Every time Eduardo Jarquin, who has worked for more than 20 years as a janitor, walks out of the front door of his Koreatown apartment building in Los Angeles he sees the future across the street: A geometric white high-rise, completed in the last year, where one-bedroom apartments rent for $2,480.

Jarquin, 58, pays $900 for the studio apartment he shares with his 23-year-old son and a roommate. Jarquin’s aged building is rent controlled, keeping his rent closer to what he paid when he moved in more than a decade ago. He knows that as his neighborhood gentrifies, his low rent makes him a target for landlords hoping to bring in higher-paying tenants.

When tenants like Jarquin leave rent-controlled apartments in Los Angeles, landlords are free to set rents as high as the market will bear. Jarquin said that since a massive real estate investment firm bought his crumbling, neoclassical building in 2020, the new owners have been pressuring rent-controlled tenants to move out. An immigrant from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, Jarquin had felt at home in the 40-unit property when its residents were almost entirely other Mexican and Central American immigrants; now, just six of the original residents he knew remain.

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