An initiative of the East Bay Community Law Center’s Health & Welfare Program, the project partners with three area hospitals and recently celebrated 10 years of collaboration with Oakland Children’s Hospital. Founded on a $25,000 budget, the initiative has grown in capacity and impact by helping patients secure basic needs to stabilize their families’ lives.
Valeska Castaneda can distinctly remember being pulled out of her preschool classroom after learning her mother was deported.[…]Now, Trump’s election has set off a wave of panic among Berkeley’s undocumented community. Now more than ever, Castaneda must confront fears about the safety of her immigrant family members and community.
The Back on the Road coalition, made up of seven California organizations and supported by the ACLU, claims that an individual’s driver’s license can only be suspended legally if the person has “willfully” failed to appear or pay a fine. Simply being “too poor to pay the fine,” according to the coalition’s complaint, isn’t enough to establish intent as required by law.
The East Bay Community Law Center partnered with the law school at UC Berkeley to further investigate the fees. After filing multiple Freedom of Information Act Requests, Weisburd and her team learned how much money was being charged, and how much was actually being collected from young people and their families.
A coalition of legal aid and civil rights organizations sued the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) this morning for illegally suspending the driver’s licenses of low-income Californians.
Civil rights lawyers say the problem is just as bad in liberal California and that the Culver charges illustrate how traffic judges have wide discretion to abuse vulnerable defendants and order fines that can destroy people’s lives. […] “It puts you in a spiral,” said Brandon Greene, staff attorney with East Bay Community Law Center. “They don’t have enough money, and they can’t pay the debt.”
OAKLAND — In the face of soaring Bay Area rents and what experts decry as a public health crisis, the Oakland City Council voted Tuesday to strengthen protections for the city’s tenants.[…]On Tuesday, Marc Janowitz of the East Bay Community Law Center told the City Council that while he supported the amendments, they don’t go far enough to protect tenants.
Laura Lane ’96 has represented low-income tenants in the East Bay for nearly 20 years. During all that time, she never saw a landlord go this far to drive out tenants as she did recently at a low-income residential hotel in Oakland’s Chinatown.
California tenants have a new arrow in their quiver: a law to protect them from being unfairly placed on rental blacklists that jeopardize their credit ratings and shut them out of the housing market. Signed this week by Gov. Jerry Brown, the measure is scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. [2017] Unpopular with landlord groups, the bill was a squeaker in the Legislature, narrowly passing through the Assembly in May and the Senate in August.
Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill Number 2819! A California law to protect innocent tenants from damaged credit and blacklists if eviction actions are resolved in their favor.
