News from Oakland City Attorney
Barbara J. Parker
|
|
This month:
- City Attorney formally launches Housing Justice Initiative, along with new “Know Your Housing Rights” campaign with Rent Adjustment Program
- Oakland joins Portland to sue the Trump Administration for its new policy and practice of deploying federal agents to progressive cities and commandeering police forces
- Court appoints receiver to manage egregiously-blighted property at 4110 Fruitvale Avenue
- Oakland and coalition of other state and local governmental entities win lawsuit against Trump Administration’s effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 Census for Congressional reapportionment
Dear Friends and Fellow Oaklanders:
I hope you are staying healthy and safe during these unsettling times.
As always, I invite your comments and thoughts about the newsletter and our Office’s work.
|
|
City Attorney formally launches Housing Justice Initiative, along with new “Know Your Housing Rights” campaign with Rent Adjustment Program
On October 22, I formally launched a new Housing Justice Initiative (HJI), a project that will be a force multiplier for my work protecting vulnerable tenants in Oakland’s diverse neighborhoods. This initiative will increase my office’s capacity to advocate in numerous ways to protect Oakland tenants’ fundamental rights to safe, healthy, and dignified housing. The HJI will coordinate with partners across non-profit and philanthropic sectors to advance this crucial work.
The launch of the HJI, and its accompanying Know Your Housing Rights campaign in collaboration with the City’s Rent Adjustment Program, is particularly crucial at this challenging time in the city, state, and nation’s history. We are facing many, many health and economic disasters, harms that are exacerbated by abusive landlords. Since March of this year, our Neighborhood Law Corps has filed multiple lawsuits and sent dozens of demand letters in response to landlords’ violations of tenants’ fundamental rights. We also have secured restraining orders against landlords engaging in some of the worst abuses against tenants during the pandemic, including illegal, self-help evictions involving lockouts and utility shutoffs, that threaten tenants’ ability to safely shelter in place. The HJI will build on this foundation to assist even more tenants in Oakland through litigation, policy efforts, and public education campaigns.
Our city, like our country, is facing multiple, overlapping pandemics: the pandemics of COVID-19, systemic racism, the destruction of the social safety net, and climate change disaster. In the context of those crises, the harms of housing insecurity—and housing injustice—are multiplied. This initiative and campaign aim to protect Oakland residents from those harms, and lift up the rights of all Oaklanders to access and maintain their housing free of discrimination and other illegal actions.
As part of the Housing Justice Initiative, we also are launching a Know Your Housing Rights campaign with the Rent Adjustment Program. The campaign will include widely disseminating information in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese to help tenants advocate for themselves and understand what resources are available to protect and defend their rights. We are coordinating this campaign with East Bay Community Law Center, Centro Legal de la Raza, Eviction Defense Center, Bay Area Legal Aid, Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, Family Violence Law Center, and Public Rights Project, whose work on housing rights the City Attorney is honored to more fully join.
As part of the HJI and the Know Your Housing Rights campaign, we have also launched a new website, www.housingjusticeoakland.org, designed to educate tenants about their rights, empower tenants to submit complaints of harassment online to the Neighborhood Law Corps, and connect with City of Oakland and nonprofit resources. The City Attorney partnered with the David E. Glover Education and Technology Center to develop the website, and with Youth Impact Hub to develop videos capturing the stories of both tenants and non-profit advocates.
The Housing Justice Initiative received its first grant from the San Francisco Foundation. I am grateful and thank the Foundation for its investment in bringing this bold new idea to life.
|
|
Oakland joins Portland to sue the Trump Administration for its new policy and practice of deploying federal agents to progressive cities and commandeering police forces
On October 14, I joined Portland and the nonprofit Public Rights Project in filing a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s new policy and practice of unlawfully deploying federal law enforcement under the guise of protecting federal property. The purpose of this new policy and practice is to control, or overtake, progressive cities’ responses to protests. These federal actions lack legal authority and jeopardize cities’ efforts to promote racial justice and protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents.
After the tragic killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May, people across the nation protested to advocate for police reform and racial justice. Through evaluations of their policies, examining funding, new race equity efforts, community engagement, and other efforts, Portland and Oakland are working to stand with their residents in this call for police reform, because public safety and thriving communities are built on a foundation of trust with law enforcement. Portland and Oakland have sought to protect public safety and support the exercise of First Amendment rights by their residents.
