Oakland Coalition Puts Renter Protections on the November Ballot

 

In the face of massive displacement pressures—the byproduct of the Bay Area’s white-hot tech economy—a powerful community-labor coalition secured a significant victory for Oakland renters last month. On July 19, in a dramatic city council session that lasted well into the early morning hours, a broad and diverse coalition of housing and tenant advocates, labor unions, and community leaders rallied over a hundred people to speak in favor of placing a tenant protection referendum on the November ballot. After four hours of debate, what was initially pegged as a close vote turned into a near unanimous decision favoring the referendum authored by Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan as well as a companion ordinance from Councilmembers Dan Kalb, Abel Guillen, Lynette Gibson McElhaney, and Annie Campbell Washington bolstering tenant protections.

Advocates pushed to incorporate strong equity provisions into both the council-adopted ordinance (7-1 voted in favor) and the ballot referendum (unanimously approved by the Oakland City Council). If Oakland voters approve the ballot measure this November, it will supersede any similar provisions in the adopted ordinance.

Oakland prides itself on its working-class roots and status as one of the most diverse cities in America.  Both those qualities are imperiled by the unprecedented wave of increased housing costs that have rocketed Oakland up to the fourth highest rent in the nation, ahead of Boston, MA.  In a city where economic inequity falls heavily along racial lines, a demographic exodus of low-income people and households of color is reshaping the face of the city.  With Uber set to expand its headquarters into downtown Oakland in 2017, housing costs are only expected to increase.

Seeking to implement urgent protections to stabilize neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification, PolicyLink joined with the Committee to Protect Oakland Renters, which also included the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Oakland Tenants Union, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, East Bay Asian Youth Center, East Bay Housing Organization, SEIU Local 1021, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and the Ella Baker Center. 

If Oakland voters approve the ballot in November, the referendum would shift the burden from renters to landlords to petition for rent increases above the Consumer Price Index.  It also expands “just cause” eviction protections to buildings constructed through 1995, meaning that building owners could only evict tenants only for violating the terms of a lease or for violating the Ellis Act (currently the cutoff date is October 1980). Another key reform is expanding the powers of, and increasing, tenant representation on the Rent Board, while providing transparent data through a rent registry. Oakland joins an array of Bay Area jurisdictions making the push to implement neighborhood stabilization measures via ordinances, ballot measures, affordable housing bonds, and other interventions.

“After seeing what’s happened across the bay in San Francisco, we can’t afford to wait any longer to put in place common sense measures to ensure that working families are able to secure housing amidst the housing affordability crisis in Oakland,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, who served as treasurer for the coalition. “Housing affordability is at the heart of the right to advance equity.  We are seeing far too many longtime Oakland families lose their grip on their homes precisely at the moment when long-awaited opportunity infrastructure is finally arriving." 

Free Our Dreams: California's Youth Gather for Advocacy Day

 

Across California, young people of color are courageously leading the charge to protect basic dignity, justice, and fundamental rights for themselves, their families, and their communities. From the Black Lives Matter to the Dreamer movement, from school board meetings to corporate board rooms, these youth are demanding that their voices be heard and their lives valued. 

On Monday, August 8, over 400 youth of color from across the state will convene in Sacramento for the Free Our Dreams Youth Organizing Summit and Advocacy Day. Organized by the Movement Strategy Center, PolicyLink, and the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, this event will strengthen youth leadership and advocacy skills, build power for a movement led by youth of color, and engage statewide decision makers on key legislative priorities for some of California’s most vulnerable communities.

The rally takes place on the west-steps of the Capitol from 12:00pm-1:00pmET. 

In addition to youth engaging legislators, the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color will be reaching out to its supporters to help pass these key pieces of legislation, throughout the legislative season.  For a full list of legislative priorities, see their statewide campaign page. 

