A powerful and relevant account of greed, gentrification, housing insecurity, and collective action.
An activist and journalist recounts the story of a mass eviction of tenants from a Los Angeles apartment complex in this nonfiction book.
Located in the Venice neighborhood of LA, Lincoln Place apartments provided affordable housing to middle-class families on fixed incomes for a half-century, with many of the residents in the early 2000s having lived there for decades. Protected by LA’s rent control laws, the complex’s tenants tended “to stay put once they had moved in,” as rents for new housing skyrocketed in Venice starting in the 1980s. Then, one day in December 2005, just weeks before Christmas, Lincoln Place’s 65 adults and 21 children were suddenly evicted from their homes in the “largest single-day lockout in Los Angeles history.” The locks on their doors were changed that very day, and they were only allowed to come back to retrieve their possessions after signing up for a two-hour time slot approved by the property’s management. Using the brute force of the sheriff’s department to enforce the evictions, Lincoln Place had found an apparent way around the city’s stringent rent control laws. The complex utilized a loophole in the Ellis Act, which allowed for mass evictions if the landlord removed all residences from the rental market. A housing activist from Venice, Hathaway tells the story of the building’s tenants with a passionate, righteous indignation, from their harrowing eviction and homelessness to their tenacious, decadelong legal battle with the property’s corporate owners. As a journalist whose work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the author is a skilled storyteller and pays close attention to the legal minutiae of both sides in the Lincoln Place trials. And while his independent research through newspaper accounts and trial records is impressive and is backed by ample citations, the strength of the volume comes from interviews with the tenants themselves and direct eyewitness accounts. At nearly 460 pages, the book is at times unwieldy, but in an era when the price of housing continues to rise, it tells a timely and important story.
A powerful and relevant account of greed, gentrification, housing insecurity, and collective action.Pub Date: July 15, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 543
Publisher: Crania Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
