UCLA real estate instructor Eric Sussman stayed in the center of his business school classroom, smiling at his students and trying, for as long as he could, to ignore the picket signs and angry faces just outside.
There, under the watchful eyes of UCLA police officers, Debora Barrientos, a 43-year-old single mother, stood with about 35 other tenants who had been bused to the campus from their Echo Park complex. Actually, it's Sussman's complex, where he wants to raise the rents, and that could leave Barrientos with no home.
Barrientos said that after she saw Sussman's red, sheepish face, she felt a little sorry for her landlord. But not sorry enough to stop her group from publicly presenting him with a ceramic piggy bank that proclaimed him the city's greediest landlord.
As rents keep rising around the region, tensions between landlords and tenants are increasingly common.
Morton Avenue has become the latest battleground, and the fight there centers on whether Los Angeles landlords whose buildings are subject to the city's rent control laws can opt out of a federal program that subsidizes rent for low-income tenants.
The question has implications not just for the 22 families in the complex whose rent is partially paid by the Section 8 program, but also for nearly 40,000 families in Los Angeles who hold vouchers.
Sussman, who owns the complex with several partners, and his lawyer think the owners have the right to get out of the program -- especially because the government's idea of fair market rent is hundreds of dollars and in some cases more than $1,000 less than what the apartments can fetch on the open market, essentially forcing landlords to further subsidize the poor who are already getting government subsidies. Last year, he served the Section 8 tenants with eviction notices.
City officials and tenant advocates, however, say that the city's tough eviction rules should cover the units. Wanting to rent apartments for more money is not one of the narrowly defined reasons allowed for eviction.
The tenants filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the evictions. The tenants can stay until a judge's decision. But regardless of the decision, which is expected in August, both sides predict the case will be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
