People Post is a space for opinion pieces, letters to the editor and guest submissions from members of the Long Beach community. The following is an op-ed submitted by a reader and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Long Beach Post.
What separates being “empowered” from being “exploited”? If you consult Wiktionary, the free dictionary, empowered is defined as “having been given the power to make choices relevant to one’s situation”, whereas exploited is defined as being “used for someone else advantage”. To most, the difference between the two is strikingly obvious. But in the murky, grey pools of political action, that line is constantly blurred.
Take for example LiBRE, Long Beach Residents Empowered; an openly socialist “grassroots organizing group advancing justice in disadvantaged communities”. They are but one of many similar sounding, innocuously named organizations who have hitched their ride to the so-called “democratic-socialist” tsunami, gaining momentum along the Southern California coast. Recently LiBRE has been amongst the very loud crowd advocating for “renter’s rights” and “tenant protections” which tends to be just a less objectionable way of saying “rent control”. How could anyone be opposed to protecting 60 percent of the population?
If you are a local political junkie, there is no doubt you know about the protest at Plymouth West that went down this Tuesday. LiBRE activists challenged property management firm LOMCO on their treatment of a senior citizen who goes by the name Bobbie. The familiar claim was that Bobbie was being wrongfully evicted by greedy landlords who refused to maintain her property and allowed the spread of bedbugs and poor housing conditions. In truth, Bobby revealed she refused access to pest control administrators, though she was given ample notice by LOMCO. The tenant was initially convinced to participate in a class action lawsuit, from which their lawyers and tenants made a pretty penny from the settlement. Following that, LiBRE caught wind of her troubles, and decided to make her their poster girl.
Eventually, due to the online notoriety of the issue, and the inaction of political action, Robert Fox of the Council of Neighborhood Organizations decided to intervene. In hours, he negotiated a memorandum of understanding between both parties, allowing Bobby to retain her residence, the landlord to correctly “clean the unit up to the standards required for habitable living as governed by Code,” in order for both parties to “walk into the future with friendly hearts and that all misunderstandings of the past may be laid to rest”. Above all things, Bobbie just wanted to stay in her home.
While bringing visibility to issues such as this is a noble and much needed service, we need more people who are willing to do the work, and compromises such as this are much more complicated than chanting into a megaphone and waving a sign. The work that needs to be done is to properly educate tenants to their bundle of rights, and to encourage positive relationships between renters and the managers of the property in which they reside. It would be nice if we could get back to those days where people of different views and backgrounds can disagree, but still respect each other and the law under which we operate.
This brings us back to the initial question; where is the line between empowerment and exploitation? Is it really empowerment to take the readily solvable problem of a frail old lady, and turn it into political theater? Without intervention by the Council of Neighborhood Organizations, Bobbie would be out on the street and would have lost her Section 8 housing vouchers due to the nature of the eviction. What LiBRE, Housing Long Beach, and other “renter’s rights” zealots do, is create artificial division between tenants and landlords to create political gains for themselves, while turning a blind eye to the consequences that will impact the lives of their designated straw dogs.
They’ve merely recycled the never-ending, reductionist diatribe of the “oppressors versus the oppressed” that echoes all across our country, when in reality it is never that simple. If these groups are for renter’s rights, why do they never seem to tell renters what their rights actually are? Because they are more interested in pushing their collective political agenda than helping individual people in need. By simply educating those they claim they want to help, LiBRE would render itself worthless, because knowledge is empowerment in its purest form. These groups reject dialogue and communication, for mediation is toxic to their method of isolating vulnerable people, capitalizing on the nature of their problems for the benefit of their movement, and tossing them to the side. Citizens need to be made aware of this strategy so that the city can see fewer Long Beach residents exploited.