Tenants Call for Rent Strike to Protest Parking Ban Plan

A call for a rent strike brought cheers Thursday night from about 100 residents of the Minnie-Standard apartments who gathered to protest their landlords’ push to outlaw street parking.

While the owners of the sprawling apartment complex say outlawing curbside parking will cut down on congestion and street crime, many of the renters call the ban effort another tactic to rid the complex of large, low-income families living in single units.

“This is being done to make a profit, not to make the streets safer,” nine-year resident Ascension Briseno told the crowd of mostly families. “This is being done so they can charge families for additional parking. (The landlords) want to steal our money.”

Briseno, 51, became the informal leader of reform campaigns in the area when his lawsuit last year blocked Santa Ana’s overcrowding ordinance.

Kris Kakkar, 40, of Santa Ana, who owns about 80% of the complex’s 527 units through various partnerships, was not present at the meeting. However, he said earlier in the day that a rent strike would be “like blackmail.” He also said he would be “surprised if any of the residents agree because we’ve turned the area around” since purchasing interests in 1988.

The complex runs the length of Minnie and Standard streets between Grant Street to the north and McFadden Avenue to the south. It has 482 parking spaces, 462 of which have been assigned to specific residents, with no more than one space per unit, Kakkar said. He also said the units average about six residents each, which would put the complex’s population at more than 3,000 people.

The residents argue that closing down the six blocks of curbside space would leave multiple-car families with no options. That, combined with what Briseno said is the general disrepair and poor conditions in the apartments, makes a strike the only effective avenue for protest, he said.

“We must get (Kakkar) to listen; we must find a way to get these things done,” he said.

City plans to establish a no-parking zone were put on hold when the residents’ protest arose this week. Protest organizers said a city official would attend the meeting Thursday, but none appeared.

Enrique Male, Kakkar’s apartment manager, told the boisterous crowd that ending curbside parking would make the streets safer for the community’s children and would hamper drug dealers who frequently make curbside deals. But a burst of applause greeted a rebuttal from a woman in the crowd who said that drugs are sold in alleys, not from cars.

Tempers were running high earlier in the day because some curbs along Minnie Street were painted red just hours before the scheduled meeting, a move seen by some renters as a sign of bad faith by the city. But City Traffic Engineer T. C. Sutaria said his crews were not responsible for the paint job.

“We had plans to paint there,” Sutaria said, “but some opposition arose so we postponed the painting until we could hear from the people who live there.”

Sutaria said city officials had contacted Kakkar, who they believed was responsible, and told him that if by Monday the curb was not repainted white, city workers would assume the task and bill him for it. Kakkar said he had no knowledge of the curb painting.