“The real problem is there’s no place for people to go. Caltrans has to come to grips with this,” said Osha Neumann, an attorney for the East Bay Community Law Center. “They have to deal with this in a rational way, just like they do with earthquakes. This is a man-made disaster.”

This time last year, EBCLC advocate Vinuta Naik was fielding frequent phone calls from clients whose path to gainful employment had hit a deeply unfair dead end.

Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods, the East Bay Community Law Center, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and other groups told the board that the fees should be eliminated because they create a long-term financial burden for low-income people who already served time for their crimes but then have problems turning their lives around.

Newly-formed Debt Free Justice California coalition calls on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to put an end to this form of county-sanctioned wealth extraction and bring about “Debt-Free Justice” for communities.

Urban Habitat and the East Bay Community Law Center have released a new report, Rooted in Home: Community-Based Alternatives to the Bay Area Housing Crisis, which highlights examples of responses and long-term solutions to the housing crisis—rooted in permanent affordability and democratic community control.

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.

On November 2nd, 2018, EBCLC celebrated our thirtieth anniversary milestone by honoring the community partners who strive to advance justice with us every day.

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.