Eviction Defense Financial Aid

Crispina and Candido's home has served as a community hub for years and years warming neighbors' hearts and tummies with delicious pupusas that put the inaccessible fare of newer gentrifying restaurants around the corner to shame. Their pop-up restaurant next to the local laundromat across the street from their home is where everyone goes to get the latest gossip, find an empathetic neighbor, and continue the tradition of sharing what we now call mutual aid.

Crispina and Candido have cultivated an ad-hoc community center - but their landlord doesn't see it that way, when drastically inflated market rates could supply four times the return of a rent-stabilized agreement - if Crispina and Candido can be forced out to make way for a younger richer whiter demographic.

And so they find themselves in court fighting an intentionally serpentine draining red-tape "gotcha" process in a language they don't speak or read - all while enduring the psychological stress of trying to hold down a physically demanding small business which pays their rent and supports and uplifts their community.

But that's not all - Crispina and Candido are a drop in the bucket of displacement through evictions in our neighborhoods - with yet another tidal wave of unlawful detainers expected to be filed in early 2024 due to the lifting of Covid restrictions on rent increases.

The Northeast Local of the LA Tenants Union has supported dozens and dozens of families facing displacement through various tactics - and won. However, the theater of war of the courts is a special one in its ability to drain people's energy through its inaccessibility, its insistence on esoteric knowledge. In short, you really need a good lawyer who is *on your side* to see you through this barrier-filled lengthy process of fighting through a trial - and without one, many tenants are forced to throw their hands up in the air and take a pathetically inadequate cash-for-keys offer from a landlord whose access to resources creates an asymmetric power imbalance in the fight - the outcome of which can easily leave tenants on the street.

We have such a lawyer - a BIPOC woman and her sharp staff of her nascent solo practice who, despite intense financial payroll pressure, on top of multiple cases headed for trial, routinely stay up to the wee hours preparing for battle on behalf of tenants they've retained without ANY promise of financial compensation, simply because she and her staff understand the slow violence done to the working-class and poor primarily Spanish-speaking families who come to her bewildered by the prospect of eviction - she and her staff want to support their community.

But she and her staff need to eat too, and put their heads on a pillow under a roof at night.

And so this GoFundMe comes to you with hat in hand asking you to help us pay the very low flat rate for her office to represent Crispina and Candido, and three other tenants, who cannot afford to pay her staff to help them stay housed.

Help us prevent the displacement that leads to gentrification, the modern-day iteration of settler-colonialism - help us cull the financial resources to not give up, to fight through trial, to keep our friends, families, loved ones IN THEIR HOMES ❤

Thank you SO MUCH