Date Founded: 1996
Community served: South Los Angeles
Mission: “SAJE builds community power and leadership for economic justice.”
Key areas of work: Economic justice, tenant rights, healthy housing, equitable development
NOlympicsLA coalition member since: 2017
Strategic Actions for Just Economy (SAJE) has been blunt about the urgency of the compounded crisis currently confronting tenants. “We’re facing a ticking time bomb,” one tweet stated. Another tweet elaborated: “Nearly 1 million renters in California have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, while the supplemental $600 a week in unemployment aid has now expired. Lifting protections now will result in thousands of households at risk of homelessness. LA families are hanging by a thread!”
One ticking time bomb was due to explode September 1, the expiration date on the statewide Emergency Rule 1. Implemented when the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown began, Rule 1 prevented courts from processing new evictions. As its expiration date drew closer and thousands of families teetered on the edge of losing their protections, SAJE protested outside LA’s courthouse to demand legislative and judicial action to cancel rent and prevent evictions, in coalition with allies like the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). As the final hours ticked away, on August 31, California’s state legislature approved a bill that requires tenants to pay 25 percent of their rent through January. The bill does not prevent evictions for those who cannot afford 25 percent or who fail to follow the complex, confusing process outlined by the bill to qualify for the protections. SAJE tweeted that the bill will fail to prevent mass displacement. The bomb has exploded for some families; thousands more families are now facing their own individualized ticking time bomb, with months of existential stress for as long as they can scrape together 25 percent of rent. Recognizing the continued threat, SAJE is pushing the City and County of Los Angeles to extend the eviction ban and codify a Right to Counsel for tenants facing eviction.
SAJE has been fighting for tenant rights, healthy housing, and economic justice since 1996. Based in South Central Los Angeles just east of the 110 on 32nd street, the organization emphasizes building community power and leadership around the principle that “the fate of city neighborhoods should be decided by those who dwell there.”
SAJE has around 20 full-time staff in addition to part-time staff and volunteers, but the direction of its work is shaped by its broader membership body of local South Los Angeles residents. Each year, staff members propose some campaign areas, a steering committee of residents refines the proposals, and then the asamblea (assembly) membership vote on which campaigns to prioritize. In 2020, priority campaigns include eviction prevention and the abolition of the Ellis Act, code enforcement reform, and free public transit. But the organization’s work spans much more ground, from advocating for tenants’ Right to Counsel to fighting against corporate landlords, running a tenant clinic, placing local workers in living wage jobs, producing research, and hosting popular education initiatives. A lot of this work takes place in coalitions, such as the Healthy LA and NOlympics LA coalitions.
One key current campaign is the fight against a proposed amendment to the 2018 Home-Sharing Ordinance. Under the ordinance, people can only rent out their own primary residence as a short-term rental (think Airbnb-style stays), and all rentals must be registered with the City. Crucially, units under the Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO) cannot be rented for short-term stays at all. This protects rent-controlled units for people who actually need to live in them. Without the ordinance, owners have high incentives to convert long-term rentals for tenants into short-term rentals for tourists, driving up evictions and further decimating the stock of rent-controlled housing. SAJE was part of a broad coalition that worked for years to bring this ordinance about. According to SAJE’s executive director, Cynthia Strathmann, the coalition brought together “hotels, the hotel employee union (Unite Here), neighborhood groups who are just tired of having Airbnb in their neighborhood, and tenants. So basically everybody. And that’s what I always say — the only people who are not in this coalition are people who actively make money from Airbnb.”
“If you ever really want to study how white entitlement is enunciated and practiced, listening to the transcripts of Airbnb hosts [giving public comment at City Hall] is really probably the place to go.”
The ordinance went into effect in July 2019 — when people could register their legal short-term rentals — and enforcement was ostensibly supposed to begin on November 2019. In reality, enforcement has been a sham. But even though LA has yet to fully implement and enforce the ordinance on the books, Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell is already trying to defang the policy. Under his proposed amendment, the owners of a RSO unit would be able to rent it out for short-term stays if it is their primary residence. SAJE and the rest of the coalition, plus newer allies like NOlympics, are rallying against the amendment. “Honestly, it’s not what RSO is for,” Cynthia argues. “RSO units are there to provide housing.” She is critical of homeowners’ sense of entitlement to an “income stream where they’re getting income basically for owning things instead of working,” as Airbnb hosts do by renting out rooms or units. “If you ever really want to study how white entitlement is enunciated and practiced, listening to the transcripts of Airbnb hosts [giving public comment at City Hall] is really probably the place to go.”
Cynthia expects the amendment, if passed, would have the most immediate impacts on places “where everyone wants to rent,” like Hollywood, the Westside, or Northeast neighborhoods like Silver Lake and Echo Park. But evictions of long-term tenants in those areas could push people into places like South Los Angeles, creating a vicious cycle of displacement. SAJE is asking Angelenos to call their city councilmember and demand a hard stop to home-sharing. Tell them “we need housing for housing,” Cynthia suggests. Tell them we need to see the whole Home-Sharing Ordinance implemented. “We can’t have loopholes and we can’t have amendments.”
