Suburban Radicals
Tenant organizing in Ventura County with Sam Gunn
The area surrounding the sprawling city of Los Angeles is changing, from the onset of private equity firms buying up houses in the suburbs, to the waves of gentrification happening in LA shifting housing costs in nearby counties. We talked with SoCal native Sam to learn about housing dynamics, foundation building, subversive strategies, and re-discovering hometowns.
Xiaowei Wang:
Could you introduce yourself?
Sam Gunn:
My name is Sam Gunn. I’m originally from Oak Park, California. I went to school and work in the Bay Area, and I've been back in my hometown of Oak Park since March 2020. Since then, I found Logic School, participated in it, and had a phenomenal time. For my final project, I wanted to get involved with local tenant organizing. That led me to find the Ventura Tenants Union. I've been working with them for the past couple months, getting more involved with the organization. My initial thought was that I would kind of merge the Anti-Eviction Mapping project efforts with whatever Ventura Tenants Union had going on at the time. But after talking with them further, [we’ve realized that] there's some much more foundational work that needs to be done to get a more solid base and that the mapping project is a great long-term goal. A lot of the work so far has been solidifying an onboarding process and trying to get the organization website up. We did our first radio interview, which was a lot of fun, and it's been great so far.
Xiaowei:
Do you want to talk a little bit about how you started getting involved? What was that process like for you, on a personal level?
Sam:
Totally. I'm definitely still very early on in my political and activist development. It was really after college that I began to engage more critically with texts and looking for ways to apply those ideas. I came across the Ventura Tenants Union on social media. I was initially very cynical about my hometown, but of course, as I should have expected, there are plenty of folks who are advocating for tenants’ rights, and getting involved felt like a very personal, transformative process for me because, first, it was a way for me to explore ideas that felt really new to me. Second, it gave me a new lens through which to see my hometown, which I was initially dismissive and skeptical of. Now I feel like there are a lot of people doing a lot of really important work. It's just breathed new life into my experience being here.
Xiaowei:
For people who have not been to Ventura County or SoCal, where does the cynicism come from?
Sam:
For me, initially, it came from just being a high schooler in the suburbs, feeling isolated from the outside world. I mean, our nickname for Oak Park is "The Bubble," which I'm sure is true of many suburbs, and perhaps that colloquially translates all over. But there really is this sense of isolation, and for a lot of social gatherings, people would drive to LA—so Oak Park just felt like its own world. Being in high school, even more so, I had that sense of wanting to enter the world as a more full person and interact with everything.
When I became more politically minded, I started to understand the history behind this type of geography, the architecture, the policies, and its intentions. My cynicism came from, "Well, this is how this space is constructed," essentially assuming that progress could not be made, that "The Bubble" had been fully formed and could not be changed. But of course, as new people interact with these old spaces, they bring new ideas. Their ideas are even formed and shaped by ways that they experience suburban culture and how it might be deficient for them or how they might want something more. Revisiting or re-examining the space as a potential backdrop for more politically engaged ideas has been really, really cool.
Tangentially related, I've been trying to form a Fire Safety Council in Oak Park, which is very interesting, because it's a good middle ground for political action, where there’s a community of people each wanting to protect their own individual property. The current science and methodology behind keeping your house safe is actually much more related to brush and debris that is immediately around your house rather than encroaching upon open space to do clearance and controlled burns and whatnot. But once a house catches fire, the debris and the temperature at which it burns is so much greater that it greatly increases the chance of other homes burning. It's an interesting melding of people being individually minded but also communally minded, where they have to be invested in the fire safety of their neighbors’ houses, so they cannot just stop at their own property boundaries. You have to be thinking outside of that scope, and ideologically it's an easy conduit for that broader thought, where you have to be thinking on a communal level, at the very least. Seeing that as a way to re-examine people's ideologies about why they exist in a suburban context and what that means. I see it as very related to the Tenants Union effort, which is maybe a further manifestation of that.
Xiaowei:
What does the landscape of tenants organizing, rentals, and housing look like in Ventura County?
