ANNOUNCEMENT! The Pasadena Tenant Justice Coalition has submitted its Rent Control and Just Cause Eviction Protections ballot measure to the City of Pasadena. Signature gathering has begun and will continue until November 29th 2021. Please contact info@pasadenatenantsunion.org to join the signature gathering effort!

Mission

As is the case for most major cities in the US, Los Angeles is suffering a serious housing crisis—not because of a shortage of homes, but because of an exploitative system of housing ownership. Pasadena is no exception – 62% of Pasadena households are renters. Rents in Pasadena have gone up more than 50% in the last 6 years (with an increase of ~9.4% in the last year alone), leading to waves of gentrification, eviction and homelessness. Meanwhile, landlords and real estate developers are enjoying enormous profits by continuing to extract rent from working class tenants. The vast majority (88%) of Pasadena’s newly constructed rental housing stock is market rate/luxury units. As a result, Pasadena residents (including Caltech students and employees) are experiencing housing crises, longer commutes, fragmented communities, and homelessness. We recognize that these problems are directly linked to issues of racism, patriarchy, police, and environmental degradation – and that these are all inherently tied to capitalism.

Organizing Around Tenant Rights

As members of the Pasadena Tenants Union (PTU), we are working with our tenant neighbors in a collective class struggle for housing justice. Ultimately, we seek to abolish rent – the system by which owners of property extract money from tenants who of course need a roof over their head. Instead, we advocate for social ownership of housing, in the form of a public resource for all. Imagine: safe, sturdy, beautiful, community-oriented public housing.In its current form, this struggle is largely centered around the fight for rent-control and eviction protections. These fights become even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, as unemployed workers face mass debt, evictions, and homelessness. Currently, many SoC members are leading PTU’s campaign to bring rent-control and just-cause eviction to Pasadena, and were instrumental in writing the new ballot measure language. Aside from our involvement in this ongoing campaign, SoC members are active members of PTU – we organize tenant actions, counsel tenants in crisis, and provide Spanish language interpretation at our meetings. We view all these efforts not only as ways of achieving critical protections for our tenant class, but also as struggles with potential to politicize and organize a mass base of working-class people; from an apartment complex coming together in the face of eviction to a national movement demanding public housing.