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Letter to Alameda City Council re: the Tuesday, January 05, 2016 City Council Meeting on R

by M Hennings (Otenant [at] gmail.com)
Letter to Alameda City Council re: the Tuesday, January 05, 2016 City Council Meeting on Rent & Evictions
tspencer [at] alamedaca.gov
tdaysog [at] alamedaca.gov
mezzyashcraft [at] alamedaca.gov
joddie [at] alamedaca.gov
fmatarrese [at] alamedaca.gov

Mayor Spencer,

In September 2015, the East Bay Express detailed the widespread evictions and exorbitant rent increases that renters were facing.
It is now January, and you and the rest of Alameda's City Council have failed to take action.

At a recent Alameda City Council Meeting it was reported that you interrupted each tenant to ask, "are you current on your rent?" But never once did you interrupt a landlord to ask "are you current on your taxes?" or "Is your apartment building up to code?"

What exactly is your issue with Alameda renters? Have the lobbyists from the California Apartment Association (CAA) and EBRHA filled your mind with tales of horrible renters, and landlords that are barely making ends meet? Have the PACs contributed so much money to your election campaign, that you have become deaf and blind to what is happening across the bay area?

Tony Saysog:

The housing crisis is not simply 'capitalism at work'. This housing crisis is fueled by speculative greed. When will you step up and do what's right?
Or are you too busy supporting the earthquake profiteers?

What will it take for the Bay Area's elected officials to do something other than ACKNOWLEDGE the crisis. It's beyond time to ACT.

The speculator driven housing frenzy has reached a point that Rent Control, Tenant Protection Ordinances, Just Cause Eviction requirements, and a provision for relocation funds for tenants are no longer a 'possible solution'. They are the only solution. You have already waited too long, and people are losing their homes.

Housing security is one of the most important issues facing 50% of your residents, yet you fail to take action to protect them.

When you attempt to placate the EBRHA and CAA and simply pass a restriction, a landlord immediately exploits a loophole and evicts the entire building.
You closed the loophole, but what about those 33 families who are being forced out?
This isn't capitalism. This is pure greed.
http://www.ebcitizen.com/2015/12/alameda-city-council-omits-eviction.html

Yet, we're supposed to believe those landlords sent by the EBRHA and CAA to fill the halls and limit tenant access?

Isn't this an election year? And aren't 50% of Alameda Residents renters?

Alameda tenants will remember how you treated us like we didn't matter. And we'll take that memory to the polls in November.

Limit rent increases to .65% of CPI
Stop all no-cause evictions.
I support Alameda Renters

http://www.48hills.org/2016/01/04/the-nimbys-and-the-housing-crisis/

The other category is what I call the Earthquake Profiteers.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Big One hits – a really Big One, 9.0 or more, and the city of San Francisco is a disaster area. There is no electricity, no transit, water pipes damaged and taps unsafe – and a big supermarket opens up and charges $50 for a quart of drinking water and $20 for a cup of rice. Starving, thirsty children are turned away by armed guards. Parents beg for just a bit of humanity, but no: You got cash, you survive. You don’t, you can die on the streets.

A huge storm hits, with cold hail and rain. A big landlord has plenty of space in a building where people can sleep warm and dry – but it’s $500 a person a night for a cot. The sick, the elderly, people with infants … they are locked out if they can’t afford the tab. Let ‘em die.

Would we, as a city, vilify those people? Would every politician in town call them out? Would the newspapers publish their names in a Hall of Shame? Would the district attorney and the city attorney look for ways to prosecute them? Would the state and local governing bodies instantly pass laws against disaster-profiteering (as, by the way, we did during WWII, when “excess profits” from the war were not only heavily taxes but roundly criticized?) Would every decent human being refuse to have anything to do with them?

I would hope so.

But the people and corporations taking the same sort of advantage of the housing crisis? The speculators, the bad landlords, the evictors? The ones who are making a fortune off the misery of people who have done nothing but try to remain in a city under pressure they did not create, people whose only crime is to be less wealthy than the new arrivals? The political players who represent the interests of these vultures? They are treated, for the most part, as business people just doing what business people do.

