In response to the growing pandemic, EBCLC joined 22 partnering organizations in urging Governor Newsom to issue an Executive Order placing an immediate moratorium on vehicle tows that are not a risk to public safety or criminal enforcement. Halting vehicle towing will slow the spread of COVID-19 by allowing essential service workers to safely transport to and from work such as hospitals and grocery stores, as well as ensure that those experiencing homelessness continue to take shelter in their vehicles and away from crowded encampments or shelters.

“The executive order that he issued … to address evictions did almost nothing, as far as we can tell, and basically said local jurisdictions you figure it out,” said Meghan Gordon, director of the housing team at East Bay Community Law Center. Tenants “need to be responding depending on which county they live in and whether those courts are open. He could’ve done something and he didn’t.”

“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.

“Our advocates utilize a highly diverse set of strategies to fight poverty, and our old system wasn’t set up to track and report on our community outreach, impact litigation, and policy change work,” he says. “For all these reasons, we needed a system that was highly customizable – something that could support our frontline attorneys in managing everything from eviction defense and asylum applications to employment advocacy and business entity formation. We’re really happy to have found all that we need in LegalServer!”