This week, we’ve got the second edition of Renter’s Hotline, our tenant advice segment. This time, Dominique called in about an issue that her dad is having at his apartment building in Paramount, where the landlord keeps raising the rent on Dominique’s father and other tenants with housing vouchers. She got advice from lawyer Gina Hong and organizer Chris Estrada from the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action. Plus, a dispatch from team Shampoolio at a MacArthur Park mutual aid event last week.

Disclaimer: Information in this episode isn’t a substitute for legal advice — please seek out a lawyer if you’re facing a legal issue. You can find some tenant legal clinics at lapublicpress.org/renters.

Transcript

You’re listening to Smogland Radio.

Broadcasting from the pop up hair salons, tenants rights meetings, and the elotero carts of Los Angeles.

I’m your host, Nancy Meza.

Welcome to a new episode of Smogland Radio, a production of LA Public Press. Each episode, we’re going to be going on a little journey across LA together. Remember that this is your news podcast about the city we all hate to love and love to hate.  This is our last episode of the year. Before we get into it, something important.

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Thank you so much.

Nancy: And for today’s episode, we’re bringing you another edition of our tenant advice segment renters hotline.

I’m here with Gina Hong and Chris Estrada. Um, Gina’s a lawyer and Chris is an organizer with a community based organization called the Los Angeles Center for Community Law in Action, or LACCLA. Um, so Chris, can you just tell us a little bit about LACCLA, what y’all do? 

Chris: Uh, yeah, we’re a small community organization based in Boyle Heights in East LA.

And we organize tenants on the eastside to fight their landlords, to fight back against rent increases, harassment, evictions, bad living conditions, basically anything housing related. And then we also have attorneys who help represent them in eviction cases, who help us file affirmative cases to support our organizing campaigns.

An amazing organization, LACCLA, in case y’all haven’t heard about them, now you know. On the phone, we also have Dominique, who is going to be discussing her renter issue for today. So thank you so much, Dominique, for joining us. 

Dominique: Thank you for having me.

Nancy: So Dominique is calling in with a question about her father’s housing situation.

He lives in Paramount, which if you’re not familiar with, it’s a city in SELA that borders Compton and Downey.  So Dominique, can you talk us through the situation that your father is dealing with? 

Dominique: My dad, well, he got an emergency housing voucher, which is basically Section 8  last year because he was experiencing homelessness.

And so we were able to get him into a senior apartment in Paramount. This year, upon like the re-examination of his Section 8, so when they basically reevaluate his income to see what his portion of the rent is going to be and if it’s going to increase, they basically increased it from $453 to $514 effective this past September.

So that was a little over a 13 percent increase and I’m not sure why it increased with LACDA, but for whatever reason it increased, even though his income didn’t necessarily increase. 

Nancy: For folks who might not know, LACDA is the Los Angeles County Development Authority, um, which is like, right, the agency that Dominique has been dealing with.

Yeah, and so after that happened, um, shortly after he got a notification from his management company saying that the rent was going to be increasing overall effective November 1st from  $1600 to nearly $2100, according to lack to his percentage that he was going to be responsible for was then going to be $588, so basically a 15 percent increase for him on top of what he already had. It was basically like a 31 percent increase overall. And so when I reached out to LACDA to ask them, how is that possible? Because I’m pretty sure that during COVID and even following COVID, because of the high rental increases, there was laws put into place to protect tenants.

Um, but they basically said, we compare it to other apartments in the area. And if it’s comparable, we authorize the increase, even though 588 sounds great to most people, but for people on fixed incomes and, you know, for seniors, you know, it’s hard. My concern is next year, it’s going to be another increase and the year after that, it will be another increase.

But I was trying to look into it myself and I know there’s like a tenant protection act that was put into place, but I don’t know if that’s still accurate or not. So my whole question to you guys is — is this even legal and or what information can we provide to be able to kind of challenge this?  

Nancy: Thank you so much Dominique for um, just sharing um, your dad’s situation.

I know that unfortunately it’s probably a situation that a lot of folks are in or come across. Yeah, so here’s a question for, right, for Gina and Chris is, is this 30 percent increase allowed? Is the tenant protected under AB 1482 or other tenant protections that might apply to him? 

Gina: Yeah, so I can, I guess, take the legal piece of it before passing the mic to Chris, if that sounds good.

Chris: Yeah, that sounds great. 

