DEMOCRACY NOW! - We look at the crisis of homelessness during the coronavirus pandemic in California, where the number of cases has passed 6,000 with 132 deaths. The entire state has been ordered to shelter in place, leaving the state’s massive unhoused population extremely vulnerable. As the state braces for a surge in cases, tens of thousands of people are living on the streets. A recent study estimates that nearly 2,600 unhoused people will need to be hospitalized for the virus in Los Angeles alone — and nearly 1,000 will need intensive care. We speak with Martha Escudero, a member of a group of unhoused mothers, elders and families who have moved into vacant houses, and Carroll Fife, director of the Oakland office for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

Interest in tenant activism has surged in the face of the coronavirus. Organizers are trying to seize the moment and build a movement.

THE NEW REPUBLIC - Last week, the head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard, predicted that in the second quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy could see a 30 percent unemployment rate and a 50 percent drop in gross domestic product. Both of these numbers far surpass their respective equivalencies during the Great Depression, with the slash in GDP dwarfing the downturn of the 2008 crash by factors of 10. “This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter,” Bullard said during the press call, voice quiet and flat. “It is a huge shock, and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

As most workers in this country live paycheck to paycheck—some surveys place that number at half of the workforce, others reach closer to 80 percent—Bullard’s predictions point to an economic disaster that will likely hit people hardest in the area that consumes the majority of their paychecks: housing. Millions of new unemployment filings have surfaced in the last week, with several states’ unemployment and Medicare websites crashing due to the rise in applicants. Even with some supports from the stimulus bill, renters are still scrambling to come up with rent money on April 1. A $1,200 government check doesn’t mean much when it barely covers a month’s rent in many cities.

Across the country, rents have soared as real wages remain stagnant. Nearly half of New York City households are considered rent-burdened, which means they pay more than 30 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. In Oakland, California, where rents have skyrocketed in recent years, a group of lifelong residents moved into a long-vacant house in protest of the lack of affordable housing. In the wake of the pandemic in Los Angeles, where minimum-wage workers need to pull nearly 80-hour shifts just to reach the “rent-burdened” threshold, unhoused families reclaimed 13 vacant homes, both as protest and a means of survival. As The New Republic reported last summer, even in America’s most affluent cities, low-income families fall through the cracks in a system so broken that it fails to even document the rapid spread of housing insecurity.

In response to a crisis further inflamed by the coronavirus, existing housing rights organizations have been struggling to meet new calls for organizing and resources, many of which have coalesced around a radical demand: A nationwide rent strike.

THE NEW YORKER - California has the worst housing crisis in the country—so bad that, when Governor Gavin Newsom took office, in 2019, he used his inaugural address to call for a “Marshall Plan for affordable housing,” entailing the construction of 3.5 million housing units by 2025. This month, with an uptick in covid-19 cases in Los Angeles, and orders from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti directing city residents to stay home at all costs, activists have turned their attention to hundreds of empty, publicly owned houses. There are thirty-six thousand homeless people in Los Angeles and countless others living in crowded, inadequate, and unstable situations. Wouldn’t they, too, be safer in a home? The acute crisis of the coronavirus, and the paradox of stay-at-home orders for a homeless population, might offer activists a chance to force decisive change.

In mid-March, a group of homeless and housing-insecure people calling themselves the Reclaimers took possession of eleven vacant houses in a quiet working-class neighborhood called El Sereno, east of downtown. The houses are among hundreds that Caltrans, the state’s transportation authority, bought last century, with the goal of demolishing them to make way for an expansion of the 710 Freeway. They were vacant—many of them unoccupied for years. According to Roberto Flores, a tenants-rights activist, after buying the houses, Caltrans rented them out, sometimes to their previous owners, then raised rents precipitously, forcing many of them out. (That’s what happened to him.) Recently, after decades of protest from environmentalists, preservationists, and social-justice activists in El Sereno, South Pasadena, and Pasadena, the freeway project was finally spiked, leaving the real estate in limbo—conspicuous waste amid a catastrophic housing shortage.