  • We need to close loopholes in the TRUTH Act and hold police accountable, vote yes on AB2792 #freeourdreams
     
  • Youth need legal counsel to ensure they understand their Miranda rights, vote yes on SB1052 #freeourdreams
     
  • No youth should have a criminal record because they can't pay a transit fare. Decriminalize fare evasion, vote yes on SB882 #freeourdreams
     
  • Secret police databases of alleged "gang members" violate due process & criminalize POC youth.  AB2298 brings transparency & oversight
     
  • For-profit immigration detention facilities are known to abuse detainees. SB1289 will stop police dept from using tax $ to hire them
     
  • Solitary confinement is no way to deal with kids. Vote yes on SB1143 to limit its use on juveniles #freeourdreams

 

$65 Million Reasons to Stop Roadblocking City-Driven Job Creation

Orignal post published in Next City

In the last year, city officials in New Orleans, Cleveland and Nashville have found themselves scrambling to protect “hire local” policies from their respective state governments.

In all three cases, racially diverse cities struggling with high rates of poverty and unemployment sought to stimulate the local economy with provisions that focused on creating job opportunities for disadvantaged residents. And in all three cases, state senators representing wealthier, predominantly white districts sought to preempt city policies to protect business interests.

Read full article >>

National Equity Atlas: April Update

Dear Equity Atlas users,

Since we launched the Atlas in October 2014, we have wanted to include data that better describes the incredible diversity within broad racial/ethnic groups and challenges the “model minority” myth that impedes action and progress toward racial equity and inclusive growth.

We are excited to be taking a first step toward that goal by adding two new breakdowns to our “Detailed race/ethnicity” indicator. Now, when you go to that indicator, you can select “By ancestry” and see more detailed breakdowns of the Asian, Black, Latino, Native American, and White populations (e.g. Filipino, Jamaican, Puerto Rican). You can also select “By nativity and ancestry” to get a breakdown of the share of each group who are immigrants versus U.S.-born.

The below screenshots show the type of data that is now available. Note that we share data for any given group if there are at least 100 survey respondents. To provide some more detailed data for smaller areas, we also created broader geographic categories (e.g. South Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian, Pacific Islander) that combine a number of ancestries. For a large, diverse region like Los Angeles, you will get data for many ancestry categories, while for a smaller, less diverse region like Charleston, you will see fewer of the detailed ancestry categories.

We hope you enjoy digging into the data! Here is a blog post highlighting some takeaways from the new data. In a few weeks (on May 23), we will be adding these more detailed racial/ethnic breakdowns to several of our economic opportunity indicators, including:

·       Unemployment

·       Wages: Median

·       Wages: $15/hour

·       Disconnected Youth

·       Educational Levels

·       Homeownership

Also, please let us know if you would like to receive more information about how to participate in the data release (including a social media toolkit and other support for writing op-eds, blog posts, etc.). Email Abigail Langston at abigail@policylink.org to sign up.

Thank you!

 

The National Equity Atlas team at PolicyLink and the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE)

“This Is a Nationwide Epidemic”: A Frank but Hopeful Conversation with Evicted Author Matthew Desmond

In Milwaukee, one in eight renters — disproportionately people of color — are evicted every two years, and this alarming trend is playing out across the country. In his eye-opening new book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond documents the devastating consequences for families, communities, and the nation. He argues that housing security must be part of a policy agenda to eliminate poverty and build an economy that works for all.

Desmond, a sociologist and urban ethnographer, spoke with Kalima Rose, senior director of the PolicyLink Center for Infrastructure Equity and co-author of Healthy Communities of Opportunity: An Equity Blueprint to Address America’s Housing Challenges. This report, released today by PolicyLink and The Kresge Foundation, explains how health, housing, and economic security policies must be aligned to achieve equitable housing outcomes.

Q: How widespread is eviction and who is most affected?

