TIC’d Off

ON A THURSDAY EVENING in June of 2021, as golden hour settled and the sun slid west, I toured an apartment in East Hollywood. Housed in a 1931 Spanish colonial revival, the one-bedroom dwelling opened up into a bright white living room with a decorative, though decommissioned, fireplace and original hardwood floors. An elegant jute rug was laid over them. Light streamed through paned French windows, and in the kitchen there were terra-cotta floor tiles, butcher block wooden counters, and just enough space for a small table and some chairs.

The tell, I later realized, was all the blue—specifically, a dusty slate blue that bordered every edge: window frames, door surrounds, ceiling beams. The hue itself softened the room, as if to promise respite to the kind of occupant who might spend long hours under the harsh light of a computer screen.

As I made my way through the apartment, a woman in a breezy linen dress motioned me toward the patio, where she was telling a young couple about the sense of “community” the courtyard inspired. From outside, one could see even more blue on the building’s façade. It accentuated the casement window sashes and the mullions and the wooden eyebrows above the balcony. The woman drew nearer to me, then handed me a glossy brochure labeled A Tenants in Common Field Guide and said if I had further questions, I might find answers there.

Just months before I stepped into the East Hollywood apartment, posing as a potential buyer, it had housed a rent-stabilized tenant. A quick flip later, it was now an entry-level homeownership opportunity priced at $499,000, much cheaper than any other house for sale within five miles.

After browsing more tenants in common properties (TICs)—and talking to the tenants who were evicted in order to sell them—I would come to refer to the dusty slate blue as the palette of displacement. Much like how Neutraface numerals signal gentrification, this blue tells its own story of speculation, eviction, and the erosion of affordable housing.

TIC STANDS, MISLEADINGLY, for a form of property ownership, most common in California, that allows a group of people to pool their resources and buy an apartment building collectively. The TIC field guide likens this arrangement to that of condominiums, but unlike a condo, the property isn’t legally subdivided into separate parcels. There is only one title, and to designate which unit each person has the right to occupy, the co-owners sign a “tenants in common agreement.” The purchase is ultimately financed through fractional loans designed to protect each co-owner’s share of the property in the event that another defaults.

To Elizabeth McDonald, the architect of Los Angeles’s TIC market and the woman I met that Thursday in June, TICs are a solution to the affordable housing crisis, which, as she tells it, has trapped the millennial middle class in the unfortunate situation of renting. With the median home in LA priced at $1 million, expectant homebuyers are often priced out of the market. TICs are a way in, and since 2017, the boutique real estate brokerage McDonald founded, The Rental Girl, has spread the TIC message to sixty so-called “communities” in the city and county, at once deed-bound and contrived.

McDonald, who has short, cropped waves and a casual-chic sense of dress, has cultivated an image of The Rental Girl, and by extension herself, as LA’s TIC “pioneer”—a description that appears twice in the field guide. Affordable housing, she insists, is her calling, and she has been featured in local and national media, waxing poetic about the panacean promise of TICs. By her own account, she entered the TIC market as a buyer: When her Burbank landlord raised the rent by $300, she resolved to find a way to never again be caught in such a situation. “I spoke to my two brothers and we ended up pooling our resources together and buying a multiunit apartment building,” she writes. “We got on one loan together, we each moved into one apartment unit, and we held title as Tenants in Common.”

The Rental Girl, with McDonald at the helm, sold its first TIC in 2017, a Spanish fourplex in Silver Lake. And in the years since, the company has tallied more than 400 TIC sales, with another 104 expected this year. Although other firms have followed its lead, carving out their own corners of the niche TIC market, The Rental Girl remains “the gold standard,” commanding 60 percent of all TIC sales in 2024.