Sam:
There are definitely two competing ideas of the county. One is, as renters are being pushed out of LA, they are coming to new and rapidly gentrifying areas of the county, namely Oxnard and the city of Ventura, both of which are farther north up the coast. I believe it was the city of Ventura that saw the fourth-highest rent increases in the country, percentage wise. So an incredible increase in housing costs, as well as increased corporate land developments, corporate land ownership, and many small landlords cashing out and selling their properties—a very classic case of gentrification. As it accelerates in the city and county of Los Angeles, it's spreading farther and farther outside LA city areas. In juxtaposition with the rental economy and gentrification are the suburban neighborhoods, which are very closed off to development of any kind. Current state legislation requires that cities zone for housing across an economic spectrum, from low to lowest to medium to high. But again, the mandates are only for zoning, and much of what is constructed is typically only the highest-rent housing that is zoned. There's also a really strong opposition to development of any kind in the suburbs. It's tough to understand what amount of that is fueled by a commitment to open space and what is motivated by more racist, classist ideas. But to watch the rhetoric up close, where there's a lot of deference to niche environmental and traffic codes and prevention of development, again, for these reasons, has challenged my conventional ideas and allowed me to see the more nuanced ways that suburbs maintain their cloistered posture and prevent people from having dignified housing.
Xiaowei:
What has organizing in your hometown been like? What do your parents think? Have there been ripple effects in terms of your day-to-day community?
Sam:
It's been a very interesting and really fulfilling process. Back in November of 2020, before Logic School, my mom and I were initially curious about fire safety in the community. We went door to door and spoke to our neighbors about what we could do. Over time, that developed into the Fire Safety Council effort. I had the opportunity to attend a local fire safety town hall that included firefighters, police officials, as well as environmental consultants talking about not just Oak Park, but the county. There was even a representative from San Diego. It was really an interdisciplinary meetup. Also the local high school's fire club, which was great. I introduced myself to one of the lead reporters at The Acorn—the local newspaper—and I recognized the reporter because his face is on their advertisement for their podcasts. He seemed surprised—I was like, "Thanks for all your reporting," because he's been following all the housing meeting stuff. He's been instrumental to my understanding of the town. I don't want to speak too generally, but I got the sense that even though he's doing the urgent, in-depth reporting, people aren't synthesizing that information, and again, thinking on that broader scale. Being able to speak with him was really cool, to just make that connection.
In terms of my immediate discussion, I think my parents… Certainly these are issues they weren't necessarily thinking about, so it's been really interesting and constructive to have these types of in-depth conversations with them. My mom actually accompanied me to one of the farmer's market–type festivals in the city of Ventura. Even though it's in the same county, it's a forty- or fifty-minute drive, but she came with me just to see what it was all about. It's been really nice to get their support or even to have them lend an ear. It has really meant a lot. I think now that we've had those conversations, they're starting to see the subtle ways that it's affecting even Oak Park.
For instance, one of our neighbors just sold his house for a million cash to, like, BlackRock, or supposedly, as the rumor had it. And people on my street are upset. Because, well, I'd have to dig into more detail, but I suppose it's because the whole town has a very neighborhood type of vibe, and so the opposition to development is also in part an opposition to predatory corporate landlord investments. What’s missing, of course, is [the understanding] that the cloistered nature of the neighborhood creates fertile ground for investment opportunities. I think my goal is to get people in my inner and increasingly outer circle more attuned to the subtle ways that things change. Additionally, I got to attend the Oak Park Municipal Advisory Council meeting, the governing body of Oak Park that serves as an intermediary between the unincorporated land of Oak Park and the county of Ventura. Being in that one meeting and seeing the scope of their concerns within the meeting—it felt a little disheartening to see how narrow it was.
Anyways, it was really interesting to see all of these things at play. It feels like people really see the problem of gentrification and housing instability and the housing crisis as something that is over there, and they live here, because it's a way to not have to think about it. But as it approaches, you feel that tension. I feel by the time it fully arrives, unless something is done, I get the sense that our community isn't prepared to handle it, at least in a humane way. I fear that the way it will be handled is just to increase policing of unhoused people to further displace those who have been economically disenfranchised. It's an imperative to act swiftly to even open up the possibility that our community response would be something other than just an increase in displacement and incarceration.
