⭐ NEW SEASON ⭐ Smogland Radio: The Tenant Association
A new season of one of my favorite LA pods, looking into the Hillside Villa Tenant Association
Smogland Radio is featured in Los Audio’s Master List, and for good reason. It’s a news podcast by and for LA from Los Angeles Public Press.
The show has quickly become one of my favorite sources of deeply reported LA news. My favorite episode thus far is LA Pee Pee (or, why it’s so hard to find a place to pee in Los Angeles)… but that may change, because Smogland’s new season drops today!
Back in 2018, the residents of Hillside Villa, a building in LA's Chinatown, got astronomical rent increases essentially overnight – some of them over 200%.
Many of the residents were elderly, many of them immigrants, and essentially all of them were low-income. Many had lived there for decades, because for decades, the rents had been very affordable. They'd made the apartment building into a home – growing a community garden in the courtyard, throwing parties together, and organizing as a community.
But what they didn't realize was that their rents had stayed affordable for so long because the building was constructed under a covenant that restricted rents for 30 years – after which time they could be raised to market rate.
Our reporting has found that there are close to a million units in buildings like theirs across the country, which means over a million tenants facing the same situation as the residents of Hillside Villa. And what the Hillside Villa tenants came to realize is that nobody had a plan for them. So they came up with a plan to save their building – and others like it – themselves.
It's a local story with national implications. It's got a ton of great characters – many of the lead organizers in the tenant association are elder Latina women, who had been friends for decades and who other residents of the building call the señoras.
And it's hosted by LAPP reporter Phoenix Tso, who's been covering the Hillside Villa fight since 2022 and has a ton of archival tape and in-depth knowledge about what's happened.
Check out the visual trailer below, and listen to the first episode here!