Spotting a Rental Girl TIC requires no signage, only a basic sense for colorways. Most prominent is the combination of white wash and slate blue trim, the latter articulating doors; columns; window sashes; mullions and muntins; balustrades and spindle work; barge boards, bellybands, rafter tails, and exposed roof brackets; and other decorative touches that characterize early twentieth-century Spanish colonial or Craftsman houses and bungalows—an architectural type that also features as a signature of the Rental Girl TIC, especially those set around a shared courtyard, each with a private entrance and intimate interiors that offer the illusion of a home of one’s own.

The look has spread and even evolved. Rival brokerages, like the Compass-affiliated Glasses & Fields Group and Tracy Do Real Estate, mimic it, specifying trims of near-identical hues. If not slate blue then coastal plain or evergreen fog or oyster bay—colors that pair well with soft neutrals and the clay tile roofs of the vintage architecture.

A prime example is the Sycamore Bungalow Court, a recently converted two-story complex off Melrose at the northern edge of Hancock Park, currently listed by Tracy Do. Completed in 1926 and designed by Charles E. Finkenbinder, a socialist whose architectural practice began in Walla Walla, Washington, in the early 1900s, the Spanish colonial revival ensemble comprises ten homes, arranged in a precise U around landscaped grounds. A certain old-school socialist sensibility survives in the neighborly scale and the modest-yet-elegant exteriors, which feature here and in much of Finkenbinder’s other work, particularly the Sylvia Park Country Club in Topanga—today known as the Mountain Mermaid—a rambling, gold-limestone hall envisioned to host dances and dinners and foster social belonging. The long-standing tenants of Sycamore, now nearing their move-out dates, recognize that this very appeal—so hard to find elsewhere at an affordable rent—has hastened their eviction.

MCDONALD PAYS LIP SERVICE to the idea of affordable housing, but her partner, in both business and life, Cristina Brow, has been more candid about the nature of The Rental Girl’s business. In a 2019 interview, Brow told Curbed LA that, in her view, the idea of housing as a human right is a fantasy. Rather, housing is a commodity to be purchased, with “winners and losers.”

One such “loser,” as Brow would have it, is Christen Springer, who moved to Los Angeles in 2014 to be near her sister, who was undergoing a second round of cancer treatment. She settled into a fourplex on Marcia Drive in Silver Lake. The building was not in the best shape, but at $1,100 a month, it was what she could afford, and the view was spectacular. From the living room window you could see the Hollywood sign and, if the sky was clear, all the way out to the ocean. To better the place, she painted every square inch, including the cabinets; she pulled up the flooring and set new vinyl. She and her neighbors—three other women—grew close. After five years of serving as her home, the building was sold to the real estate investment firm TriWest Development. The next month, TriWest issued Springer an eviction notice invoking the Ellis Act, a 1985 California law that allows landlords to vacate tenants—even those who are elderly or disabled or whose home is rent stabilized—if the landlord seeks to take the property off the rental market.

Springer was given 120 days to leave, but she wasn’t informed as to why she was being evicted, and she had nowhere to go. “I was going to go buy a van and live in it,” she told me. Then Covid-19 descended on Los Angeles, and an eviction moratorium delayed Springer’s move until March 2022. During this time, the former home of Springer’s neighbor was made available for in-person browsing. It was listed for sale on The Rental Girl’s website, with an asking price of $626,145.

Though she didn’t realize it at the time, Springer had encountered Elizabeth McDonald shortly before receiving her eviction notice. “They came into my apartment for a ‘quote, unquote’ inspection,” she said. “I had no idea who they were.… Four people showed up, two women and two men, but no property manager.” Which is who she’d been told to expect. She had rearranged her day to be there. The small group moved through her home, taking measurements of the kitchen, then the living room, the bathroom, and the bedrooms. “They were very vague,” Springer recalls. They didn’t fully explain to her who they were or what they were doing, and she remembers thinking, “What kind of inspection is this?”

