I am the only tenant on the Los Angeles City Council. In a city where renters make up almost two-thirds of the population, renters are routinely left out of the city’s decision-making. To make Los Angeles livable for the majority of its residents, city politicians must take renters’ rights seriously — but they’ll never choose to do it on their own. Renters have to start standing up for ourselves, which is why my office is organizing tenants whose names appear on the city’s eviction databases.

For decades, we renters were thought of as undesirables who would lower property values, so apartment buildings were routinely shunned in favor of the single-family home. Meanwhile, the remnants of redlining and racial covenants still play out in the city’s political dynamics. Although the city is diverse, neighborhoods were once strictly segregated by race and class, patterns that remain to this day. While these policies have slowly gotten better over the years, tenants continue to feel their reverberations like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

Los Angeles’s housing and homelessness crisis is one of the worst in the nation. Our catastrophic lack of multifamily housing, especially units that workers can truly afford, drives up housing costs and supercharges the gentrification of working-class communities of color. For Los Angeles residents, it’s no shock that estimates show we need half a million new units just to stabilize the market. It makes all the more sense when you learn that we haven’t built a single unit of social housing since the Dodgers came to town.