The Road to Economic and Housing Justice
Fight for a Roof Over Every Head.
Stable housing is the cornerstone of public and private life. Liberty Hill and our partners are fighting to create a future in which everyone in Los Angeles has a safe and affordable place to call home—and in which tenants know their rights and those rights are protected.
Together with our partners, we have made incredible progress, building the largest eviction prevention program in the country: Stay Housed L.A. We have championed rent stabilization and just-cause eviction protections, and we have provided funding to organizations working to organize their communities against eviction, displacement, and gentrification. And after six years of organizing, Right to Counsel is on the verge of being codified in the City so tenants have the same access to legal representation as landlords.
But with temporary pandemic protections expiring, many tenants remain vulnerable. That’s why there has been an explosion of direct organizing for tenant protections across the county. Led by folks like our partners at Keep LA Housed, this people-centered movement is motivating smaller cities to take on the critical fight to protect their residents.
Keep LA Housed is a coalition of tenants and organizers who advocate for tenant protection policies across the city and county. Formed during the pandemic, their platform is a Tenant Bill of Rights, which includes enacting anti-harassment policies, rent stabilization, just cause eviction protections, proactive code enforcement, relocation assistance, and a codified right to counsel for tenants.
“One of the major challenges we face in the housing justice movement is the push and pull between trying to use resources to win bigger picture policies that will help provide long-term housing stability, and the need for emergency responses to our eviction crisis,” said Carla La Paz, of Community Power Collective, a member of the Keep LA Housed coalition. “We shouldn’t have to let people fall victim to evictions in order to prioritize long-term change, and we shouldn’t have to sacrifice more transformative change in order to prevent people from losing their homes right now.”
Liberty Hill and our partners will continue to champion the value of innovative housing solutions like Community Land Trusts, which put community land back into community hands. But we know there is more work to do to ensure that we stop the vicious cycle of unaffordable housing, evictions, displacement, and homelessness. We must change our thinking about housing as purely a commodity and ensure that Los Angeles has housing solutions that are stable, affordable, and self-determined.
The well-being of tenants and small property owners is not mutually exclusive. One of our main goals over the next two years is making sure the City of LA establishes a well-funded social housing program that will produce high-quality, affordable housing at scale.