Gina: So, unfortunately, Dominique, you are in the city of Paramount, meaning you’re in an incorporated area that is a city within Los Angeles County. So why I say that that’s unfortunate is because Los Angeles County actually does have a countywide rent control law, but it applies only to unincorporated areas.

So places like Firestone or East Los Angeles and strangely Marina del Rey and places like that that aren’t officially cities. So whenever I get a rent increase question, the first thing we do is look at, okay, what are the applicable laws? And that starts with asking, are you in LA County? If yes, are you in an unincorporated area or in an incorporated city?

One place you can look to check whether or not you’re in a city that has rent control is an organization called Tenants Together. They’re a statewide organization and they have a lot of great resources online and that’s why I like to tell people about them. Because if there is a local rent control ordinance in your city, it is likely that they have information about it because they have sort of a registry of the local rent control laws in the state of California.

So you could look there, but Paramount does not have its own city-based ordinance or municipal code that would restrict any rent increases. So then the next step is, okay, are you covered by the Tenant Protection Act of California? Now, the TPA does apply to a lot of buildings in California. But there’s some pretty standard restrictions listed in the tenant protection act, and it just sort of explicitly says that if you’re in a building that is quote-unquote “affordable housing” or restricted, uh, rents and other ways, such as through Section 8, the law just doesn’t apply to you.

So, you know, it’s just very black and white. Uh, this is one of the reasons why we always start every meeting at LACCLA by saying there is a big distance between the law and what is just, and unfortunately, you know, every week we see folks who are in a similar situation as your father, where there’s really nothing the attorney can say, because yes, it is legal, unfortunately. The only thing that I would flag for you is that if it’s a greater than 10% Increase the law in California does allow you a notice period of 90 days. So what you could do is you could go back to the property management if they didn’t give you 90 full days before the increase went into effect and you could let them know:

“Hey, like, we’re not under any obligation to pay this increase just yet because we haven’t received proper notice,” and that is Civil Code Section 827 if you want to cite it and be flashy like that with them, but there aren’t really clear cut solutions for what to do legally. Um, and that’s why, you know, at LACCLA, we emphasize that legal solutions are usually few and far between for tenants, and really what needs to happen is, um, a greater understanding of how to build, like, grassroots power to change the dynamics of power between landlords and tenants, um, at large.

So I guess with that, um, I can pass it to Chris, and maybe he could make some suggestions that are really about looking at extra legal or organizing and community-based solutions to the problem. 

Chris: Yeah, thank you, Gina. And yeah, before talking about like, I guess like organizing strategies that you could use, I just wanted to share a little bit about the Section 8 program in general and why we think that these kinds of like, quote-unquote, “solutions” or like “measures to address the housing crisis” are really not good ones.

So for people may be listening who don’t know what it is, the Section 8 program is where a government agency agrees to pay part of your rent. So they like subsidize part of your rent through a rent payment made directly to the landlord. So you have to apply for these vouchers and they’re like income restricted.

And there’s a really long waiting list and it’s really hard to get them right. But essentially what’s happening is that the root cause of this problem is that — your dad’s landlord is just greedy. He was already charging a certain amount of rent. It was fine before, and just suddenly decided that he wanted to raise your dad’s rent.

He just suddenly decided that he’d like another vacation this year or something. And so now what that means is that a government agency is going to pay more money, and part of that’s being passed on to your dad, too, that your dad’s paying more money to this landlord. And so there’s this obvious crisis where rents are really expensive and where people can’t afford to pay their rent.

And then liberal politicians look at this and they’re like, okay, what sorts of measures can we take to address this problem, but there’s always this like unspoken bottom line of whatever we do, we cannot harm landlords’ profits. And so then what they come up with is like, okay, well, let’s just accept the fact that rents will be high and that landlords can raise them as high as they want.

Let’s rubber stamp every single increase application that landlords give us. And we’ll just have the state foot the bill. And in this case, like not completely, right? Like your dad’s also getting a rent increase. That’s the big issue here. And so, yeah, I don’t think that these are at all good solutions to, like, the housing crisis.

Like Gina said, at every meeting, at every LACCLA meeting, we always start off by saying there’s this big gap between law and justice. And this is one of those cases where it’s obviously unjust, where people on fixed salaries can’t afford this rent increase. What that means, like, when this is perfectly legal, it doesn’t mean that the struggle’s over and it doesn’t mean that you have to give up.

