East Bay Times - In response to troubling reports of landlords harassing or threatening their tenants, the Richmond City Council voted Tuesday to kickstart a process to create an anti-harassment law to protect renters.

The City Council directed the city attorney’s office to come back in about a month with an ordinance that would specifically lay out what constitutes “harassment” and ban it under city law.

Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin, who brought the idea to the council along with Councilmember Melvin Willis, pointed to Oakland’s tenant anti-harassment law as a model to follow.

News 5 Cleveland - People have fallen behind on their rent during the pandemic.

In addition to the $19 billion rent debt, new data from PolicyLink shows that nearly 6 million households are behind on rent. The data stems from a partnership that aims to not only eliminate that debt but to spark change.

San Diego resident Genea Wall joined forces with tenants' rights advocates who fight eviction. ACCE, or The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, shared their protest video with us. They're working to protect people like Genea, who they believe are falling victim to loopholes in rent relief laws.

CalMatters - When Blanca Esthela Trejo, 46, lies down to sleep, what feels like shards of glass stab her back and cut into her lungs — a lingering effect of COVID-19.

“I’d like to be crouched down, hunched over all the time, because the pain is too much,” she said.

But Trejo is foregoing medical treatment because she has put paying the rent on her Salinas apartment above all else — to keep a roof over her three children’s heads.

A state law passed in January extended eviction protections for tenants through June 30, as long as tenants show they lost their income due to COVID-19 and pay a quarter of what they owe.

LA Times - At the tenant clinics hosted by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action, about 90% of renters who show up seeking help say they’re being harassed by their landlords.

Their stories have a familiar refrain, advocates say. A new owner buys a rent-controlled building and wants to clear out the existing tenants in order to raise the rents. Sometimes the property management company offers cash to get longtime tenants to move out, but the offer is accompanied by intimidation or retaliation. Rent checks are refused. Needed repairs ignored. Baseless eviction cases are filed.

It’s a concerted campaign to get tenants to move out. These actions are often illegal, but there’s little enforcement. Tenants can try to sue their landlord for harassment, but there are a limited number of legal aid lawyers available. Plus, the penalties for harassment are so low that it can be hard to find an attorney willing to take the case.

LA Daily News - Los Angeles Councilwoman Nithya Raman proposed a set of amendments Tuesday to the draft Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, which the City Council Housing Committee is scheduled to discuss on Wednesday.

“Tenant harassment is a pernicious problem that contributes to gentrification, displacement, and homelessness in Los Angeles, and this law represents an important step in the right direction,” Raman said.

“The amendments I am offering are to ensure that the law reflects the many forms of harassment that our office regularly hears about from tenants and tenants groups, and that the proscribed remedies are sufficient to ensure adequate legal representation and deter such unlawful behavior from occurring in the first place.”

City News Service - Tenants' rights advocates today called on the Los Angeles City Council to amend the city's proposed tenant harassment ordinance to include stronger enforcement measures.

The City Council's Housing Committee is scheduled to review the draft ordinance on Wednesday, according to the city clerk.

``We are urging the council members to take a serious look at this situation and to go ahead and pass the anti-harassment ordinance,'' an advocate said at the rally organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. ”This is a very serious matter. The more you ignore it, the bigger it gets.''

San Jose Mercury News - About two dozen Fruitvale tenants are suing their landlord, demanding he fix living conditions they say range from rat infestations to holes in the floor to an ongoing lack of hot water.

The six-unit building on 28th Avenue is rife with health and safety issues that violate state and local law, according to lawyers who filed the lawsuit this week in Alameda County Superior Court. They claim landlord Michael You, who owns the complex through BYLD 2 LLC, has neglected the building since taking ownership in 2018 — despite repeated requests by tenants to make repairs.

“He has willingly violated these laws and allowed atrocious conditions to exist in this property,” said Ruby Acevedo, a lawyer with Public Advocates who is representing the plaintiffs.

NBC San Diego - Patricia Mendoza’s fight to keep her home has been anything but easy.

"It's been a nightmare, but what's really helped me is learning my rights, to know that I'm not alone,” said Mendoza, an Imperial Beach single mother of two.

Mendoza lost her job in medical transportation last March, and while her landlord wanted her out of her home due to her inability to pay rent, she’s been able to resist two eviction orders.