The visit lasted about thirty minutes. On her way out, McDonald turned to Springer and said, “Oh, your place is really cute.” Springer received her eviction notice shortly after that. It wasn’t until her neighbor’s unit went up for sale that she learned of The Rental Girl. After Googling the name, she realized the woman who had been in her home was none other than the company’s founder. Looking back, Springer said, “They were seeing what kind of work they needed to do to get my place up to TIC showroom standard.” (I sought answers from McDonald for this article, but she did not respond.)

A similar fate befell musician Sophia Knapp and her neighbors when their landlord sold their building in Angelino Heights. For years, the space had been lovingly maintained by longtime resident Jimmy Poonsook, who moved to the US from Bangkok in the 1980s. The new owner, Lenny Young, a former political staffer for US Representative Julia Brownley, issued new leases with harsh terms, including prohibitions on using the property’s hose bib, which as Knapp explained to me, rendered Poonsook’s gardening a violation of his lease.

Construction started promptly, without warning. Sawing, drilling, cutting cement. Tall wooden fences were erected around each bungalow, creating what Knapp described as a claustrophobic, prison-like atmosphere that undermined the social function of the court’s design. “They were creating privacy that no one asked for,” Knapp recalled.

City inspectors visited the property, which is within a historic preservation zone, at least three times, citing the new owner for unpermitted construction and ordering some of his changes to be reversed. Young’s most egregious act, however—one that could not be undone—was the removal of a Buddhist altar that Poonsook had affixed to the tree in the yard. The altar was taken without his permission, and the tree itself was cut down.

I visited Knapp’s home in late 2023, not long after she received her eviction notice. I moved through the compound, amid the stand-alone cottages she and her neighbors occupied, and made my way to her porch. As soon as I set foot inside her 1914 Craftsman, with its hardwood floors, built-in kitchen hutch, and coffered ceiling, I thought to myself, “This could be a TIC.”

And then in June 2024, after everyone moved out, the first listing went live on Redfin: a TIC with an asking price of $995,000. In an email to Knapp, Young justified the evictions by saying removing the building from the rental market “was the only viable option.”

“By viable, they mean profitable,” Knapp told me. “They bought the property with the sole purpose of flipping it.”

IN 1978, CALIFORNIA renters were promised a windfall. Landlords advertised half-off Christmas rent if Proposition 13, which would reduce property taxes for homeowners throughout the state, passed, assuring tenants that the tax cuts would trickle down to them. The measure secured a majority, taxes fell, and rents rose anyway. Outrage followed, and the city responded the next year with the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, which made any Spanish bungalow court, Craftsman duplex, or early twentieth-century cottage, by virtue of its age, a protected relic in LA’s volatile housing landscape. For tenants, this safeguard is invaluable because it allows them to stay put through lost work, illness, a tight housing market, and life’s other upheavals, and build long-term community. For landlords, the ordinance ensures that any protected building will “underperform”—the term used to describe a property that would yield more profit if it were rented at market rate. Indeed, a rent-stabilized building sells for more when it is vacant than when it is occupied. The TIC business model has emerged primarily as a way to manufacture such vacancies. Evictions aren’t accidental casualties of the TIC model; they’re central to it.

This has been the case since the TIC model first emerged in San Francisco as an outgrowth of the broader wave of condominium conversions that swept the country in the 1970s. In 1979 alone, some 135,000 apartments were converted into condos nationwide. In California, the pace was even quicker: From 1976 to 1980, the number of conversions doubled each year, meeting demand for homeownership by a struggling lower-middle class that had been priced out of the single-family-home market.

In a process that is by now familiar, an apartment’s conversion into a condominium typically meant evicting its tenants. In San Francisco, this condominium wave triggered widespread evictions and a sharp loss of affordable rental housing. The San Francisco Tenants Union demanded that the board of supervisors act, but the latter’s pitiful attempts at regulation contained numerous loopholes. One provision required that tenants themselves be the condo buyers for a building to qualify for conversion, but this only encouraged landlords to pay tenants to feign interest in purchasing their own apartments, clearing the way for the conversion to proceed. Fed up, the board of supervisors voted for a moratorium on conversions. But then-Mayor Diane Feinstein vetoed the moratorium, honoring the speculative “rights” of landlords. As a compromise, in 1982, the board instituted an annual limit of 200 condominium conversions each year citywide. To fairly enforce the cap, a lottery system was introduced.