Xiaowei:
I'm curious if you want to talk about your day-to-day involvement with VTU. What’s that been like?
Sam:
So, day to day, I do a lot of administrative foundational work like getting a Slack server set up or a good onboarding process. One of our other members had the great idea to do interviews with people who are interested in joining. We're still growing, and it's feasible at our current scale to really engage with people who are interested in becoming a part of VTU because there's so much work that can and needs to be done. For people who have varying capacities and skills, we want to provide an opportunity for them to contribute in a meaningful way. The interview process is more of a getting-to-know-your-interests. Over the last few meetings, we've been talking about that.
I've also started setting up the website. I'm actually a pretty inexperienced frontend developer, and I'm also a very, very bad designer. It's a bit of a struggle with WordPress, but it’s important to get the infrastructure set up so that people who are curious about tenants’ rights in Ventura are coming to our page and finding good stuff. A lot of the members of VTU are part of other organizations as well, so much of the work is also standing in solidarity with other orgs. There was recently a demonstration at Julia Brownley's house about Congress's inaction with the eviction moratorium. One of our other members spearheaded a fundraiser for a really vocal activist in the community. She was under threat of losing her housing—her landlord was not renewing their lease and didn't give the proper notice. She's receiving the Housing Choice Voucher, Section 8, and we've gotten the landlord to produce, in writing, a ninety-day notice, which is really good and definitely feels like a win.
Xiaowei:
Do people at your day job know about your organizing work?
Sam:
No. It's still definitely at a point where they're not really intersecting. There's plenty of analysis and work to be done with regards to big tech’s impact on housing. But I'm anticipating that if they were ever to find out—not that it's some big secret—but I hope it's a meeting in the middle, where the tenants union will be interacting with large capital institutions in a confrontational way at some point. At this point, my job is pretty separate from the work that I do with the tenants union.
Xiaowei:
How are you feeling about the future of your work with VTU? What does the future hold for you?
Sam:
I'm feeling really optimistic. I really think our membership is super committed. It's been really an interesting experience to be a part of an organization that feels like it's in its very earliest stages. I hope to continue my involvement with tenants’ rights when I go back up to the Bay Area and interact with those more mature tenants unions, seeing how they maneuver and hopefully bringing that resource back to VTU.
Regardless of how active I'm able to stay in a remote capacity, I have a lot of optimism about the future of the organization because it is something that's so necessary, and I think there are going to be a lot of people who, unfortunately, are going to be increasingly placed in this economically desperate situation. I really hope that we can not only capture that need, but also do justice to it. Not just be a place to vent but be a place to really express collective power. It's one thing to make astute observations about housing, but it's another thing to actually produce results for people, and I think everybody's really focused on trying to be that organization producing results and to hold ourselves to a high standard.
I'm just super excited. I'm feeling hopeful. I'm feeling nervous. There's a lot at stake. What's important for me to keep in mind is I want to maintain that level of commitment because this is, for as much as it is something that I genuinely enjoy, it's something that people really need and will come to rely on. There's that real responsibility that comes with being involved in an organization that is primarily aiming to produce results for people, to understand and take on that responsibility and understand what my capacity to provide that is. Maintaining that sustainability, to be a consistent resource for people rather than somebody who burns out quickly. I really want to be in this for the long haul and develop my own personal skills in tandem with the organization building power so that I can remain effective for a long time. That's the goal.
Xiaowei:
I love that. It’s the opposite of "work really hard and burn out,” which is usually the pathway for start-up rocket ships.
Sam:
It's a long game.
Sam Gunn (they/them) is a tech worker learning how to build community and fight for housing justice. Find Sam at https://twitter.com/_sam_gunn
Further resources:
LA Tenants Union instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latenants/
Ventura Tenants Union on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/venturatenantsunion/
All Things 805 episode, with Ventura Tenants Union https://spoti.fi/3yOdXHr