Power + Permanence for LA's Eastside

Housing and Homelessness

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

LA has a long history of pricing-out and pushing out its lowest income residents. BIPOC and immigrant residents in particular have been routinely excluded from affordable, safe, healthy homes. After the official sunsetting of emergency Covid-19 protections in March 2023, these populations became even more at risk of losing their homes with no other options than to join LA's already sizable population of unhoused residents sheltered in dangerous, uninhabitable places. Eastside renters have some of the lowest paying and least secure jobs as well as the highest reported Covid-19 positive-testing rates throughout LA. They took the hardest financial hit from the pandemic, and now their rent repayment deadlines loom even as their economic hardships persist. Meanwhile, real estate market-driven increases in average rent prices continue to price out long-term residents. The forces against housing affordability are powerful. Only a powerful community-led response can overcome them.

Support from LA 2050 will strengthen ICS's leadership development and organizing efforts to advance a Tenant Bill of Rights campaign, including scaling education and outreach through its Civic Engagement and Integrative Voter Engagement programming. In coordinated alliance, ICS will play active roles in the repurposing of the historic LAC+USC Medical Center General Hospital to provide housing and holistic services to highest need residents. These and other activities fall within the broader objectives and work-areas, including: 1. Restore and grow ICS membership up to 1,200 Eastside youth and family leaders addressing housing justice priority issue-areas, including the fight for full adoption of the Tenant Bill of Rights at the City and County; 2. Strengthen collaborative partnerships to escalate collective impact work in housing justice by strategically aligning with (2-3) policy campaign efforts led by Eastside LEADS and Keep LA Housed coalitions to champion community-driven investments and disrupt the larger forces of inequitable development and displacement historically endemic to the Eastside; 3. Develop and implement a Communications Campaign combining community members' stories with data on housing-related issues to uplift public support for tenants' rights. 4. Establish an emergency mutual aid fund to support ICS community leaders experiencing extreme economic burden and need for emergency rental or other basic living assistance.

With support from LA 2050, ICS will strengthen the work of community-led initiatives and civic engagement on the Eastside specifically targeting affordable living and community permanence. ICS aims to succeed in implementation of the Tenant Bill of Rights and to develop other measures that will help thousands of Eastside and other low-income LA residents remain in the neighborhoods and schools of their choice. This work is a major component of the ICS community's long-term vision for a healthy, stable, and strong Eastside and LA County where all families are supported with pathways to thrive. This means protecting community voter bases who lead the way for effective solution-making. Amidst these crucial moments of pandemic recovery, ICS is positioning ongoing community leadership on holding decision-makers accountable to further advance policies and practices that provide LA's most vulnerable families with all the social safety and opportunity available to wealthier ones.

Throughout the pandemic, ICS provided rapid-response leadership that secured and provided more than $500,000 in emergency rental relief for more than 600 Eastside families. Against multiple attempts to phase-out emergency Covid-19 tenant protections sooner than anticipated, ICS's mobilizing efforts at the City and County successfully extended emergency protections beyond an additional year and prevented thousands from being displaced in that time. Benchmarks of efficacy used to evaluate and guide this ongoing work include recent policy wins as envisioned through the 9 policy recommendations of the Tenant Bill of Rights: -Rent stabilization and limits on rent increases (County) -Universal just cause eviction protections (Both) -Limitations on evictions for failure to pay rent (Both) -Relocation assistance for tenants displaced for no fault of their own (City) -Effective tenant anti-harassment protections (County) -Safeguards when landlords attempt to buyout tenants (Both)