like, I'm a loudmouth. I'm a very loud person naturally. So it's like, I told myself, like, if I have this voice, I need to use it for these people. I need to use it for my family for, for, for my Hillside family, you know. It's not fair that here comes the landlord and just say like, Hey, well, if you can afford it, like move out. You know, for them, it's so easy to just tell you like, Hey, move out. You know, like he was offering cash cash for keys, but it was like $4,000 -- How is that going to help us to move out? You know, so, my role in the whole tenants association, honestly, is just helping who I could help being a voice for those who might be scared of like using their own voice. Um, but we're, all of us are in this together, you know? So I'm just fighting just like everybody else. You know, I just, I just wanna, I just wanna make sure that these older ladies who I know maybe like in 10 years, they're not going to have the strength to like, fight if this was to happen again. You know? So if I move out, I want to move out with an idea of me knowing that like my ladies are comfortable. My ladies have a safe place to be, you know, cause you know, I don't know what the future holds for me. I might even move out. But if I move out, I want to be the one who choose to move out. I don't want to like forcefully get evicted. Me, moving out, and then not knowing what half of these ladies who saw me growing up, they seen me since I was a child... how am I going to just walk away and not care about them, you know? So. That's the reason why I decided to fight. I want to help people who think that they don't have a voice and show them that, Hey, everybody has a voice. You know, we are in this together and we could all help each other.

​On the landlord and his daughter policing the building 

​You know, just seeing like kids also like, you know, honestly, like the building has changed a lot. Yeah, like this building, like as soon as the new management came in, Tom came in. Um, they took a lot of childhood from a lot of these kids. A lot of these kids are not allowed to play in the current area anymore without them being harassed by the manager. Yeah, without them being harassed by the manager, by Chloe herself. 'cause, she will literally like if she sees a kid here, she'll ask them what apartment do you live in? She'll walk their child to the door and be like, Hey, they're not allowed to be playing with the ball down there. If we see them playing with the ball down there again, that's like an eviction. [They're policing kids] because they want to take care of the building in a way that it's just like [trying to avoid] buying anything new… but things break. And that's something that they don’t understand. I guess they just don't want to be putting money in things that they feel like, "well, why should we?" Like, but you see it, like it's changed a lot, honestly. It's not the same environment that it was when I was growing up.

​On growing up in Chinatown

Yeah. So basically, I think I want to Castelar [Elementary]. I was like five, six when I first moved from here and I moved in like, so you could be familiar with the area, kinda like the Staple Center area, like from that, from around that area, that's where we moved in here and you know, like the reason why we moved over here with my parents was because in our old apartment or what I been told and kind of remember, it was a single, so with my sister and myself getting older, you know, my mom, my parents wanted it for us to have more space for us to have our own privacy, like for us to have our own room. Um, so she looked. My mom had friends who already lived here. [At that time] it was pretty much under the affordable covenant. So it was like the city, when it first opened, the city gave money and it was just like, Hey, it needs to stay affordable, but we were never told [that it would expire]. And I know for a fact, our parents were never told that this was going to expire, this kind of where it's going to expire in the future. So we were never prepared. I am pretty sure that if we were ever, it might, if our parents knew this, they would have prepared us. They would have told us. But no, like we didn't know.

When I first got here, I remember like walking, I still remember like that first day walking into my apartment. Because I've lived in the same unit since I moved in. I remember like my mom opening the door and saying like, okay, like this is our new apartment. Like I was walking in, her showing us the apartment, and me just seeing this empty apartment and just, just thinking to myself like, oh my gosh, this apartment is huge for us. Like, it's literally just us four, like, I remember my mom, walking us through the room to our room. Our beds were already set up my sisters and my, and her saying like, this is your guys's room. It was like the happy feeling of like, Hey, we have our own room. Um, you know, so like growing up here, going to Castelar, meeting new friends and honestly like, it was beautiful, like becoming a teenager here, you know. Growing up in Chinatown has always been safe. And that is something that I always talked to about like to everyone -- you guys don't understand the safety that we've honestly had in this community. Like I never used to -- you see Lincoln Heights, Highland Park. It's close to us. We never grew up with like our parents having to worry like, oh my God, there's so much gang activity around here. You know, if she goes to the liquor store, is she going to come back? We never had to worry about that. I didn't know the danger of, like gang activities and all that. It wasn't till I became a teenager, like at 15, 16, that's when I was just like, oh shoot, like, you know, woah, like why isn't my area like that. So it, it, it's such a wonderful feeling to tell people, like I grew up in Chinatown, I remember being 14, 15, 16, once he started dating, you know, like after school, like coming with your friends in Chinatown and all that is gone now.

