How We Help Tenants In Distress
Notice: Under Construction
Our team is hard at work finishing this website. Check back regularly, and thank you for your patience.
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Empowering Tenants for Change
At the Westside Tenants' Alliance, we're on a mission to empower tenants in order to balance out the power dynamics between renters and their increasingly predatory landlords.
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We do this by educating tenants about their rights and how to enforce them through collective action. We also help tenants navigate the legal system if needed.
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The Struggle for Tenant Rights
Historically, tenants have faced an uphill battle in controlling their housing due to the commodification of homes. What is a basic need to many has also become a cash cow to a few, with individual tenants left vulnerable to exploitation by their landlords. Learning your rights as a tenant and organizing with your neighbors vastly cuts down on the exploitation done by predatory landlords.
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Why We Must Organize
The days of casual neighborly greetings are gone. We must organize together! Landlords exploit legal loopholes, manipulate and lobby local councils, and ignore tenant rights. Meanwhile, city organizations meant to protect tenants send out meaningless letters with no follow up or reinforcement. This is largely due to the fact that organizations like LAHD have left it up to our Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, that guarantees procedural due process, where only courts can award damages and sanction wrongful conduct, as opposed to stepping in at the city level and sanctioning landlords for wrongful conduct when it is clearly evident. All tenants have is their lease as a binding contract with hopefully some good evidence, and everything falls into the matter of law. This however, in order to be fair, requires that both sides have access to legal counsel, yet usually landlords have legal representation while tenants often do not. The combination of many tenants spending a large percentage of their earnings on rent while wages are barely able to keep up with the ever increasing rents and inflation in general, paired with there only being sixty housing attorneys - the kind you have to have to get a predatory landlord off your back - is just a couple of the reasons why tenants often go to court unrepresented. To make matters worse, judges are not pro tenant. This is why it's time to take action by organizing to educate and mobilize the tenant base in order to bring the scales of power into balance.
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A Harrowing Reality
Landlords resort to harassment through the performance of reduction of services, retaliatory and other types of fraudulent evictions, refusal to make repairs, etc., in an effort to force out tenants from their rent-controlled units so they can subsequently re-rent said units at market rate and hence realize higher profits. At Westside Tenants' Alliance, we've witnessed enough of these horror stories to fill volumes. It's time to expose these injustices and ensure that they do not continue.
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* There will be further discussion about how market 'rates' are determined in a market controlled by predatory landlords ;) We will post a link here soon. Stay tuned!
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Navigating Legal Challenges
Tenants face daunting legal battles in a system that requires legal representation in order to prevail in court - where being obviously innocent isn't enough to get a just ruling wihtout an attorney. Perjury, a landlord's modus operandi, goes unpunished, and housing attorneys - the kind you must have - are overwhelmed with an unprecedented number of evictions. Judges often favor landlords over pro per / pro se tenants (tenant without legal representation). So what's a tenant to do? We must organize with our neighbors so that we manage a predatory landlord before things escalate to court, but if an escalation to court is reached, organizing will benefit tenants in way of having witnesses, having shared any relevant documents so that discrepancies or different 'stories' in regards to shared matters can be used to disqualify a landlords merit in court; and to approach the City Council to enact stricter enforcmenet of tenant rights and rent control so that to begin with there are less loopholes for landlords to expolit; and much, much more. Attorneys also favor working with tenants who are part of a tenants association in their building, thus increasing chances of getting representation if there should be need to do so.
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We're here to teach you the strategies necessary to get your rights enforced before matters reach court and to help you have more of a fighting chance in court if that is the point you are already at when you call us.
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Strength in Unity
Organizing with fellow tenants means confronting landlords collectively. No longer will landlords be able to divide and conquer (ask us how they do this). Associations give tenants a voice and leverage shared struggles in ways that balance out the power imbalance between landlord and tenant.
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Your Rights, Your Community
Joining a tenant association means getting access to legal support and community solidarity. Through building tenant associations, tenants become informed about the law and are shown strategies on how to reclaim their power as neighbors and allies.
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Facing Eviction? Act NOW!
Don't ignore an unlawful detainer - a thick stack of papers called a summons and complaint. You have only five business days to respond and there are various ways of responding depending on a multitude of variables leading up to being served. We can help you navigate the process and ensure your rights are protected. Your home is worth fighting for.
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Together, We Can
Join us in the fight for tenant rights. Together, we can bring agenda suggestions to City Counsel, vote on all things housing, make landlords respect our rights and follow through on their lawful duties, all by building community where everyone has a voice and a home.
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