Page 10 - Sonoma County Gazette - May 2019

RENTERS cont’d from page 1
by their landlord, renters can feel powerless and lonely, says Beatrice Camacho, a tenant organizer with NBOP.
“The goal is to give renters agency and the ability to say, ‘No,
I know my rights,’ ” Camacho says.
The recently formed group is the latest in a long line of tenants’ struggles for
solidarity and greater legal protections for renters across the country.
Bay Area cities, including San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley all have their own tenants’ organizations, but the concept is relatively new for the North Bay, where tenants have fewer legal protections. In Sonoma County, approximately
40 percent of housing units are occupied by renters, according to 2017 American Community Survey data.
The Tenants Union is still in an early phase, but Camacho hopes that the group and a number of tenant associations—smaller groups consisting of residents of the same apartment complexes—will help tenants feel solidarity, build communal knowledge about their rights and, possibly, put pressure on local leaders to pass legislation.
For the past several years as California has become increasingly unaffordable, activists in cities across the state have pushed for rent control and tenant protections with mixed success. Last year, the battle came to a head over Proposition 10, a statewide ballot measure intended to expand the number of properties that can be covered by rent control legislation.
NBOP and other groups have tried to pass rent control and eviction protection laws in Santa Rosa several times in the past several years but the attempts have failed at different stages.
The primary adversary of tenant organizing campaigns are corporate landlords, not local mom and pop owners, Camacho says. For instance, after the foreclosure crisis in 2008, companies began buying up thousands of single- family homes across the country, bundling the properties into funds with
high returns, according to a 2018 study by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
Some of the companies with large financial stakes in the California housing market spent millions of dollars to defeat Proposition 10, the measure on the November 2018 ballot.
At a series of FREE EVENTS in May, organizers will
educate attendees about the history of renters’ struggles in the United States, offer advice to tenants and suggest steps for organizing their neighbors.
The events are meant to remind attendants that similar struggles have been going on for a long time across the country, Camacho says.
“We want to reach people who think nothing can change,” Camacho says.
Tuesday, May 14 from 6pm to 8pm at Petaluma Library, 100 Fairgrounds Dr., Petaluma
Wednesday, May 22, 6 to 8pm at Cook Middle School Rm 144, 2480 Sebastopol Rd, Santa Rosa
To register for an event or to join the Sonoma County Tenants Union, contact Beatrice Camacho at 707-479-5475 or bcamacho@northbayop.org. Both workshops are free and will be translated into Spanish.
10 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 5/19