KPBS - The city and county of San Diego set aside more than $47 million in federal coronavirus aid last fall to pay landlords whose low-income tenants were behind on rent.

But some eligible renters didn’t get any help because their landlords didn’t take the money and they weren’t required to explain why.

Spectrum News 1 - It’s been a long time since Adela Peñabla has gotten a good night’s sleep. "My body starts to shake and I have depression,” she said. 

An immigrant from El Salvador, Peñabla moved to Southern California 18 years ago, making a living as a street vendor. She’s been renting a tiny room in house in South L.A., where she cooks her meals in a make shift kitchen, using bottled water in lieu of a sink.

She’s been able to make just enough to cover her $370 a month rent, until the pandemic hit and her income dried up overnight.

Mothers are being evicted far more frequently than other Americans. This is the hidden story of America's looming housing crisis.

The New Republic - In February, a white man showed up at Patricia Mendoza’s door and informed her that the month-to-month lease for her two-bedroom apartment in Imperial Beach, California, would be terminated on April 10. He was speaking so loudly that her daughter began recording him on her phone; inside, Mendoza’s son began to cry. They had been through two eviction attempts since the pandemic began last March. Now, they would have to fend off another.

Before the pandemic, Mendoza told me, she would have said the worst thing that had ever happened to her was her divorce. “It was a dark time in my life,” she said, but “nothing compared to what my struggle is now.”

La Opinion - Las redes sociales mostraron imágenes de inquilinos que salían con sus pocas pertenencias en bolsas de plástico de una propiedad en el sur de Los Ángeles el jueves por la mañana.

Aproximadamente 12 inquilinos de una casa de huéspedes, localizada sobre la calle 46 y la esquina McKinley en el sur de Los Ángeles, desconocían que la renta que estaban pagando no iba directa a los dueños de la propiedad, sino a un inquilino principal que desapareció.

La casa de huéspedes usualmente albergaba a personas que eran mayores de edad o personas en recuperación de adicciones. No era parte de ningún programa gubernamental. Los vecinos dicen que el inquilino principal rentaba por su cuenta y los interesados se enteraban acerca de esta vivienda mediante amigos o conocidos.

NBC Bay Area - A new digital-first investigative series coming in late March 2021 to the NBC Bay Area app on Roku and Apple TV and to NBCBayArea.com

Against the backdrop of California’s affordability crisis, pushing thousands of Black residents out of their homes and onto the streets, a group of unhoused working mothers in Oakland took matters into their own hands.

In November 2019, the mothers formed a group called Moms 4 Housing and illegally occupied a vacant, corporate-owned home on Magnolia Street in West Oakland. Standing on the shoulders of generations of iconic Oakland activists, such as the Black Panthers and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the moms’ act of civil disobedience sparked a national reckoning around displacement and the erosion of African American neighborhoods.

“The Moms of Magnolia Street” follows the moms’ journeys as they took on the large home-flipping corporation and challenged the city’s power structure.

Participants want access to vaccines for school staff and all zip codes serviced by district to be out of purple tier

LA Daily News - Students, parents, educators and community members rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, Feb. 20, to demand that schools not reopen amid the pandemic until stronger safety measures are in place. The event featured a mid-morning car caravan rally that began outside the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and ended at the Ronald Reagan State Building.

KQED - More renters in Richmond may soon be protected from evictions after the City Council on Tuesday approved directing city staff to draft stronger eviction protections for tenants during the pandemic.

"We feel the urgency of now, that we have to take action. So what we want to do is fill the gaps. This is the best scenario that we can do and we want to do the best scenario," said Richmond City Council member Gayle McLaughlin, who introduced the item.

Despite statewide protections that prevent tenants from eviction for nonpayment of rent if they claim a financial hardship, evictions are still happening, including in the city of Richmond. Contra Costa County evicted 135 people between the beginning of the pandemic and the end of 2020, the second-highest number of evictions across the Bay Area. That’s according to a KQED analysis of sheriff lockouts that was cited in the council member’s report.

Despite that moratorium, some landlords are looking for ways around the law to try to force tenants out now.

ABC 10 - A single mother of two young children has vowed that she will have to be "dragged out" of her home, after receiving notice by her landlord she's being forced out of her rental unit in Imperial Beach. This threat to evict Patricia Mendoza comes despite the current statewide eviction moratorium, which has now been extended through June.