SAJE is also known for its work in piloting Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), like the local hiring agreements attached to the LA Live sports and entertainment district and a series of agreements tied to the USC Village development. Cynthia speaks frankly about the complexity of CBAs. On the one hand, she says, “they’ve established an expectation that private development still owes something to the community,” and they can be a tool for gaining “material wins” for local residents. On the other hand, CBAs are usually a response to a top-down proposal rather than a community-centered process throughout. Ideally, Cynthia argues, “you should have had the community in there designing what was gonna happen from the get-go. You shouldn’t be in a position where you’re just trying to mitigate whatever craziness they’ve already decided on.” CBAs can also be resource-intensive for local organizations in the negotiation phase, while the burden of monitoring and holding developers accountable after the fact often falls on those same under-resourced organizations.
“You should have had the community in there designing what was gonna happen from the get-go. You shouldn’t be in a position where you’re just trying to mitigate whatever craziness they’ve already decided on.”
SAJE also opposes some proposed developments outright. As part of the United Neighbors in Defense Against Displacement (UNIDAD) coalition, SAJE is opposing a proposal to build a hotel on the former site of the Bethune Library, just adjacent to USC’s campus in South LA. The site is currently owned by the city, and until recently the City Council was planning to build a “mixed-income development that would have contained primarily workforce and affordable units,” according to the coalition’s “open letter to city leaders.” The current plan for a hotel, in contrast, runs counter to the coalition’s demand to “preserve public land for public good.” This demand is urgent in the context of a rapidly gentrifying community, where the majority Black and Latinx residents are facing “housing instability, lack of quality economic opportunities, inequitable educational institutions, insufficient healthcare, dearth of resources, and a culture of criminalizing and over-policing the community.”
The open letter notes that the hotel will contain a media room “to serve the nearby USC Coliseum and other professional sports stadiums in the area.” The area around USC has faced gentrification pressures for years, but the announcement of the 2028 Olympics has intensified developers’ interest in hotel and commercial investments catered to tourists. On the opposite side of USC and Expo Park from the Bethune Library site is the Fig, a complex planned to contain hotel rooms, student housing, retail and office space, and some so-called “affordable” housing units. After developers argued the Fig would contribute hotel rooms for the Olympics, the development was cleared to receive $103 million in subsidies, even though it will displace 32 rent-controlled units. Since its approval, the developers have changed up the project plan (and its name, now “Exposition Point”), shrinking the number of “affordable” units (from 82 to 66).
Even before the emergence of these specific instances of Olympics-driven gentrification in South LA, SAJE signed on to the NOlympics LA coalition in 2017. “As a group that has focused on land use and housing over the last decade,” Cynthia reflects, “staff were already familiar with the fact that the Olympics in other cities have had really bad effects on the lives of ordinary people […] because of the long-term consequences of the way that development is pursued.” She adds: “And I think that that’s fair to say about a lot of the groups in South Los Angeles. They know how gentrification works, they know we’re very close to both Downtown and to the Coliseum, that there’s going to be a problem there.” Cynthia questions whether anyone who “knows a lot about land use and is into social justice” still supports the Olympics. The fact that the Olympics increase policing and militarization is also a grave concern for SAJE.
“As a group that has focused on land use and housing over the last decade, staff were already familiar with the fact that the Olympics in other cities have had really bad effects on the lives of ordinary people […] because of the long-term consequences of the way that development is pursued.”
Organizing is not just about what you’re fighting against; it’s about what you’re fighting for. And for SAJE, that’s a city that serves people, not profit. “The vision we’re fighting for is really a city in which the people who decide the fate of neighborhoods are the people who live there. And that your voice in civic processes isn’t determined by how much money you have, or how much cultural capital you have. It’s determined by an inherent right as a resident, as somebody who lives in this space. […] So practically what that would mean is a functioning transit system that didn’t damage the climate and was accessible to everybody. Safe, healthy, and affordable housing for everyone — that almost certainly means decommodifying it.
“We have to have green spaces open and available to everybody. We have to have shops and private enterprises that are locally controlled and owned, and aren’t just extractive mechanisms for removing money from the community and sending it off to the corporate ether somewhere. So I think it really does involve creating a livable city where the point of the infrastructure of the city isn’t profit, but is the good of the people.”
Check out SAJE and UNIDAD’s petition for housing — not a hotel — at the former Bethune Library site. And join SAJE and NOlympics LA in fighting the HSO amendment — sign up below if you want to receive alerts and updates about next steps, as well as suggested messaging and public hearing toolkits. They can keep delaying, but we’ll be ready.