"In October of 2018, Leslie Hernandez stood in the hallway of her building, an olive-green stucco and concrete complex in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, trying to communicate with her neighbor Benson Lai, an elder in his early 60s and a monolingual Cantonese speaker. She held up an official notice of a rent increase, which had been given to tenants throughout the building, and tore it in half. Then she took the pieces and tore those too. Lai’s “okay” in response is one origin story for the Hillside Villa Tenants Association. For over two years now, Leslie and more than 60 other households in the Hillside Villa Apartments have been organizing in three languages—English, Spanish, and Cantonese—to reject rent increases of up to 200 percent and stay in their homes. It’s a fight they’d never thought they’d have to take on: For 30 years, their building had been officially designated as Affordable Housing. Though privately owned, Hillside Villa’s 124 apartments were developed through a combination of subsidized loans and tax breaks, tied to a 30-year covenant to keep rents low. But that clock ran out in 2019."