Out of this constrained market, the TIC was born. It was not a new legal structure per se (TICs exist sparingly in various forms across the US), but in San Francisco, the TIC took on a distinctly cutthroat character. Lawyer-developer Andy Sirkin could be described as the capo of California TICs. After graduating from Boston College Law School in 1984, Sirkin moved to San Francisco and, unable to afford the cost of a house, partnered with friends to buy an apartment under tenancy in common. This piqued the interest of some of his colleagues, who began asking him to legally arrange and execute TIC agreements for them. Within a few years, it was a full-time job.

Because TICs require no legal subdivision of units—which would make them condos—they avoided San Francisco’s strict condo-conversion cap. Still, the market was slow to develop, largely due to the lack of viable financing. Buyers had to secure a single apartment building loan, with all co-owners applying jointly as co-borrowers. That demanded deep trust, something few were willing to extend to strangers. The breakthrough came when fractional loans were introduced in the early 2000s, allowing each owner to take out an individual mortgage tied to their specific share of the property. From there, the TIC market began to grow in earnest. Nearly all new TICs adopted the “Andy Sirkin TIC Agreement,” a six-page contract addendum that lays out who lives where, who pays what, and what happens if things fall apart.

In 1979, Santa Monica addressed its own wave of condominium conversions by adopting a local ordinance that prevented property owners from leaving the rental market (and thus evicting their tenants) if their tenants were of low or moderate income or if the withdrawal would diminish the city’s housing supply. Landlords challenged the restriction all the way to the California Supreme Court, which upheld it in 1984. The following year, however, State Senator Jim Ellis introduced legislation, the aforementioned Ellis Act, that abrogated local governments’ right to pass laws like Santa Monica’s. Any tenant in the state could be evicted if their landlord wanted to sell the building to owner-occupants. In San Francisco, though, the city’s strict cap on condo conversions remained in place. TICs thus became a legal side door through which the city’s landlords could continue to clear out rent-stabilized apartments.

In 1999, the San Francisco Tenants Union, recognizing the sleight of hand, demanded that the board of supervisors rein in TICs, and after a two-year delay, the board imposed a cap similar to that on condos. “Do we cannibalize some tenants so a select group of tenants can achieve the American dream?” board Supervisor Chris Daly asked aloud in SF Gate. “One person’s American dream may be another person’s nightmare.” But the San Francisco Superior Court was unmoved by this rhetoric and quickly overturned the ordinance. TIC conversions continued, far outpacing the ability of TIC-to-condo conversions, and frustration mounted. On February 6, 2008—lottery day—hundreds of TIC owners turned up at city hall, hoping to be among the lucky ones who’d get the green light to go full condo.

“We’re treated like second-class citizens,” one TIC owner told SF Gate. “The city makes us jump through hoops to own a fraction of a house. You’d think the city would be encouraging people to buy property and put down roots.”

By 2013, the waitlist to convert TICs into condos had stretched into a decade-plus exercise in magical thinking. So the city offered a political trade: In exchange for an “expedited conversion program,” a kind of bureaucratic amnesty for those who had been stuck in line the longest, the lottery was suspended for the foreseeable future. Some speculated it would open again in 2024, 2025, or 2026. The TIC era was solidified in the interim.

SEEKING HELP WITH her eviction, Springer—originally from Burbank and piecing together a living through gigs like flower arranging and haircutting—found the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) through a Google search and began attending meetings and actions. At a protest outside then-Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell’s office in December 2019, she met organizer Trinidad Ruiz, who introduced her to another TriWest tenant in Silver Lake, on Micheltorena Street, being evicted for a TIC conversion. Months later, at a union picnic at Echo Park Lake, Springer encountered more neighbors—a couple living on Edgeware Road—being TIC’d by TriWest. Ruiz had met other TriWest tenants, one who was being evicted from her two-bedroom on Bellevue Street and another on Angus Street.