The Reclaimers, a Los Angeles group, are taking back government-owned properties to give the homeless a chance to stay healthy

The Guardian - Several Los Angeles families who have been forced to live in cars, shelters and other unsafe situations have seized control of 13 vacant homes owned by the government, with the goal of staying indefinitely – and staying alive.

The takeover comes as California’s homelessness crisis and the escalating coronavirus outbreak have collided to create a catastrophe threatening thousands of lives.

“To me, this is life or death,” said Benito Flores, 64, who has been living out of his van for years and moved into a vacant two-bedroom house on Wednesday. Wearing a face mask and standing inside the dusty home as volunteers cleaned, Flores explained that he is diabetic and at risk of serious illness or worse if he catches Covid-19. “By doing this, I’m giving myself a chance at living and surviving this crisis.”

The homeless residents and their supporters, who have called themselves the Reclaimers, were inspired by Moms 4 Housing, a group of houseless mothers in Oakland who publicly occupied a corporate-owned vacant home for two months. That protest sparked international attention and support from some California lawmakers, and ultimately, the mothers were able to purchase the home.

LA TIMES - For years, dozens of perfectly good houses in El Sereno and nearby areas have sat empty, even as California’s housing shortage has grown more and more dire.

The houses are owned by Caltrans, the state’s transportation agency, which began acquiring them in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for the 710 Freeway extension. But the proposal to “close the gap” — by building the final 4.5-mile stretch to connect the 710 to the 210 Freeway — was finally and definitively killed in 2017. That left more than 400 properties, including houses, apartments, commercial buildings and vacant lots surplus. Some are occupied by tenants, but 87 single-family homes are vacant.

Last week, a group of families that are homeless or at risk of becoming so decided to start moving into some of those empty houses. As of Friday, the group, which calls itself Reclaiming Our Homes, had taken over 12 houses. The occupations are both a plea for help for struggling families and a protest against the state’s failure to move faster to solve the housing crisis — which is obviously an even greater concern at a time when Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered people to stay at home to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing politicians to act in ways that just weeks ago seemed unthinkable. And activists like the Reclaimers are opening the cracks still wider.

DISSENT - This past weekend, accompanied (at a safe distance) by a handful of friends and allies, Martha Escudero and Benito Flores moved into vacant homes in Los Angeles’s El Sereno neighborhood. Part of a movement calling itself Reclaiming Our Homes, and accompanied by signs reading “This house IS a home,” “Housing is healthcare,” and “Housing is a human right,” they flocked into the vacant homes, bearing flowers and with children in tow, and prepared for self-isolation as the coronavirus continued to spread. In the days following their move-in, other homeless families have reclaimed twelve additional vacant homes in the area, all owned by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). “Being homeless myself and seeing people literally dying on the streets, seeing sick people dying every day in L.A., made me start realizing that, ‘Well, we need to do something, and we should probably just start taking over these vacant homes,’” Flores told me through a translator.

Backed by the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action (LACCLA), the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Los Angeles Democratic Socialists of America, the LA Tenants Union, and Eastside Café, the Reclaimers were inspired by the Moms4Housing in Oakland, a group of housing-insecure black mothers who last November took up residence in a vacant, foreclosed home in the rapidly gentrifying city and won their battle to stay. The Reclaimers issued a set of demands, including turning “publicly-owned vacant property into public or social housing NOW,” opening up speculator-owned housing, a rent freeze and eviction and utility shut-off moratorium during the coronavirus emergency, and a halt to the criminalization of homelessness and the release of incarcerated people who do not pose a safety concern. Their arguments intrinsically link the housing and healthcare crises to the crisis of mass incarceration, understanding that the conditions created by an out-of-control housing market and an arrest-happy police department will only fuel the spread of illness. “The coronavirus pandemic—it is the spark that lit everything up, the drop that spilled the water,” Escudero explained by phone.