It doesn’t mean that you or your dad have to just accept the rent increase and like sit back. For me I think it means like, okay, then it’s time to look for real strategies to change this. And that means organizing. So that might mean like talking to your dad’s neighbors, for instance, because — I mean, not always, but usually when people get rent increases in bigger buildings, and it usually happens to the whole building, uh, either at the same time or within a couple of months of each other or something like that. And so I suspect that if your dad got this rent increase, then the other tenants there probably did too, whether they have Section 8 or not.

Do you know if anybody else in the building has gotten rent increases recently? 

Dominique: From what he told me, it was only the Section 8 recipients who received the notice. I don’t know how many tenants are Section 8 recipients in the building, but there are like 300 units. Thirty percent for each of those people, that’s a lot of money. That’s going to be a few vacations. 

Chris: Right, exactly. So, the reason they give it to the Section 8 tenants is because probably the other tenants, anybody who doesn’t have Section 8, is covered under the Tenant Protection Act, the one that you asked about, AB 1482. But anybody who does have Section 8 isn’t covered, so that means that those rent increases aren’t limited to 10 percent.

I mean, it’s unfortunate for sure that a lot of people are getting these rent increases, but it’s also good news in a sense, in that the silver lining is that if a lot of other people are getting these rent increases, then you can start talking to your dad’s neighbors. And, uh, have like a meeting where people get together and talk about any issues that they’ve had in the building.

They can talk about these rent increases. And that’s usually a really big first step towards finding some sort of collective solution. So let me give you an example. There was a building in Chinatown, uh, it’s called Hillside Villa. But the whole building is like, um, it’s some sort of affordable housing. Do you know the word, Gina?

Gina: It’s difficult to explain, it’s a covenant, um, in the, um, it’s an affordable housing covenant that was expiring. 

Chris: Right, yeah, so the building’s status as affordable housing was about to expire, and the tenants there, who had rents somewhere around $800 a month, were suddenly faced with rent increases to $2,400 a month.

Their rents were tripling pretty much overnight, and so they organized with the help of Chinatown Communities for Equitable Development, or CCED, and the LA Tenants Union. And so they’ve been fighting these rent increases for four years, if I’m not mistaken. And so they basically just started off by having weekly meetings with everybody in the building where they talked about the rent increases and like how impossible it was to pay them.

They started drafting letters to the landlord and demanding that the rent increases be rescinded, they demanded the opportunity to negotiate with the landlord. So eventually when the landlord wouldn’t meet with them, they went on rent strike and try to create some sort of like collective bargaining situation.

And the strategy that they’ve sort of landed at now is that they’ve demanded that the city basically use eminent domain to purchase the building from the landlord and turn it over to them as like some sort of social housing to be controlled by the community that lives there. So they’ve been pressuring politicians lately to do that.

So that’s like a really, really big campaign. And I don’t mean to intimidate you with like sort of the size and scale of that, because I know that that’s a lot, but that’s like one big example of one strategy for dealing with this in the long-term. Right? Because one thing that I noticed about what Gina said is that, yeah, they’re limited to like one rent increase annually.

But if each one is going to be 30 percent every year, right? And if that means your dad’s increase is 15 percent every year, then eventually that’s just going to become totally unaffordable. Right? And so I think no matter what, we have to look for like some kind of permanent solution. So, I know that’s a lot, but I want to pause there.

I don’t know, ask what you’re thinking about that or if you have any questions.  

Dominique: Yeah, no, I think, you know, that’s a good idea. And sometimes that’s what it comes down to is advocating and coming together. I’m a social worker, so I know all about advocating. And it’s sad because they’re targeting very vulnerable populations.

You know, these being seniors and, you know, people who otherwise cannot afford to pay these kinds of rent if it wasn’t for being fortunate enough to get like the section eight housing. And in his case he was. really lucky, you know, that he was able to get that. I think it’s really important to bring attention to these matters because just in me helping with him to get to find housing, I mean, that was — it was like jumping through hoops.

Nancy: Dominique, you mentioned something that I, if you want kind of elaborating on just, you mentioned just how difficult it was just getting your father into housing in the first place. Do ou might kind of explaining that? 

Dominique: Yeah, yeah, no problem. So basically, you know, he got it got approved through an agency called PATH that, you know, assists the homeless with getting this emergency voucher and they had a bunch of them or they were giving them out because of COVID and they wanted to get people housed.

