“We are already in a housing crisis and now we have a housing crisis colliding with a public health crisis,” said Meghan Gordon, housing director of the East Bay Community Law Center, a nonprofit legal aid group in Oakland.

On Wednesday, at the Alameda County State Superior Courthouse in Hayward, Gordon was one of dozens of attorneys standing shoulder to shoulder in a hallway with nearly 100 tenants and landlords during the court’s Wednesday conference day, a mandatory mass meeting judges make renters and landlords attend to try to settle eviction lawsuits instead of taking them trial. Gordon said the daily operations of eviction courts in urban counties create exactly the kinds of mass gatherings which can spread contagious diseases.

EBCLC represents more than thirty years of disrupting the impoverishment, incarceration and destruction of lives. We lean on this history of resilience and resolve during this time of flux. Moreover, we are voicing the concerns of our broad community, and recommending that our government partners take sensible, compassionate steps to advance long-term change in our legal system and value the safety of all people.

“People are only given a short amount of time in which they have to move everything, and if they can’t, people lose everything,” said Osha Neumann, consulting attorney for the East Bay Community Law Center, who just helped win a $2 million settlement against the California Department of Transportation for destroying homeless folks’ property. (In 2019, I profiled Neumann’s work for the San Francisco Chronicle.) “People are simply cleaned out,” he said. “The day begins with them having what they need to survive, and they come back and don’t have a home.”

There is currently a class action lawsuit against Caltrans to prevent it from moving people and to get compensation for those who lost their belongings, according to Osha Neumann, an attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center. Neumann added that the insistence of the homeless community to stay in that area sparked the “Where do we go?” campaign in Berkeley.

On February 20, after years of work by EBCLC, community land trusts, and Berkeley government, Mayor Jesse Arreguín introduced the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), a groundbreaking affordable housing policy that prevents displacement by empowering tenants with choices when their owner decides to sell. Raise your voice for TOPA today!

During a recent presentation at Berkeley Law before a packed lecture hall, two leaders of this effort—Carroll Fife and Leah Simon-Weisberg—described the rewards and challenges involved. The event was moderated by Osha Neumann, a lawyer with the East Bay Community Law Center, whose work includes protecting the civil rights of homeless people.

“With funding, TOPA can level the playing field for low-income tenants and affordable housing developers, create pathways to homeownership and preserve and create more affordable housing during a time when we desperately need it,” said EBCLC attorney Seema Rupani at the press conference.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, 2/18/2020: Los Angeles County Ends Assessment Of And Discharges $1.8 Billion in Adult Fees. The Debt Free Justice California coalition commends the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for ending county-sanctioned racialized wealth extraction through criminal fees.

Seema Rupani, an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center, said rents in places like Oakland and Berkeley have risen as more people have left San Francisco for the East Bay, pushing out longtime residents, particularly African Americans. “The rent is just impossible,” Rupani said, adding that displacement has also meant “loss of community.”

“It has been forever that the property of homeless people has been considered garbage,” said Osha Neumann, an East Bay Community Law Center attorney representing the plaintiffs. “The people are considered garbage and their property has been considered garbage, and that’s not OK. This says they have the same constitutional protections as anyone else.”