Facing a health crisis, California legislators call for a moratorium on evictions, utility shutoffs and foreclosures.

CAPITAL & MAIN - The red banner raised outside a modest suburban home in East Los Angeles was a dramatic new addition to the neighborhood. “Reclamando nuestros hogares,” it read in big block letters. It translates roughly as “Reclaiming our homes,” an explicit statement of protest and personal survival at a time of crisis on this quiet stretch of Sheffield Avenue.

Inside, Martha Escudero, 42, and her two young daughters, ages 8 and 10, were still settling in three days after the family and several community activists took control of the empty bungalow. The March 14 takeover was the first step in an ongoing campaign to provide shelter to homeless and housing-insecure Angelenos through the distribution of state-owned properties, just as the coronavirus pandemic reaches a crisis point.

In California, homeless and housing-insecure families struggle to find safe places to shelter from coronavirus. 

marie claire - Across from two of the tall, unnervingly skinny palm trees Los Angeles is known for, there is a light blue bungalow in a row of neat, single-story structures. After a historically dry winter, the city has just seen a bout of rain, which drummed on the brown, sloping roof of the building and turned the front yard a vivid green. Now, in the muddy soil and shade from the still-clouded sky, the home’s youngest new inhabitants set about their task of the day: digging into that wet soil and sprinkling seeds—they’re creating a vegetable garden. 

“They call it [the] ‘love and kindness garden,’” Martha Escudero tells me over the phone. In the background, a soft soundtrack of children’s voices pipes up intermittently.

As families across the United States prepare to ride out this medical crisis by self-isolating for weeks, or possibly longer, Escudero, a 42-year-old mother of two, is grateful for a safe space to call home. But the bungalow with the newly green yard isn’t actually theirs—it’s a vacant property, owned by the state of California.

Over the past week, health experts have increasingly called for communities to practice social distancing and self-isolation to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. But as reports of the sickness in California began trickling—then flooding—in and counties began calling for residents to “shelter in place,” Escudero and her daughters Victoria, 10, and Meztli, 8, didn’t know what to do. They had no place of their own to stay.

DEMOCRACY NOW! - In Los Angeles, a group of unhoused mothers is trying to take over a vacant house and demanding the local government use all publicly owned vacant homes, libraries, recreation centers and other properties to house people immediately. This comes as the coronavirus is putting unhoused people and other vulnerable communities at a higher risk of infection.

LA TIMES - Weeks after a group of homeless mothers took over a vacant house in Oakland and managed to keep it, another group of moms is trying to do the same in Los Angeles.

On Saturday morning, the protesters and their families moved into a two-bedroom bungalow in El Sereno. They say they plan to remain indefinitely and potentially take over more houses.

They are calling on state and local governments to use all publicly owned vacant homes, libraries, recreation centers and other properties to house people immediately. They say the region’s extreme lack of affordable housing and the threat of the novel coronavirus pushed them to act.

“I am a mother of two daughters. I need a home,” said Martha Escudero, 42, who has spent the last 18 months living on couches with friends and family members in neighborhoods across East Los Angeles. “There’s these homes that are vacant, and they belong to the community.”

Inequality . org - Just two days before Thanksgiving, the nearly 100 elderly residents of Brookdale San Pablo received an unfortunate holiday notice – they were going to be evicted. 

Brookdale, which operates around 800 senior living facilities across the United States, had decided not to renew the lease of their San Pablo location, which expired in January — leaving tenants scrambling in the midst of California’s affordable housing crisis. Brookdale’s move, which it called a “portfolio reset” earlier last year, means some tenants are concerned they’ll be moved far from their families and communities. Others are worried about the potential for homelessness given skyrocketing cost of living in the Bay Area. 