And so we were lucky enough to get him one because there was only so many. And, you know, you think when you have it, like, “Oh, this is great. You know, we’re going to get you housing.” It’s not that simple. So you go to a lot of different places, you know, try to find apartments.  And places that will accept Section 8.

And I believe now in California, there’s a law that requires all landlords to accept housing vouchers. But some of them still give you a hard time. You know, it’s the whole, uh, well, we have to run a credit check, you know, each credit check is about $40 at least. And so how do these people who have a fixed income or don’t have much money coming in, come up with the $40 each time to do this credit — the credit checks, not to mention many of them don’t even have credit or don’t have good credit.

Sometimes you also run into the barriers like he did in the beginning where LACDA was like, well, no, uh, we don’t approve, you know, of that apartment because of the amount they’re charging or, you know, they go and they do inspections. And so if there’s things that they want fixed, if the landlord is not willing to do that, then you basically lose the apartment and then you gotta start from point A again.

He also had a case manager, sorry, I’m just going to put him on blast, from PATH who just was not helpful at all. They’re supposed to be going with their client to show them apartments and talk to the management and fill out applications. And unfortunately, the person that he was assigned  was not helpful at all.

And I was doing all the legwork, you know, and there’s things that have to be scanned in and they require so much information. You know, bank statements and identification and your social and all these different medical statements and copies of bills and all kinds of things. And with this apartment that he finally got, I really, really had to advocate and just push on both ends with the PATH case manager and with the management company that we were dealing with.

Finally, you know, he was able to get in, but it was a long process and it’s very frustrating and draining. 

Nancy: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. It’s all money. Gina and Chris, do you have anything else to add to the situation or also Dominique, if there’s any other follow up questions, legal questions that you might have, or organizing questions, feel free to ask as well.  

Gina: Yeah. Dominique, did you have any other questions before I step in and make the comment that I was thinking about? 

Dominique: No, I think you answered them, you know, so far. I mean, it’s a little disappointing, um, but I do appreciate, like, the feedback and the resources, you know, and the ideas of, you know, how to kind of address this.

Gina: Word, I mean, you know, always down to drag PATH through the mud. And we love our social workers. So we support you and we appreciate you. And I’m grateful for this conversation. You know, you’re clearly not any stranger to advocacy, but I just wanted to, you know,  emphasize that one of the words we use in organizing is power mapping, right?

So if we’re confronting a problem and we’re trying to analyze it, the first thing we do is map out who has power in the situation. And I think for your situation, one thing that is interesting, and might be useful is that it’s not just the landlord and the tenants involved. It’s also a big government agency that at least in name is beholden to your elected officials and the people in this organization are supposed to, at least in name, serve people like your father.

So just taking a quick look at LACDA’s website, it looks like their commissioners are actually the Board of Supervisors of Los Angeles County. And so it sounds to me like, you know, your father and all of the people in this building who got this rent increase and wanted to go to a Board of Supervisors meeting, which are all public, and the dates and times are listed online, and tell their story, which is a compelling one, right?

To say that, hey, the agency that y’all created to prevent homelessness is actually going to be causing the people who are most vulnerable in your communities to be at risk of homelessness again because of some technical defects in the law, right? And to pressure them to try and change the situation. Maybe there’s something that can be done from the LACDA perspective of things. 

So just to say that there’s always, I think, like more that can be done from an organizing perspective, if there are more people involved, like we always say, we’re stronger together. So maybe like, if your father is down for it, step one could be reaching out to those neighbors who also got this rent increase and getting together and seeing if anyone’s interested in meeting up and brainstorming.

Dominique: Yeah, definitely. That’s a good idea. 

Chris: And to add on to that too, definitely for, for like first steps, like Gina said, so it can seem, I guess, daunting or like a lot of work to, to approach this from an organizing angle. But the first step is just talking to the neighbors. If there is some sort of common area in the building or like a parking structure, a lot or something, or a yard, or if not, then you can just meet in someone’s apartment.

And the first step is, yeah, just like talking to the neighbors as you run into them, as you’re leaving your house or coming back or like walking down the hallways in the laundry room, whatever, and talking to people and sharing what’s going on with your dad or asking if they know anybody who got a rent increase like that.