These discoveries were revelatory. Ruiz began tracing the network and identified at least five buildings in the area owned by TriWest that were being converted into TICs. He coordinated a meeting, and in mid-February 2020, upward of twenty tenants from across the different properties met in the parking lot of the Micheltorena building. It was clear their evictions were not isolated or random but coordinated and strategic, and they wondered how many others were caught in TriWest’s net. By the end of the evening, the tenants had formed the Anti-TriWest Tenant Association to fight back.

“Our campaign slogan was ‘Don’t be a DIC’—displacer in common,” Ruiz told me over the phone. “We saw a contradiction in calling them tenants. How can you be a tenant if you’re evicting actual tenants? Our goal was to highlight that contradiction.”

As often as possible, the group attended open houses for TICs to protest the evictions, stop the sales, and inform prospective buyers of the harm inflicted on former tenants.

“A lot of the people at these open houses didn’t know they were displacing tenants,” he said. “We would go and say, ‘Hey, you know a tenant who lived here for twenty years was displaced to make way for you?’”

TriWest, a luxury investment firm that specializes in flipping multifamily properties, provides the capital needed to buy and renovate rent-stabilized apartments, while The Rental Girl offers a friendly face to the displacement. The latter’s saccharine, pink marketing materials, in addition to the name of the company itself, disarm and feminize, deflecting attention from the ugly side of the TIC business. The trademark blue deployed in its renovations meanwhile paints over—literally and figuratively—the lives of the people it forces out.

Since Elizabeth McDonald first brought TICs to LA in 2017, The Rental Girl, according to its publicly available data, has helped to generate over $80 million in profits for itself and its developer partners, with an average profit rate of 37 percent in property sales. “[McDonald] found a hole in the system that led her to profit off of other people’s misery,” Springer told me. “And she can sit there and pretend that she’s this woman entrepreneur, blah, blah, blah. But, really, what she does is she’s a predator.” Renters in bungalow courts now fear they have a target on their backs, and they hope their landlords don’t discover the TIC scheme or get approached by The Rental Girl.

“Housing shouldn’t be a business,” sixty-eight-year-old Michele Loud, a longtime resident of Sycamore Bungalow Court, said to me on a recent Sunday afternoon. She is now packing up her home of over twenty years and moving on so someone else can purchase it as a TIC. The complex isn’t being sold by The Rental Girl, but according to tenants, McDonald did view it and ultimately decided against getting involved because of its termite damage and dry rot. Regardless, Loud believes that McDonald still bears some responsibility, given The Rental Girl’s role in cultivating a market that displaces longstanding tenants like herself.

Because of LATU’s organizing efforts, even buyers are taking issue with the industry’s tactics. One TIC buyer who asked to remain anonymous purchased her home through The Rental Girl in 2020. During the sale, Cristina Brow, McDonald’s partner, claimed that the previous tenant had accepted a buyout and “happily moved elsewhere.” Springer told me otherwise. According to her, the former tenant, facing an Ellis Act eviction, accepted a cash buyout under pressure and relocated to her hometown in Michigan, unable to find anything affordable in LA. The TIC buyer has since moved out.

WHEN MICHELE LOUD described her life at Sycamore Bungalow Court, before the evictions, it resembled what “tenancy in common” might be if stripped of the profit motive and rendered instead as a mode of communal living. Residents would exit their front doors and step out not into hallways or parking lots but a shared garden—an informal civic space that functions as a commons in the classic sense. Sycamore Court’s garden—one casualty of the developer’s TIC conversion—had been shaped collectively over time. There grew French lavender, rosemary, basil, hibiscus, star jasmine, white plumeria, mint, and, of course, tomatoes. Residents shared the labor and the harvest, and in the first spring of the Covid-19 pandemic, birthdays were celebrated (wine was shared from six feet apart). The physical design of the bungalow court, with its private entrances and open-air layout, allowed for an ideal combination of safety and sociability.

