CES’ first organizing campaigns focused on transportation, utilities, affordable food, and employment issues. These campaigns successfully held back bus fare and utility rate increases, lowered milk prices and fought for the rights of the unemployed.

As rents skyrocketed during the mid-1970s, tenants' rights, rent control and preserving affordable housing became CES’ priorities.

CES focuses on educating low and moderate tenants about their rights to affordable, decent and safe housing, to train and empower them to take action to protect and advocate for their rights, and to build powerful, participatory tenant organizations of low income and working class people to work together toward these goals.

The following are some of CES’ significant accomplishments:

• Winning rent control for the cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood.
• Incorporating the City of West Hollywood and electing (and re-electing) CES members to the West Hollywood City Council.
• Campaign to defeat Proposition 98, which would have wiped out rent control and tenants' rights; and winning Proposition 99, providing homeowners' protections against certain eminent domain threats.
• LA's Systematic Code Enforcement Program (SCEP).
• LA's Rent Escrow Account Program (REAP).
• LA's Lead Paint Prevention Program.
• LA's Housing Preservation Program.
• The Primary Renovation Ordinance.
• Substantial increases to tenant relocation assistance amounts.
• Rent Control Extended to Section 8 Rent Subsidized Units.
• Rent Control Extended to Units where landlords have prepaid their HUD subsidized mortgages and/or opted out of their project-based Section 8 contract.
• Rent Control Extended to newly built apartments where tenants were falsely evicted using the Ellis Act.
• Expanding City Noticing of Planning Department hearing or zoning changes within a 500-foot radius of a residence to include tenants as well as homeowners.
• Providing tenants interest on their security deposits.
• Denial of a $1/2 million contract to provide relocation services to an anti-tenants relocation firm.
• Implementation of an existing law, which enables the denial of condo conversions if the vacancy rate is below 5% in that planning area.
• Eliminating the Major Rehabilitation eviction provision from LA's rent control law.
• Closing the capital improvements pass through loophole previously used to hit tenants with permanent rent increases.  The new law splits costs between tenants and landlords with a $55 cap as a surcharge paid out for only 5 years.
• The prevention of landlords changing tenant terms of tenancy as a way to evict them.
• Increasing rent decrease amounts where landlords are found to have reduced services to tenants.
• Tenant buy-outs of 4 HUD subsidized apartment complexes in Lincoln Heights, Sylmar, Hollywood and San Gabriel, where tenants now own and control these complexes as permanent affordable housing.
• Organizing thousands of renters to stop unjust evictions and rent increases, force landlords to make needed repairs and save affordable housing.
• Educating and organizing tenants to eradicate unsafe, unhealthy and toxic conditions in their dwellings.
• Winning just compensation for tenants displaced and replacement of affordable housing due to of government projects such as the convention center expansion and the Los Angeles Unified School District school construction plans.
• Winning numerous laws to provide tenants' rights and preserve affordable housing on the federal, state on local levels.

• Providing thousands of renters with crucial information to protect their rights at CES' twice-weekly Tenants' Rights Clinic.