And then, uh, once you’ve got maybe two or three other neighbors who are willing to, to support, or at least to just have further conversations, then you can just go door knocking and just knock on every door in the building and say, “Hey, Like I got this really big rent increase. I’m not going to be able to afford this, even with Section 8,

And the county government is just approving these left and right without any consideration to whether we can afford them. Have you gotten anything like this?” And if you go knocking on every door like that, you’re bound to meet a lot of other people who have gotten these rent increases. I’m sure some of them will have Section 8, but also maybe some people who don’t have Section 8 and who also got rent increases, right?

If you can just invite them to a meeting and say, “Hey, we’re going to have a big meeting on Thursday at 7:30 or something to talk about this. It’s going to be in my apartment coming out with us. And that’s like how, that’s how this process gets started, right? If you just have a meeting with your neighbor, with your neighbors, start talking about this problem and then together start to think about like, okay, what could we do, right?”

That’s where the power mapping that Gina mentioned can come in. That’s where you can start thinking about like, okay, maybe we can all write a letter together to the landlord or to LACDA or to the supervisors. Then you can maybe plan, you know, let’s just go talk to our local supervisor and let them know about our situation and see what they can do to help.

And then for later on down the road, the people that Gina was just naming, you know, the directors of LACDA — the County Board of Supervisors, all these people have, well, one, public meetings, right, where you can go and yell at them. And then two, they have home addresses, right, and we’ve gone to their homes many times and yelled at them at home in the morning, at night, that “Hey, like, if I’ve got this problem, like, you are not going to sleep comfortably until you’ve helped me solve this, right?”

But that might be later down the road in the organizing process, just wanted to throw that out there as an idea, though. 

Gina: And one really big thing that I feel like we should have mentioned earlier is, you know, reach out to your local tenants union. I don’t know if the Paramount Tenants Union is particularly active right now, but you know, Compton has a tenants union, Long Beach, there’s a bunch of people who have been really active in the movement as well.

And so this organizing doesn’t have to happen on your own. And often, if the union is active, there will be organizers who can support you at least in getting some of these steps off the ground. 

Chris: Yeah, I know for sure that the Compton Tenants Union is active. Who else is in the area? I know the Party for Socialism and Liberation is doing a lot of environmental work in the area.

Gina: Inglewood is also close enough, so maybe someone in the Inglewood Tenants Union might know some folks who are closer to you. They’re pretty active. 

Dominique: Yeah, definitely. That was actually going to be my next question, was if your organization or any others kind of assist with putting this all together. 

Chris: We can, so we can definitely help out with that.

So we have meetings every Wednesday in Boyle Heights. So I know that that might be a little far, but if you’re willing to come hang out, then we can talk about, uh, next steps for organizing your building and we can give you, you know, trainings, that kind of stuff, but otherwise we can put you in touch with people who might be closer to you.

Dominique: Okay. Awesome. Yeah, that would be great. 

Nancy: Yes, and I would just add that, like, the biggest added benefit of connecting to your local tenants union is that these are folks who have already kind of either gone through a campaign or some campaigns. It’s kind of good to know that you’re not going to fight it alone, right?

That there are people you can lean on. What’s interesting is when I asked Gina and Chris, like, oh, you know, do you have examples of, like, specific, like, senior citizen organizing? They’re both, like, well, most of the tenants that are in the tenants union are elderly. Cause those are the folks that are being, feeling the pressure, right?

And are being pushed out, are, you know, seeing these rent increases when they’re on fixed income, which at first I was like, damn, that’s really messed up, right? That it’s like our senior community are, are the ones that are being most effective, but they are organizing, right? They are involved, which is good.

And it’s really messed up that it’s like, this is who is organizing. Cause they have folks have to organize, right? Like your father, um, Dominique and you, right, that are helping your father. Um, so it just brings up just a really important population when we think about, right, the housing crisis, um, that I just think needs to be centered more.

Gina: I mean, it impacts the long term residents of our communities, and those long term residents are folks who have been here a while and who usually immigrated in decades past and are now suffering the brunt of gentrification, who, you know, if they’re displaced in LA, it usually means they’re displaced out of LA, right, and we’ve seen that happen time and time again.

But yeah, it’s just like a party of elderly folks every meeting at LACCLA. I don’t know if we have any members under the age of 50. 

Chris: It really is. And actually the building that I mentioned as an example, the Hillside Villa, that’s also primarily elderly residents in Chinatown who are fighting their displacement and who are doing all the organizing.

Dominique: That’s awesome. Don’t underestimate seniors.  They’ll go to bat.  

