Second in a series
Re “Activist Daytona Organizes Tenants – Rent Control Is Their Goal”
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A rent control story cannot be written in Culver City in these times without recognizing that last summer two low-income tenants suddenly died shortly after their rents underwent rocket raises likely beyond their modest reach.
Powerful and loud, the anti-rent control corner immediately and predictably responded. “You can’t prove there was a connection,” was the unanimous howl from City Hall.
However, the deaths of two ordinary persons that otherwise would have passed without notice, spurred a renewed – and now expanding – interest in establishing rent control rules in a community that successfully has avoided all such strictures.
Enter Shireen Daytona. Just days ago, Ms. Daytona organized what may be a landmark, www.CulverCityRentControl.com, which she intends to be the instrument that finally brings pricing discipline to under-siege tenants.
A laser-focused activist, last year she generated a one-person lightning storm in the usually placid corridors of City Hall, where voices traditionally are not raised.
Overnight last spring, Ms. Daytona was transformed by City Hall bureaucrats into the most feared/dreaded personality to test their rusty mettle in years.
A deafening clap of thunder should have been heard on the evening in May she was selected as an alternate to the Landlord Tenant Mediation Board.
Her insistence on answers to common-sense, seeming softball questions made bureaucrats wish they had gone on a mass and long-term vacation.
She issued probing inquiries about renting and housing.
Stunned by some answers, dismayed by others, she taught veteran comfies at City Hall to sit no farther back than the edges of their chairs when she sought seldom-pursued information.
She composed no-nonsense emails, and she wanted answers, full, efficient ones.
Bureaucrats did not want to take Ms. Daytona seriously. They had seen activists. They had suffered gadflies. But this woman was starkly, and muscularly, different from the crowd.
She demanded direct responses, not long-delayed shoulder movements. A businesswoman, she refused to accept vague, brusque shrugs, which seemed to be the traditional pattern.
Denizens of City Hall, accustomed to sailing through their workdays, began scootching around in their suddenly crowded chairs when her emails and telephone calls struck.
Sometimes they answered her snippily, as if she were a no one, standing, palms up, on a freeway off-ramp.
That is when they responded her at all.
Comfortable bureaucrats could not be bothered with urgent challenges, especially from one as lowly as a mere renter who had not had the decency to be popularly elected to office.
By the last available census, 45 percent of Culver City residents are tenants. Rent control advocates say they live powerlessly, at the mercy of sometimes-authoritarian landlords.
Ms. Daytona is determined to bring them relief with the aid of her online petition:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/110/202/391/culver-city-residents-demand-rent-controlstablization-ordinances-tenants-rights/
(To be continued)