Oakland and Portland filed this new lawsuit to challenge a policy and practice that directly contravene—and harm—cities’ efforts to engage in the critical work of securing racial justice and police reform, and purport to allow the federal government to engage in virtually boundless policing in the nation’s cities. The policy and practice were animated, at least in part, by the Executive Order that President Trump signed on June 26. That Executive Order was aimed at punishing state and local governments that, in Trump’s view, had “lost the ability to distinguish between the lawful exercise of rights to free speech and assembly and unvarnished vandalism,” or “failed to protect public monuments, memorials, and statues.”
Under the new policy, the Trump Administration deployed unmarked federal law enforcement agents to the streets of Portland as part of “Operation Diligent Valor” without the city's knowledge or consent. The federal agents used tactics and munitions that significantly escalated violence and reduced public trust in public safety efforts. As the lawsuit explains, the federal agents’ actions exceeded their authority under the law. In addition, although the alleged purpose of the deployment was to protect federal property, under the new policy, federal agents patrolled and detained individuals far beyond the immediate vicinity of federal property.
The Trump Administration’s efforts to direct local police powers beyond their legal authority have continued: in September, the federal government refused to return officers of the local Portland Police Bureau to operating under local authority, insisting they must remain deputized as federal agents without the city’s consent and against its explicit requests. In its inflammatory press release, the federal government accused “City Hall” of failing to support law enforcement officers as a rationale for its refusal.
It is a sad day for this nation when Oakland and other progressive cities must protect our residents’ constitutional rights from unlawful and unconstitutional federal overreach. During the 1960s civil rights movement, the federal government sought to protect constitutional rights to peacefully protest segregated businesses and public facilities, and to attend desegregated public schools when local and state governments failed to do so. But the Trump Administration’s new policy does the opposite, which is why we had to go to court to challenge it.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Attorney General William Barr, the U.S. Department of Justice, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The lawsuit alleges violations of the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the Homeland Security Act.
|
|
Court appoints receiver to manage egregiously-blighted property at 4110 Fruitvale Avenue
The Alameda County Superior Court has approved a request to appoint a receiver to take over management of the property at 4110 Fruitvale Avenue, a property where, for years, the City received complaints about blight, unpermitted industrial activity, and hazardous waste. Despite numerous pre-litigation attempts by many city units and departments, including Building Code Enforcement, Fire Prevention, and the City Administrator’s Office, to alert the owners and managers of the property via notices and letters, inspections, and the assessment of civil penalties, the owners and managers refused to abate the nuisance.
Because of this dire situation, I filed a lawsuit several years ago to require those responsible to actually abate the perilous nuisance present on their property. The property contained, variously, an accumulation of trash and debris, open storage of cardboard, construction debris, discarded household items, a large amount of construction materials (including roofing materials, a forklift, and lumber), tools, wood, paint, tires, 12 propane tanks, 3 oxygen cylinders, 2 acetylene compressed gas tanks, extensive amounts of paint and paint products, and a 55-gallon container of waste oil—a massive and dangerous accretion of items that posed an extreme fire risk that the owners and managers nonetheless did not abate.
I took these defendants to court to protect our community. We all have a role to play in protecting our neighbors from risks, especially fire risk. It was unconscionable to allow such risks to persist and multiply in defiance of city notices and fines, and we are relieved that a court-appointed receiver will take over this property. The receiver will ensure that the dangers present at the property will be abated in a responsible fashion, and will ensure that the neighborhood is no longer at risk from the nuisance that has long existed at that location.
|
|
Oakland and coalition of other state and local governmental entities win lawsuit against Trump Administration’s effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 Census for Congressional reapportionment
Several months ago, Oakland joined California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the County of Los Angeles in a lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s July 2020 memorandum aimed at excluding undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 Census for the purposes of Congressional reapportionment. The clearly unlawful memorandum ignored federal constitutional requirements and was a last-ditch attempt to exclude immigrants from the 2020 Census count. Last week, the District Court for the Northern District of California agreed, and granted a significant victory to the state and local government coalition.
I joined this lawsuit because in America, everyone should count. In the Constitution, the Census does not discriminate. Neither should this administration. Immigrants are Americans, and it is crucial that this lawsuit ensured that they are counted like all other Americans. Census results impact everything from the distribution of federal funding to state representation in Congress. Many billions of dollars and a number of Congressional seats were at stake in this litigation: an undercount would have reduced California’s representation and funding significantly. With this victory, those detrimental changes will not proceed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