Chris: Oh yeah, for sure. 

Gina: You can get your ass whooped if you underestimate them. It’s not a good idea. 

Nancy: Right, and for all you young people out there that are like, how do we fight back gentrification? Look at the seniors. They’re already doing it. 

Chris: Yeah, I mean it was a group of like 30 elder señoras in East LA that passed the rent control law that Gina had talked about. The county rent control law. It’s always our elder women who are doing all the work. Definitely a big source of inspiration for all of us. 

Gina: Breaking news. 

Nancy: Breaking news. Dominique, do you have any further questions while we still have Chris and Gina here with us today? 

Gina: No, I think that’s it. Yeah.  Is there any way any listeners of the podcast, if they are aware of the Paramount Tenants Union, could perhaps reach out and let us know if they’re connected?

Nancy: Yeah, so if you’re a listener out there and you’re connected to the Paramount Tenants Union, you can email us at smoglandradio at lapublicpress.org. But yeah, thank you so much for calling in and, and sharing, for being a very big advocate on behalf of your father. I know  it hasn’t been easy just to get him where he’s at today and we’re in a fight together to make sure he stays.

And thank you, Chris and Gina from LACCLA for joining us today on Renters Hotline. 

Gina and Chris: Thank you. Thank you. 

Dominique: Guys, thank you all for, you know, your help and your guidance and all the resources. I appreciate your time. You’re not alone. We’re here. Reach out. Thank you so much.

Nancy: That was Gina Hong and Chris Estrada talking to Dominique. She was calling in with a question about her father’s landlord raising his rent.  If you have any tips or questions for us, you can reach us at [email protected]. Or you can also leave us a voicemail at 323 200 9539.  For more renters resources, you can also check out lapublicpress.org-slash renters. 

By the way, we reached out to PATH for comment.  They’re the homelessness non-profit that Dominique and her father had to deal with. They didn’t respond by the time of recording.

Okay, before we go, we’re going to MacArthur Park where a team of volunteers set up a mutual aid distribution on a beautiful Sunday to provide much needed resources, support, and love to the MacArthur Park community. Phillip Kim was there and spoke to one of the volunteers, Julio Romano.

Julio: Uh, this is our team here. And it’s Team Shampoolio, uh, for lack of a better name. And we try to volunteer at least a few times a month at various places to help. Uh, and, you know, to make people feel great is super important. You can, uh, pick somebody up off the sidewalk and make them feel like a king in five, ten minutes.

And that’s a gift.

We work, um, really hard, uh, to, um, learn this skill and we figured why give it to only the people that are rich? Why not do Robin Hood and take from the rich and give to the poor? So that’s kind of what we do. We haven’t missed a, uh, a month in over two years now. And we look forward to that. It’s exciting to come and people are happy to see us too, because now they recognize us and they can rely on us.

So when you’re giving people something to rely on, that changes everything in their life because they don’t have anybody to rely on anymore. So if you can be that person, so helpful, you know, so we try to do that. We also go outside — trans outreach, um, haircuts, uh, community cuts for, for, uh, moms, for children, uh, whatever we can do, you know, all of that.

Uh, talent, love, care, all that detail that, you know, that’s why people come back to the hairdresser because we know how to make people feel good. So at this point here, it’s so important to give people that. It picks them right up. So, um, we’re just grateful that we can share that. Um, I think that it’s, uh, emotionally fulfilling to help.

Otherwise my job might be meaningless. If you know what I mean. So this is what gives us, um, you know, true, uh, feeling that we’re helping and belonging.

That was a Shampoolio volunteer talking to Phillip Kim at MacArthur Park last week.

Smogland Radio is produced by Phoenix Tso and Carla Green. I’m your host, Nancy Meza. We’re a production of LA Public Press, a non profit newsroom for Los Angeles.  Eduardo Arenas made our music, and Jaime Zacarias made our show art. Special thanks to the Robinson Space, where we record this podcast.

Additional music by Epidemic Sound.  Also, we’re a newsroom funded entirely by donations. And we’re currently having a fundraising drive. If you like the work that we do, you can support us by becoming a member at lapublicpress.org/donate.  You can also support us by leaving a review on Apple podcasts, telling your friends about us, or following us on social media.

We’re on all platforms @LAPublicPress. Thank you so much for joining us this year. We appreciate you and we hope all of you have a great holiday break. And we’ll see you in about a month in the new year for our next episode.