I heard a similar sentiment from sixty-year-old Robert Leeburg, a psychotherapist and admirer of 1920s and ’30s era LA architecture, who cherished the 1931 Spanish bungalow on Valentine Street where he had lived since 1993. He recalled scouring the city—near the Magic Castle, around Fairfax, along Beverly Boulevard in Mid City, and in Franklin Hills—until finally finding one in Elysian Heights for $600 a month.

When Leeburg first moved in, one of his neighbors greeted him with an ice sculpture of a mermaid—a gesture of kindness that set the tone for the years to come. He would go on to share meals with his neighbors, take a turn watering the complex’s plants, and celebrate birthdays with everyone, often on his terrace. On his fiftieth birthday, Leeburg packed the terrace with close to one hundred friends and family. The space was decorated top to bottom in purple, his favorite color, and a photo booth was set up at the base of the stairs. Guests arrived around dusk, climbing the narrow staircase that turned abruptly at the top. Someone brought a guitar, and Leeburg remembers singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” after the sun went down. At one moment, he got boxed in near the landing. From there, he could see everything. People from the building. People from up and down the block. The whole
thing felt improbably communal, like something Los Angeles didn’t intend to offer, but somehow did. He planned to live there forever.

In 2017, a week after the building sold to a new owner, Leeburg and his neighbors received notices telling them they had 120 days to move out per the Ellis Act. It wasn’t long until fences were erected between all the units and Leeburg’s home was repainted white with The Rental Girl’s signature blue trim. In less than nine months, the complex was flipped and each unit sold off individually for a total of $2.56 million, netting a profit of over $1.1 million.

The communities to which Loud and Leeburg belonged experienced just about the closest thing to a life in common that a city like Los Angeles allows. The TIC conversion, in the manner carried out by The Rental Girl and its developer partners, commodifies and adulterates this possibility, destroying the very collectivity it claims to celebrate.

Real estate lawyers are debasing the idea of tenants in common even further by advising their clients to use TIC arrangements to evade the taxes they owe under ULA the so-called mansion tax, which took effect in 2023 in order to fund affordable housing. The measure imposes a 4 percent levy on real property sales priced between $5 million and $10 million and a 5.5 percent tax on sales of $10 million or more. However, the total tax can be significantly reduced if the property is split among TIC owners—say, two domestic partners—who each file separate deeds of at least $5 million.

When I first heard the phrase “tenancy in common,” I thought it sounded almost utopian. A way for people to pool their resources, reject individualized homeownership, and secure something more social. A TIC, after all, is commonly owned, and like many models that gesture toward the collective, there is real promise in its concepts. The Rental Girl clients of today see these homes as an antidote to the antiseptic sterility of cost-cutting new construction (and as an affordable entry into asset appreciation). Yet one can imagine a version of tenancy in common that lives up to its name. Just as the design of a building—one with a shared courtyard or open stairwell—can encourage social life, legal and financial forms can shape our habits of dwelling, too. A TIC, in its best sense, opens the door not only to co-ownership but to a different orientation toward the idea of home itself.

Like eminent domain or rent control, tenancy in common is a tool. It has been used to destroy communities. But under different stewardship, it could sustain them. This would require it to be used differently, as a mode of nonspeculative ownership, embedded in community control, separate from profit. We can get there, but it will require organizing—tenant by tenant, building by building—and it will require structural changes, chief among them the abolition of the Ellis Act, that blunt instrument of displacement.

For those of us serious about abolishing landlords, what comes next must offer not simply a cheaper, more accessible version of private ownership but an entirely different ethic of habitation: not property as identity or investment but home as a relation, rooted and reciprocal. Only then can the promise of “in common” be reclaimed from the distortions of commodification.