Listen to Jhumpa Bhattacharya, Brandon Greene and Noe Gudiño discuss the impacts of administrative criminal justice fees and fines on formerly incarcerated individuals as they try to move on with their lives after serving time.

Berkeley Law’s East Bay Community Law Center, working with four other organizations, brought the litigation on behalf of plaintiffs Darren Mathieu and Edward Jackson. It asserts that the Oakland Housing Authority ordinance is unconstitutional, and that the OHA Police Department has used it to hassle and intimidate public housing residents through racially discriminatory enforcement practices.

The 61 year old Ross represents just one of 60 households that have been helped so far by a program launched just ten days ago, a partnership that includes Catholic Charities, the East Bay Community Law Center, the San Francisco Foundation, Bay Area Community Services, and the City of Oakland.

A coalition including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, East Bay Community Law Center, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and King & Spalding LLP, is supporting Mathieu and former Lockwood resident Edward Jackson as they challenge the constitutionality of the Oakland Public Housing loitering ordinance.

But Osha Neumann, an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center, responded that “to regulate objects is a surrogate to regulating people.” Neumann added that he believes the “impetus for this is the new BART Access Corridor.”

Nationally, communities of color are suffering through widespread government-sanctioned wealth extraction. Alameda County is no exception.

At a City Hall news conference, Schaaf and executives from the East Bay Community Law Center, Catholic Charities of the East Bay and Bay Area Community Services presented a $9 million pilot plan called Keep Oakland Housed, which is designed to provide support services for low-income city residents.

Tirien Steinbach, executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center, said pressures of the region’s tightening rental market provide incentives to landlords to raise rents. Tenants are feeling the squeeze, and need help fighting evictions.

“We believe that it will help staunch the bleeding of Oakland tenants,” said Tirien Steinbach, executive director of the East Bay Community Law Center.

Financially stressed families must choose between paying crippling fees or basic expenses, like feeding their children