Editor’s note: This is part of our “My LA” series — a look at how changing demographics are shifting culture in LA’s historic neighborhoods and communities — told by the people from those communities.

It was June 2020, three months into the pandemic, when I made the leap from my childhood bedroom in Hoboken, New Jersey, to LA. I had leverage. Landlords were under pressure, the city was in flux, and the market had opened just enough for me to slip through.

After a month in the USC area, subletting a bare room for $600, and five months in a shady Boyle Heights situation where the person collecting my rent wasn’t paying the actual landlord, I landed somewhere I did not expect: a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in West Adams at $950 a month.

The tenants before me were a Black couple who had just bought their first house. They left me their old couch.

My landlords were older Black women, a mother and daughter — Mrs. Johnson and Rene — whose family owned three properties side by side. On the left was an old mansion. In the middle, a home for extended family. On the right was our building, more utilitarian and stripped down. That was where I lived.

The building housed people on the margins: formerly incarcerated neighbors, working people, a social worker who spent her days helping financially vulnerable people. One neighbor had run with Freeway Rick Ross. Another worked the docks in Long Beach.

I loved it. I was lucky.

Then Rene called me over to her place.

The buyout

Her home was all black marble and mirrors, the kind of home that had seen a lot of parties. An elderly German Shepherd stood watch at the door. There was a large photo of the Obamas on the coffee table.

She seemed nervous that day. Off. More formal than usual.

The building where I lived was getting too expensive to maintain, she told me. A burst pipe downstairs had been so severe that the Johnsons put the affected tenants up in a hotel for more than a month. The roof. The upkeep. They were tired.

Then she handed me the Rent Stabilization Ordinance buyout form.

“I appreciate however much time I was and am allowed here,” I said, in my normally cool way.

She offered me $10,000. Roughly three months of rent and utilities at local market rates.

I was a Cash for Keys statistic.

The takeover

I went for a walk to take in the neighborhood, not knowing how much time I had left in my first real apartment — in LA or anywhere. And what I saw, once I started looking, stopped me cold.

There they were, on nearly every block: three- and four-story rectangular structures coated in red and white, flat-faced and soulless, stacked like modular filing cabinets between the Craftsman homes and bungalows that had long defined the neighborhood’s character.

One company’s name appeared again and again on the signage.

Tripalink.

In 2013, Donghao Li arrived from China to pursue a master’s degree in financial engineering at USC. He spent a month and a half searching for housing online across a 12-hour time difference and eventually signed a lease on a room in a seven-bedroom, two-bathroom house for $750 a month — nothing included, no furniture.

He found it too expensive.

Three years later, he co-founded Tripalink with business partner Patrick Liang. The model was simple: serve international students looking for housing near USC, but provide the furniture and simplify the process via a slick app. Co-living for young professionals. WeWork, but for bedrooms.

Tripalink has not responded to a request for comment. But according to its website, Tripalink rooms in Los Angeles often start around $1,100. The company says it has grown to more than 15,000 units across 20 North American cities, with more than 100 projects in major urban markets. It has also acquired Varsity, a student housing company, and raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, according to public reports.

And in my neighborhood, Tripalink managed buildings seemed to be everywhere.

Their gray-box aesthetic felt like an interruption, a kind of architectural override, something antithetical to the older homes around them. Not a neighborhood language, but a neighborhood takeover.

The history of West Adams 

In the 1930s, West Adams was Sugar Hill — the West Coast’s answer to Harlem, a neighborhood of Black prominence. Ray Charles, Joe Louis, Little Richard, Hattie McDaniel and Lionel Hampton walked these streets. This was the advent of Black Hollywood. This was where Thurgood Marshall and Loren Miller challenged racially restrictive housing covenants,  which helped lay the groundwork for later fair-housing protections.

McDaniel, the first Black person to win an Oscar, purchased her home at 2203 S. Harvard Blvd. in 1941, a year after winning Best Supporting Actress for “Gone With the Wind.” Her home became a sanctuary and social club. Because Black performers were barred from white-owned hotels, clubs and restaurants across Los Angeles, McDaniel opened her doors. Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson came to her.

McDaniel was the child of formerly enslaved people. Her father, a Civil War veteran, spent the rest of his life with bone fragments and infection from a jaw wound he received fighting for the Union and was denied pension benefits at 70 for lacking documentation of his birth.

In 1943, white homeowners in the area formed the West Adams Heights Improvement Association and sued the Black residents of Sugar Hill for violating racial covenants. McDaniel, then in a public feud with NAACP President Walter White over her Mammy roles, used her prominence to organize resistance directly, holding meetings in her home and hiring NAACP attorney Miller. On Dec. 5, 1945, with more than 200 allies present, Miller successfully argued the covenants were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

It was a short-lived victory. 

Within years, the California Highway Commission built the I-10 through the heart of Sugar Hill. As the LA Sentinel noted at the time, the route could have avoided the neighborhood — it would have only required cutting through USC’s fraternity and sorority row instead.

Sorority and fraternity row still stands.

The Aftermath

USC is four miles from Skid Row. Recently embroiled in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, in which wealthy parents bribed members of the athletics department to fabricate admissions criteria for their unqualified children, the school is a concentrated pipeline into the political and financial elite. According to a 2025 report by the school, only 6% of its students are Black. 

Four miles from Skid Row, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art — built on USC’s 11.5-acre campus for $1 billion — is essentially a spaceship telling the neighborhood’s residents to look somewhere else for affordable housing.

One billion dollars, four miles from Skid Row.

Tripalink’s gray boxes aren’t an accident. They’re infrastructure for a particular kind of person, built on top of the neighborhood that Hattie McDaniel fought to hold.

A few months before I was handed my buyout form, a foot chase on my block turned into a police pursuit. My neighbor Roland wasn’t too surprised. “Those folk are squatting across the street,” he said — as if the squatting and the chaos were the same thing, even though Roland himself had once been incarcerated. People in desperate circumstances do desperate things.

The next day, demolition signs appeared on that building.

For the following weeks, I heard everything: yelling, crying, glass shattering. Sometimes all at once. Every night. Men, women, children, pets. For days, a dog howled in the middle of the night. You could feel its distress. It was sometimes horrific. It was always heartbreaking.

I had Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” on repeat that month — “We Cry Together” especially, the song that starts with “this is what the world sounds like” before a couple tears each other apart. One morning, at 6 a.m., a young Black couple from across the street walked the length of the block arguing, crossing into what had become, block by block, gentrified terrain.

A few doors down, an older Black woman with advanced dementia sat on her porch. She had the most electric smile. I’d wave, and she’d wave back. As the couple’s argument moved past her, I thought about everything she might have chosen to forget — on that block alone.

Then one day, the building was gone. Flattened.

The construction sounds started a few days later: welding, sawing, equipment beeps. I didn’t need to see the sign to know. 

Tripalink was taking up real estate in my bedroom window.

Is your neighborhood changing? We want to hear your story. Whether you’ve lived on your block for forty years or four, we want to know: What does “home” mean to you right now?

Share a brief memory or a thought on how your neighborhood is changing with us at pitches@thelalocal.org. We’ll feature some of our favorite responses in our newsletter, and if your story sparks something deeper, we may reach out to commission a full-length piece (yes, we pay our writers!)