A: In Milwaukee, if you look at only formal court-ordered evictions, you learn that about 16,000 people are evicted every year in that city. That’s about 40 people every day. We’ve crunched court-ordered eviction numbers in other cities, and Milwaukee is no outlier. New York processes about 60 marshal evictions every single day.

These numbers are startling and very troubling, but these are just court-ordered evictions. If you add landlord foreclosures and building condemnations, then you learn that every two years about one in eight renters in the city of Milwaukee is evicted. Mothers in low-income African American communities, in particular, are evicted at incredibly high rates. Among Milwaukee renters, about one in five Black women report being evicted versus one in 15 White women. This is a nationwide epidemic.

Q: Why do evictions hit families with children especially hard?

A: Children often are the reason families get evicted. When I started this work, I thought that having kids would shield you from eviction. But families living with kids have three times the odds of receiving an eviction judgment in eviction court, even controlling for arrears. What you’re seeing in that discrepancy is the landlord’s discretion. Some landlords are choosing not to work with families with children — because children can be hard on the landlord’s bottom line. Then kids often prolong the time you're homeless after your eviction because family discrimination is still real. I saw families get turned away quite a bit for having kids.

If we want to give children a fighting chance to realize their full potential, we have to provide them stable, affordable housing. You don’t just lose your home when you're evicted. You often lose your school and your community and your possessions. This massive instability has broad-reaching consequences.

Q:  You write that eviction impacts African American women in the same way that criminal conviction impacts African American men. Explain the parallels.

A: We know that when you get out of prison and you have a criminal record, it can really affect your life. It can affect your success in the job market and your access to certain forms of public aid. An eviction record works the same way. It can bar you from receiving public housing, which means we’re still systematically denying housing help to people that most need it. It can bar you from accessing a decent place to live in a safe neighborhood, because many landlords turn away families with a recent eviction. There’s a kind of gender discrepancy that mirrors incarceration.

There’s also a policy story where they move in lock step. We have had massive investment in public housing over the last three decades, but it’s been in the form of prisons. Some governors reallocated money for public housing to build more prisons. So there are more connections than one would think that link mass incarceration and the lack of affordable housing. 

Q: Your book draws distinct pictures of neighborhoods — from trailer parks to White, Black, or Latino enclaves in Milwaukee. What are the forces driving segregation in the city?

A:  The White folks I spent time with that were evicted from a trailer park didn’t even consider moving to the North Side of the city, the predominantly African American inner city. But even though they amputated a large section of the city from their possibilities, they still had an easier time finding housing than the African American folks that I spent time with. It’s a story about the salience of discrimination. It’s a story about how race still matters, even at the very bottom of the market.

Q. What does this mean for building strong communities of opportunity?

A: Unless we provide families a shot at investing in a community, it’s going to be really hard for them to make a difference on their own streets and their own blocks. There are some neighborhoods in Milwaukee that have a 10 percent or 15 percent eviction rate. Those conditions turn neighbors into strangers. They disrupt the social fabric of neighborhoods. We know from previous research that if neighbors get together and work hard on local issues they can make a huge difference. Programs to stabilize housing would stabilize communities, too.

Q: What policy action would you like to see at the federal level?

A: There needs to be more attention paid to the role that housing is playing in poverty. When most politicians on either side of the aisle are asked about what to do about inequality or poverty in the United States, they usually start with a focus on jobs. That’s only part of the solution though. I don’t think we can fix poverty if we don’t fix housing.

Eviction is not just a condition of poverty, it’s a cause of it. It’s linked to job loss, mental health issues, school instability, loss of possessions, homelessness, and moving into worse neighborhoods. It’s fundamentally recasting people’s lives in a more difficult way. But we also have to ask ourselves a question about who are we as a nation that allows this level of inequality, this level of blunting of human capacity, and this degree of social suffering. I don’t think there’s any American value that justifies this situation.

Visit Just Shelter, an organization started by Desmond, to learn about the work of community organizations fighting to prevent eviction, preserve affordable housing, and prevent family homelessness.

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