After months of waiting for eminent domain to move forward, the tenants find out that the housing department negotiated a secret deal with their landlord. What the tenants did next, and where things stand now… on the final episode of this series. (Spoiler alert: it’s not over).

If you heard just one thing about Hillside Villa before listening to this podcast, you probably heard about May 27th, 2022. The day that LA City Council voted on buying Hillside Villa through eminent domain. It was a huge deal. It felt like the tenants had won. But the real story is much more complicated than that. This week, eminent domain’s long legacy of displacement, a national affordable housing crisis, and the tenants’ innovative campaign to turn eminent domain on its head.

So you want to build a tenant association, but don’t know how? Sometimes it takes just one person to get things going. At Hillside Villa, that person was Luisa Ramirez. We’re gonna show you, step by step, how Luisa and her neighbors built their tenant association. How they held their first meeting right under management’s nose; how they successfully lobbied their council member; and how they paid an early-morning wake-up call to their landlord in Malibu... after he refused to sign a deal that would save their housing.