Under SB 179 and SB 310, California will (1) no longer require a physician’s declaration to change a gender marker on California identity documents and California court-ordered gender changes, (2) allow for a nonbinary gender marker option, (3) eliminate the need in most cases to attend a court hearing to obtain a court-ordered gender change, and (4) no longer deny the right to a court-ordered name and gender marker change for individuals who are under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or are in county jail.

Residents and allies of the vehicular community at the Berkeley Marina held a press conference Monday to demand access to basic needs facilities and call for an end to the city’s order to move or risk losing their homes.  Several speakers gathered at the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center about 12:30 p.m., including City Councilmember Cheryl Davila and Osha Neumann, a supervising attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center, according to Yesica Prado, a Berkeley Marina vehicular resident.

“The situation they’re up against is that Berkeley has essentially made it illegal to live in a vehicle anywhere within the city limits,” said Osha Neumann, with the East Bay Community Law Center.

The East Bay Community Law Center, or EBCLC, announced Monday that the Alameda County Superior Court will use the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “extremely low-income” standard to determine eligibility for applicants seeking reduced traffic infraction fines under the court’s Ability to Pay, or ATP, program.

Furthermore, collection agencies are not bound by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which protects consumers from various forms of threat and harassment, because court debts are considered “involuntary.” As a result of this loophole, said Miguel Soto, an attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center, “We’ve had clients tell us that the [debt collector] they’re dealing with is threatening them with violence, imprisonment, or, in some occasions, deportation.”

Monday, June 25, 2018: OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA:   The Superior Court of Alameda County has revised its criteria for low-income applicants seeking a fine reduction for traffic infractions, making the Court’s fine reduction program more accessible to low-income residents.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and representing tenants in Berkeley. It’s amazing the number of people who have had to move away,” said Laura Lane, who was director of the housing practice at the East Bay Community Law Center for 20 years.

Shallyn Wells, an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center, shared the story of her client, Samantha Lao, at today’s committee hearing. Lao lives in the upper unit of a duplex. Her downstairs neighbor left after a new owner purchased the building and evicted them. The new owner now claims to be living in the bottom unit, but Wells claims that this isn’t true, and that instead the landlord is simply using the exemption to get rid of Lao and increase the rent.

Benjamin Blake, chief clinical strategy officer for BACS, said the organization has many people who are “rental ready” in Oakland, but there aren’t apartments available. East Bay Community Law Center supervising attorney Osha Neumann agreed that the limiting factor is a lack of affordable subsidized housing in Berkeley and Oakland.

It’s always them. We debate them, we invoke them in our polemics, we sympathize with them, we scorn them, we lump them into a generic mass, we fantasize about them, we are alternatively charitable and punitive, but they are always the other. What we don’t do is listen to them.