Red flags over dollar$ as workers in LA protest racist SoFi

INGLEWOOD, CA. February 13 - In the shadow of the newly-built $5 billion SoFi Stadium, home of the LA Rams football team and host to Super Bowl 56, working-class tenants in a local apartment complex are organizing together to secure their class interests. They are fighting evictions, and putting their rent money towards the cost of basic repairs instead of paying their blood-sucking slumlord, Alfa Investments. This struggle has the potential to spread in this city torn apart by racist unemployment, gentrification, homelessness and poverty. 

Under capitalism, everything that the working class needs to live is tainted and poisoned by the practice of commodity exchange. Whether it is the need for decent and safe housing, food, or clothing, capitalism puts a price tag on it.

Working class tenants fight back 

Two Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been active in the Lennox-Inglewood Tenants’ Union (LITU), which has organized for over two years in an apartment building across from SoFi. At the first tenants’ meeting in the complex courtyard, the slumlord called the cops to try and scare off the union and intimidate the tenants. This tactic failed. Although the pandemic made visiting much more difficult, the LITU organizers persevered. After the tenants’ demands for decent housing were ignored by Alfa, and one tenant was threatened with eviction, they decided to sharpen the struggle.

 LITU members and some tenants from the building rallied in front of the Courthouse to support the tenant threatened with eviction. One LITU member went into the courtroom and advocated for her. The judge postponed her case for two months. Then the tenants decided to work with a local Los Angeles group opposed to the 2028 Olympics, which is slated to take place at SoFi and many other locations around Los Angeles. 

The No Olympics group produced a short film featuring three tenants who talked about their rundown, rodent and roach-infested apartments, and the slumlord’s failure to adequately exterminate and make the necessary repairs. One tenant has been living without a stove or lock on his front door for over a year; another’s carpet is infested with mold. Shoddy “repairs” in her apartment further reflect the racist arrogance and neglect of the slumlord. The film has helped LITU raise funds to buy materials needed for repairs and attract volunteers willing to donate skilled labor to make them.

Some of the tenants we’re working with have been regularly getting copies of CHALLENGE. The Party’s newspaper has helped them see through the hype surrounding SoFi and put Inglewood’s racist gentrification into a broader context of why it is inevitable that “redevelopment” under capitalism will always serve the needs of the billionaires and banks who profit off these schemes. We have also shared our Paper and Party ideas with several LITU members. Communist ideas have generally been well-received.

Bosses and politicians gang up to build SoFi 

In addition to these rotten conditions, workers are paying exorbitant rents. Since the decision from the National Football League (NFL) in January 2016 approving the Rams move from St. Louis to Inglewood, average rents skyrocketed, increasing almost 60 percent  (LA Times, 2/9). 

Inglewood’s rent control ordinance, not passed until November 2019, allows annual “cost of living” rent increases up to California’s 10 percent limit and vacancy decontrol, giving landlords a perverse incentive to drive out current tenants and raise rents to “market” levels. Alfa’s calculation that it can charge much more if it drives out the current tenants is behind its refusal to make repairs. The collaboration of Inglewood’s Mayor James Butts and the City Council with investment companies like Alfa and their shameless promotion of SoFi as a savior for the largely Black and Latin population of Inglewood have led to increased homelessness and an exodus of working class families who can no longer afford to live here.

One Inglewood Code Enforcement officer told a complaining tenant there’s “nothing we can do” about dangerously soft and sinking floorboards. Another cited Alfa’s violations, but then never followed through to check if repairs were actually made (they weren’t). These attitudes contrast with Butts’ groveling towards multi-billionaire Rams owner Stan Kroenke. According to Kroenke, at his first meeting with Butts in 2013 about the prospect of the new stadium “[h]e (Butts) just said very simply, ‘What do you need?’” (USA Today, 2/8).     

This stark picture of non-stop racist attacks on the working class has only been magnified by the obscene spectacle of this year’s Super Bowl. The most expensive single ticket for this year’s extravaganza was $34,000, enough to pay rent for one of the complex’s tenants for almost two years. The entire area within one mile of the Stadium was cordoned off and homeless encampments swept away. The area was then flooded with local cops, Homeland Security, FBI and ICE officers, joined overhead by Blackhawk Helicopters, all supposedly to “protect the public health” and prevent a “terrorist attack”.

Working class tenants will never get justice in the bosses’ courts or from the bosses’ legislatures. The principle of making profit off of private property is ingrained in the U.S. Constitution and is fundamental to capitalism. A communist revolution will end that practice, and a communist society will mobilize our class to build all the housing that the working class needs worldwide. No longer will we pay for something as fundamental as a place to live or be put out on the street if we can’t. Join the fight for that world by joining PLP!