Every time Eduardo Jarquin, who has worked for more than 20 years as a janitor, walks out of the front door of his Koreatown apartment building in Los Angeles he sees the future across the street: A geometric white high-rise, completed in the last year, where one-bedroom apartments rent for $2,480.
Jarquin, 58, pays $900 for the studio apartment he shares with his 23-year-old son and a roommate. Jarquin’s aged building is rent controlled, keeping his rent closer to what he paid when he moved in more than a decade ago. He knows that as his neighborhood gentrifies, his low rent makes him a target for landlords hoping to bring in higher-paying tenants.
When tenants like Jarquin leave rent-controlled apartments in Los Angeles, landlords are free to set rents as high as the market will bear. Jarquin said that since a massive real estate investment firm bought his crumbling, neoclassical building in 2020, the new owners have been pressuring rent-controlled tenants to move out. An immigrant from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, Jarquin had felt at home in the 40-unit property when its residents were almost entirely other Mexican and Central American immigrants; now, just six remain.
But as investment firms buy up thousands of rent-controlled housing units intending to raise rents to current rates, something unexpected has happened: The “gentrifiers” are beginning to see themselves as having more in common with their low-income neighbors than with their corporate landlords. The newer tenants who have moved into buildings like Jarquin’s say that when landlords purposefully neglect maintenance or pressure tenants to move out, it affects them too.
An Unexpected Alliance
Ten blocks away, in another building owned by the same investment firm, Sam Trinh, a 28-year-old communications executive, walks out his door to another kind of change in the neighborhood: In the fall, signs went up in front of his building in English and Spanish, declaring in capital letters that “NO PERSON SHALL SIT, LIE, SLEEP OR ALLOW ITEMS TO REMAIN IN THE PUBLIC RIGHT-OF-WAY” — another of what local activists call “homelessness banishment zones.” It’s a daily reminder that not everyone can pay rising rents in high-cost cities like Los Angeles, and of what happens to those who cannot — including people like those who might live down the hall from him. In 2019, he moved into the one bedroom apartment he rents for $1,267. He shares it with his tabby cat, Sandy.
On Sundays, Jarquin walks south and Trinh walks west until they meet at a sloping park — opposite a Korean pavilion called Dawooljong, or “Harmonious Gathering Place” — where the tenant council for buildings owned by K3 Holdings meets over pupusas and sodas.