(Editorial Note: The person profiled in the article has asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation. We have changed the person’s name to Samantha.)
A few months ago, Samantha, a community activist, had the misfortune to run up against the California Apartment Association. The CAA, one of the most powerful landlord lobbying groups in the state, is known to smackdown anyone who tries to protect renters from unfair evictions and outrageous rent hikes.
“They send people into any locality when they get a whiff of rent control,” Samantha told me on a recent Saturday morning. “They’re an organization that has massive resources. They’re a force to be reckoned with.”
We sat at a wooden table in a cafe on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito, a working-class city about four miles north of Berkeley. She is a mother and member of local advocacy organization. She was born in Europe, and moved to California with her family in the late 1980s. Recently, she left her previous career to work in activism.
“I got tired of being a fly on the wall, an observer,” Samantha explained. “I wanted to be a social justice advocate — and warrior.”
She has a strong sense of what’s fair and unfair, and feels a somewhat unexplainable urge to help people.
“My partner calls it the ‘Mother Teresa complex,’” she said with a laugh. “I just see, if you look, that there’s so much inequity.”
Samantha added, “I just like to stand up for people who can’t defend themselves.”
Today, she battles for housing justice in El Cerrito, where she lives.
“As a constituency,” Samantha said, “tenants are at the whims of the landlords. El Cerrito doesn’t have any renter protections at all.”
Like much of the Bay Area, rents in El Cerrito have increased rapidly over the years — and there’s no sign that’s going to stop.
“Housing is the number one issue facing the Bay Area, and facing the state,” she explained. “People are paying a huge part of their paychecks on rent, and you can’t save for anything else.”
In El Cerrito, seniors on fixed incomes and working-class residents are getting slammed by unfair, excessive rents.
“We have senior citizens tell us that if this keeps up, they’ll have to move out of state, where they don’t know anyone.”
But just as sky-high rents are all too common in California cities, so is the lack of political will by elected leaders to do anything about it. Whether it’s Sacramento, San Diego, or El Cerrito.
“The sentiment one gets when going to a City Council meeting,” said Samantha, “is that they’re completely out of touch with what renters are going through.”
So earlier this year, Samantha and her fellow activists pushed for a number of tenant protections, including just cause eviction — a landlord must have a reason to kick someone out of his or her home. By May, the El Cerrito City Council approved a watered-down version of what housing activists wanted. It only applied to around 15 percent of the city’s rental units, Samantha said, but it was something.
The California Apartment Association, though, believed even that was too much, and started a signature drive to repeal it.
“They engaged in a total misinformation campaign.”
Samantha said that signature gatherers misleadingly told residents that they should sign the petition if they wanted rent control — a complete lie. Other signature gatherers said that if residents didn’t want criminals to move into El Cerrito, they should sign. The CAA is known for such underhanded tactics.
Last year, in Mountain View, the landlord lobbying group tried to repeal renter protections through a ballot measure that CAA and others actually framed as a good thing for tenants. Fortunately, the disingenuous effort failed to get enough signatures. Mayor Lenny Siegel said in a strongly worded statement: “Mountain View voters were not fooled by the apartment owners’ deceptive campaign to place the sneaky repeal on the ballot.”
El Cerrito residents, however, weren’t experienced in the tricky ways of the California Apartment Association. The lobbying powerhouse got the signatures it needed, forcing the City Council’s hand. The politicians folded, and repealed their own watered-down protections in August. Samantha witnessed the vote at City Hall.
“It was another example of CAA’s power,” she told me. “It was a joke. At that moment, it became clear to me that getting anything through the City Council was going to be next to impossible.”
She added, “Our group is not anti-landlord. It’s anti-rent gouging. We want fairness for tenants.”
Her organization is now undertaking a citywide education campaign to better inform residents about tenant protections, with the possibility of trying to place a rent control initiative on the local ballot.
“We just need a little more empathy in California,” said Samantha. “We’d live in a much better place.”