And they are allowed to defeat laws that would reign in the profits they destroying other people’s lives, while the political class that runs this city and takes their money says it’s just fine.

The worst Nimbys in the city aren’t even close to that class of villains.



http://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2015/09/04/rising-rents-and-evictions-in-alameda-get-attention-of-city-council

Alameda officials, who have long asked for hard data to gauge whether the island’s renters are being gouged by exorbitant rent increases and forced out of their homes by evictions, appear to be realizing the problem is more widespread than previously acknowledged. A council meeting this week to approve final passage of an ordinance to reform the city’s rent review board process — legislation one councilmember now calls “toothless” — also featured another round of heartbreaking tales of steep 15 to 20 percent rent hikes and waves of 30- and 60-day eviction notices. Councilmember Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft described Tuesday night’s Alameda City Council meeting as one of the most emotional she has witnessed in years.

Linda Weinstock, a seven-year Alameda resident, said her rent was recently raised 10 percent. After the increase, her rent for a two-bedroom apartment is now $2,950 a month, she said. The property’s management later told her to expect an additional 15-25 percent increase next year. “I think it’s unreasonable. It’s almost like they’re asking us to leave,” said Weinstock. “I’ve given everything to Alameda. I found you and I feel like I’m being asked to leave.” She is now looking for a possible “exit strategy” from the island.

Seniors are feeling the brunt of the burgeoning rental crisis, said longtime resident Barbara Duncan, who is advocating for rent control in Alameda. Holding a sign that read, “I Rent & I Vote,” Duncan told the council that landlords are pushing out Alamedans with an eye at reaping vastly higher rents from out-of-towners. “There’s no way we can survive if the rents keep going up,” she said. “If they want San Francisco people here, let us know now. We’re all wondering whether we’re going to be able to stay or are San Francisco, Palo Alto people going to move us out.”

Alameda’s new rent review board rules provide little relief from the rent increases and evictions, renters say. “Over the summer, I’ve seen more and more people get displaced out of their homes, and this rent review ordinance does nothing to address thirty- and sixty-day notices to vacate,” said Angela Hockabout, founder of the Alameda Renters Coalition.
Other than providing a venue for renters to contest rent increases, the ordinance only holds property owners accountable for merely showing up to a rent review hearing or forfeiting the right to raise rents the next year. “The reason all these renters are here tonight is that they are worried the rent review ordinance isn’t going to be enough,” added Hockabout. “This is a great first step, but it shouldn’t be the last step.”

In contrast to the ordinance’s initial approval last July and other city meetings over the past year, there appears to be a noticeable change in the city council tone toward the plight of renters. In the past, several councilmembers were reluctant to act on the issue before a long-awaited city staff report on the impact of rent increases in Alameda is released sometime in December. Several council members often wondered aloud whether reports of rent hikes and evictions were due to a “few bad apples” among landlords.


http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_29327546/alameda-my-word:-election-days-oneperson-onevote-rule-gives-renters-solace


When I owned a house, there was never a question of whether I was "long-term" or not. You own here, you count. Soon I will have lived here longer as a renter than I ever did as a homeowner. But really this fact is beside the point, and I doubt whether this little bit of personal history will have any impact on those who dismiss me or any other of the "hares" here in the city.

Luckily for me, and for more than half of Alamedans, it has been more than a century-and-a-half since property ownership was required for the right to vote. Voting rights have a long and complex history -- one that can barely be scratched here. But, in the year before I was born, the U.S. Supreme Court (Dunn v. Blumstein, 1972) decided that states couldn't put a residential duration test on voting access. Tennessee had set a one-year residence requirement for access to the polls. The court rejected this requirement while conceding 30 days to handle whatever "administrative tasks are needed." In other words, if you live here, you count.

So when I feel agitated, when renters are viewed as transient, when "longtime" residence and property ownership are used to imply that one person cares more about this city and its future than another, I try to remember that it does not matter whether you think I count or not. When we pick our elected officials or decide ballot initiatives, my vote counts exactly as much as anyone else's. I take comfort in that today and all the months from now until November.
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