I am the only tenant on the Los Angeles City Council. In a city where renters make up almost two-thirds of the population, renters are routinely left out of the city’s decision-making. To make Los Angeles livable for the majority of its residents, city politicians must take renters’ rights seriously — but they’ll never choose to do it on their own. Renters have to start standing up for ourselves, which is why my office is organizing tenants whose names appear on the city’s eviction databases.
For decades, we renters were thought of as undesirables who would lower property values, so apartment buildings were routinely shunned in favor of the single-family home. Meanwhile, the remnants of redlining and…