In the months since they received the notice, many Brookdale residents have left. But there are still a couple dozen tenants who can’t find anywhere affordable to move. They’re demanding better treatment by Brookdale, which has told them they have until the end of March to move, a local NBC affiliate reports. The residents told NBC they want either a settlement to help them move, or a plan that would allow them to stay in place in their homes. 

Read full article here.

The Mercury News - OAKLAND — After refusing to pay rent for four months, tenants striking in Fruitvale say their landlord has agreed to consider selling the building — a potential win for the strikers and their activist backers.

Some renters living in the 29th Avenue complex stopped paying rent in November, both to protest what they say are poor living conditions, and to pressure the owner to sell them the building through a local community land trust. If the bold strategy works, it will be the second recent victory for the group supporting them — Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment — which also helped Moms 4 Housing pressure a corporate landlord to negotiate the sale of the West Oakland home they’d been squatting in.

“Thanks to our fight, we have been heard by the owner of this building,” Maria Montes de Oca, who has lived in the 29th Avenue building for 11 years, said Thursday night before a crowd of several dozen neighbors and supporters. “We are closer than ever to buying this building.”

Read the full article here. 

Counterpunch - In an age of worsening income and wealth inequality, a supply of affordable shelter for workers and their families is low while demand for it is high, the conditions for price-gouging. Just ask Dominique Walker, 34, of Moms 4 Housing, one of the unhoused women who occupied a vacant home in West Oakland that Wedgewood Property Management, a real estate investment company, owned.

Oakland police forcibly removed M4H from that abode; meanwhile, wildcat graduate student strikers at two of the 10 campuses in the University California system are withholding their labor, demanding higher pay for skyrocketing rents.

“We are trying to build a coalition,” Walker, a full-time organizer of the Black Housing Union, a chapter of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), told me. “That effort has resonated with people globally.” Movement politics is the name of this game.

Read full article here. 

NBC Bay Area - Some East Bay seniors facing eviction took their protest public Wednesday. They’re the last of what’s left of nearly 100 tenants at San Pablo’s Brookdale Senior-Living Facility who received eviction notices last fall.

Watch full video here. 

CBS Bay Area - Tenants of an Oakland apartment complex were staging a strike to protest rent hikes and the shoddy condition of their living units. But they’re taking it a step further by pressuring the landlords to sell the property so the apartment renters can stay in their homes.

The building, located on 29th Avenue, in Oakland, is the scene of the Bay Area’s latest tenant uprising. Half the residents in the 14-unit complex stopped paying rent four months ago. Francisco Perez says the monthly cost of his one bedroom apartment has doubled to more than $1,500 in just the last 3 years.

“My fear is, OK, this year I can afford it but next year…what am I gonna do?” said Perez.

Curbed SF - Tenants of an Oakland apartment building near the Fruitvale neighborhood have stopped paying rent, demanding that their landlord sell them the building for $3.2 million via the Oakland Land Trust nonprofit.

The rent strike is the tenants’ response to what they say are years of rent increases that threaten to push them out.

At the 14-unit building on 29th Avenue, half of the building’s renters are are participating in the standoff that started in October. CBS SF cites one 20-year tenant, who pays $1,500 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, which he says has doubled in price over the last three years. This, in part, has prompted fears of eviction in the building and neighborhood in the gentrification.

Read the full article here.

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — Chanting “housing is a human right,” several dozen activists walked into a popular San Francisco restaurant on Friday evening, interrupting patrons’ Valentine dinner to call out the establishment’s landlord as a heartless mega-corporation determined to squeeze renters.

Roughly 60 protesters marched into The Keystone on Fourth Street near Market in downtown San Francisco on Friday. The upscale tavern is in a property owned by Mosser Capital, which also has many other buildings throughout the Bay Area. According to the protesters, corporate greed may force them to move out of their homes. Many in the group live in a property owned by Mosser.