On the gentrification of Chinatown

Chinatown is like completely gone. 🔊Now when I tell my goddaughter, like, oh yeah, like I remember going to that meeting and I'm like, wait a second. Like, I never took you well, now that she's older, like I didn't, I didn't take you to that mini mall. Cause I didn't think that mini mall was going to be demolished, you know, now just to see Chinatown changing and it's all because of these developers coming in and just not caring, like they just don't care about the history that Chinatown has had. They don't care about communities. They don't care about anything. All they see is money signs, all they see is the land and they like, oh yeah. How can we exploit it? You know, let's make buildings, but to not think of the working class, cause honestly myself, like, I don't say low income. I say the working class, because to me, it shouldn’t-- that phrase, like low income shouldn't really exist, you know, because you're, you're working class, you know, and I understand, to me that we’re like low income is something that politics that created that to me, to me, my personal opinion, to me, it was just the politics that created that these definitions so they could just label you. And it's just like, we're not asking for freebies. You know what I mean? So for a lot of people like, oh, they're low income. You say what? I think what bothers me is the negativity that follows that, that it's just like, oh, you're low income. You're poor. You don't deserve this either. You shouldn't deserve that. You shouldn't get this. You shouldn't get that. Your community shouldn't have that. And it's just like, why, why don't we deserve it? Because in your eyes we’re low income? So we don't deserve, a good opportunity and he didn't disturb pretty things are in our, in our community? So we're such a low income community, why bring luxury buildings into that community? Why? You know, so all that, like now seeing that. All these luxury buildings are, or just office spaces are being built here in Chinatown. It's hurtful. It honestly, I feel hurt because it's not what it used to be. Chinatown is not what it used to be anymore. You know, like I remember all that. I still have friends that sometimes like they call me and they're like, hey. You know, we're going to go visit here because I want to go to Chinatown. And it’s like I tell them, it’s not like we were in high school, like all that is gone🔊, like all than you guys would come to Chinatown, you guys, where are you guys gonna go do our little shopping? I'm just like, everything is being closed down.

​A lot of us [neighbors and children of neighbors] grew up together. That's how we were like, I get to know there was times they, you know, in our early twenties, when we started going out and stuff like that, like we will meet in the front and the front steps. Like we will meet there and it was like maybe like 10, 11, 12 of us. And it was like two, three o'clock in the morning. We had neighbors like, hey, go inside already, like, you guys are making so much noise, you know, and all that. All of that is also gone, you know, and it's gone because a lot of us, you know, we grew up, we got married and we moved out, you know, but a lot of us also, you know, a lot of the neighbors also left with that fear of getting evicted.

On the second generation fighting back

Unfortunately, a lot of us before this started happening, we didn't a hundred percent know our tenants rights, as renters. To us, the word eviction was always so heavy that it was just like my mom, my mom was one of them, whatever the manager would do say she will never be one to take the opposite side of it. She would always be like, you know what? They're managers, they know what they're doing. They're within their right, within the law. Yeah. Just do it and don't want to create a problem. Exactly. And it sucks that a lot of like our parents generation, that was their mentality. I'm not going to create problems, Language barriers, too. So I saw a lot of that and in these ladies, and that's why I'm just like, no, like if I'm understanding that we have rights. And I'm understanding the rights. I'm gonna convince them like, Hey, we could fight this. You know, so… yeah like, I started telling them and like, no, like we need to do something to keep our, our, our building affordable. Like, it's not a fair that all these developers who are coming into our community, just putting a price tag on the land and saying like, hey, you know, well, this land is big enough. We're going to make apartments. We're going to build apartments. But all you guys have worrying about is bringing in money into the community and not even caring the people that you're displacing. So that's really sad. And then to see how these politics taking their side, just because of money, just money. All they see is money because do they care about all these people who are moving into these luxury buildings. No, because they know they come with a fat paycheck, right? So it was just like, Hey, these are the kind of people that we want to be our community. 

​On uniting during a crisis, COVID-19

​And it goes back to, again, that "eviction." it's such a strong word and it sounds worse than what it is because we have rights as we've explained to a lot of them, even if the cops come and try to like, shut your door, like they're not in the right. You know, like it's not okay. We know that's against the law. I mean, I wish that we knew this back to our parents, you know, like, so we could've been putting a stop to the little things that we were seeing wasn't there for us as. You know, like they weren’t watching out for us, they were watching out for the landlord, you know, and it was just like, I wish that there were things that we would known back then. Maybe things could've been different now, but at least I'm glad that I'm glad that no matter what, I guess it's very stressful, it's such a horrible situation that we're going through it, but this has brought a lot of our neighbors way closer than what we've ever been, honestly. Like this has taught us a lot. This is honestly teaching us a lot of like, especially right now, like with like the whole COVID like, you know what, the whole pandemic thing, like a lot of us were helping each other and the politicians don’t see this. Yeah. They don't see it. To them, us having to move, they take it all in. Why is this such a horrible thing to just move away? But when are we going to build the same comfort, the same family dynamic that we have with a lot of our neighbors, where are we going to build that if we move off somewhere else. It's not that easy. This is years and years in the making. It’s not just from like one month to the other, you know, like, so there's just a lot of things that, you know, it's hurtful to see that just because we don't have a big bank account, people really don't care. You know, like if we wouldn't have been pushy, if we wouldn't have pushed Cedillo to all this, honestly, this building would have been market-rate already. If the organizers who we’re working with and guided us the way they’ve guided us to now, and we've learned so much from them. A lot of us would have just walked away. 

"And it's just like, why, why don't we deserve it? Because in your eyes, we’re low income? So we don't deserve, a good opportunity and we don't deserve pretty things in our community? So if we're such a low income community, why bring luxury buildings into that community? All these luxury buildings and office spaces are being built here in Chinatown. It's hurtful."