CBS 8 - On the heels of announcing federal rental assistance in late January, Mayor Todd Gloria announced Friday the state will provide $45.5 million in assistance for San Diego residents unable to pay rent due to the impacts of COVID-19.

LA Times - Millions of Americans unable to pay their rent during the pandemic face a snowballing financial burden that threatens to deplete their savings, ruin their credit and drive them from their homes.

A patchwork of government action is protecting many of the most financially strapped tenants for now. But it could take these renters — especially low-income ones — years to recover, even as the rest of the economy begins to rebound.

Jacobin - Carroll Fife is a community organizer based in Oakland, California. She recently came to prominence for her role in helping to organize the Moms 4 Housing movement at the end of 2019, before going on to win a city council seat this past November. She won in the council district of West Oakland, the historic center of the Black Panthers that had, in more recent years, been controlled by a neoliberal representative. She still holds her position as the director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and is looking to take her grassroots movement-building experience to city hall to achieve real material change for the working class.

Fife ran on a platform of the right to housing, defunding the police to fund public services, and implementing the Black New Deal — a local variant on the Green New Deal that takes anti-racism as a key focus. As she prepares to enter city hall, Fife sat down with Jacobin to discuss her background in organizing, the fight to build municipal power, and what it would look like to decommodify human essentials like housing.

The rent moratorium extension worked out in Sacramento is a flawed and incomplete emergency measure.

Capital & Main - Placed strictly in the context of the urgency that surrounds it, Monday’s announcement of a proposed extension of eviction protections for California’s battered lower income renters is welcome news. Moreover, since the deal was worked out among both state Senate and Assembly leaders, quick passage on Thursday is almost assured.

But a fix it is not. Rather, it’s exactly what it appears to be: a flawed and in many ways incomplete emergency measure, crafted in the high heat of the COVID-19 pandemic without the input of some significant stakeholders — and certain to require adjustments or perhaps follow-up legislation altogether.

Put another way, it is one piece of a very large puzzle. And when it comes to California’s ongoing crisis of affordable housing, that puzzle continues to grow.

CapRadio - Legislators are prepared to extend California’s eviction moratorium to the end of June while offering landlords an incentive to forgive back rent using an extra $2.6 billion the state received from the latest federal relief bill.

Legislators and groups representing landlords and tenants worked on a deal over the weekend, and the bill, SB 91, was introduced this morning, which means lawmakers can vote on it Thursday morning.  

“We have a deal,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference, noting that the deal also extended to financial assistance for unpaid utilities.

...

“If federal tenant protection policies are mandatory because of the decades of evidence that landlords discriminate, such as fair housing, why would we allow landlords to opt out of a tenant protection program where the cost to society and human life could be catastrophic,” said Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment executive director Christina Livingston in a statement.

Spectrum News 1 -  Inside the eviction defense network offices in Westlake, siblings and attorneys Nathaly and Stefano Medina are working to keep hundreds of low-income Angelenos in their home.

They’ve had a fighters spirit since they were little, activists, a bit peleones, meaning agitators.

Truthout - Rent strikes have spread across the country with the spread of the coronavirus. In the pandemic’s first months, 400 New York City families stopped paying rent in buildings with over 1,500 rental units. In May, rent strikes involving 200,000 tenants spread to Philadelphia and elsewhere. Washington, D.C., in September saw tenant unions spring up in strikes at the Tivoli Gardens Apartments and the Woodner, as well as Southern Towers in nearby Alexandria.

Rent strikes had a history as a resistance tactic before the pandemic hit. Cleveland tenants settled a rent strike in February, after 38 families forced concessions on the landlord of the 348-unit Vue Apartments in Beachwood. San Francisco had a famous rent strike that went on for three years at the Midtown Park Apartments, ending in 2017.

Telemundo 52 - Inquilinos afectados por la pandemia aprovechan el miércoles por la noche el inicio de las tradicionales posadas para demandar a los miembros de la legislatura estatal que aprueben una extensión a la ley que los protege de ser desalojados. Gabriel Huerta reporta el 16 de diciembre de 2020.

CBS 8 - There are pleas from renters who said they could lose everything if the current eviction moratorium expires. Californians owe an estimated $1.7 billion in back rent and still find themselves unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. State lawmakers are hoping to extend the moratorium while Gov. Gavin Newsom looks to the federal government for help.