Read full article here

NBC Bay Area - On the evening of Valentine’s Day, dozens of Oakland tenants and their supporters chose a San Francisco restaurant and hotel owned by their landlord to protest increasing rents.

Mosser, a company that owns more than 80 properties in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, is the landlord of the protesting tenants and owner of the Mosser Hotel. They say the company told them it has to make improvements to their buildings that would allow Mosser to increase their rents.

“It’s real,” said Oakland tenant Angela Shannon. “This kind of stress, it takes a real toll on people’s health and people’s lives. We don’t have to wait until people are on the street to take it seriously.”

Read full article here

Univision 14 - Un grupo de inquilinos en uno de los barrios hispanos de Oakland decidió tomar medidas drásticas para hacerle frente a los aumentos desproporcionados de renta que ellos consideran injustos: no pagar el alquiler por cuatro meses.

NBC Bay Area - Unable to keep up with rising rents, tenants of an Oakland apartment building are protesting in a bold way – they’re on a rent strike.

For the past four months, half the tenants of the Oakland property have refused to pay. They hope that by banding together they can afford to keep their homes.

“This is my place,” said rent striker Francisco Perez. “I spent 20 years, a good part of my life.”

Perez takes pride in the apartment he's shared with his wife for the past two decades but said he can no longer keep up with the rising rent. The retired roofer said it's more than doubled in the past five years.

Read full article here.

The Mercury News - OAKLAND — A group of tenants living in a Fruitvale apartment building haven’t paid their rent since October, and they don’t plan to until their landlord gives them what they want — a chance to buy the building.

The tenants say they went on strike after a series of rent increases and the landlord’s failure to maintain their apartments. Now they refuse to make another payment until the landlord sits down and negotiates a deal that would allow them, with the help of the nonprofit Oakland Community Land Trust, to take over the property on 29th Avenue. Half of the building’s 14 households are participating, and with the strike in its fourth month, their tactics may be working — a tenant rights group says the landlord last week agreed to set up a meeting.

Read full article here. 

The Sacramento Bee - 

A city of Sacramento rent control ballot initiative that was considered dead may be making a comeback.

The initiative, which aims to protect tenants from rent hikes and unjust evictions, last year received more than 44,000 signatures from voters, qualifying it for the city ballot in 2020.

But in August, the Sacramento City Council passed a rent control ordinance, and the three proponents who had submitted the ballot measure agreed not to pursue it, Margarita Maldonado, one of the proponents, said at the time.

Capradio - There are 47,000 signatures supporting a rent control measure in the city of Sacramento, but the City Council hasn’t put it on the March 2020 ballot. Supporters say they'll sue if it isn't. 

John Shaban with SEIU Local 1021 helped hang a large gray banner on the windows at Tuesday's City Hall meeting. 

"The city has a qualified initiative that has been lawfully submitted,” Shaban said. “The county elections and the city clerk have accepted this initiative. They have 88 days ahead of the next election to place it on the ballot and tell us that they're doing it so that we can run our part of the campaign."

But the Sacramento City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood says the Council may place charter initiatives before the voters at the next regularly scheduled general municipal election, which is in November 2020. 

Alcala Wood says the council actually has until June 2020 to put it on the ballot.

Read the full article here. 

Gulf Times - When Dominique Walker moved back from Mississippi to her native California last year, she planned to pursue a nursing degree while caring for her two small children.But she and other moms and their children ended up living as squatters in a bold, high-profile protest against homelessness. And today the 34-year-old has come to symbolise a crisis that has reached historic proportions in one of America’s wealthiest states.

Read the full article here.

The Guardian - For almost two months, an unassuming white house on Magnolia Street in Oakland was home for Dominique Walker and her family.

Her one-year-old son, Amir, took his first steps in the living room. He said his first words there, too – “thank you”. Walker’s daughter, Aja, celebrated her fifth birthday in the house.

“We made it a home,” Walker, 34, told the Guardian.