THE BATTLE OF LINCOLN PLACE

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.