[ The city of Oakland’s longest rent strike has ended in victory
for tenants. They didn’t just win necessary repairs or rent control;
they decommodified their housing, getting profit-motivated landlords
out of the picture altogether.]
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HOW OAKLAND TENANTS FORCED THEIR LANDLORD TO TURN OVER THE KEYS  
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Mathilde Lind Gustavussen
August 30, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The city of Oakland’s longest rent strike has ended in victory
for tenants. They didn’t just win necessary repairs or rent control;
they decommodified their housing, getting profit-motivated landlords
out of the picture altogether. _

Tenants in Oakland, California, fought back against their abusive
landlord, eventually taking control of the building themselves., (Kira
Hofmann / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

 

When Maria Montes de Oca and her family moved into their apartment in
the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland fourteen years ago, there were
already problems. The apartment clearly hadn’t been maintained; the
carpet was stained and damaged, and neither the stove nor the fridge
worked. Later on, there were cockroach infestation and mold issues.
When Maria tried to get the landlord, Calvin Wong, to carry out
repairs or fumigate, he would ignore her requests or tell her he’d
use her security deposit to pay for it — a practice that’s illegal
in California.

Yet in spite of the mounting maintenance and habitability issues, the
rent kept going up. Maria’s fourteen-unit building wasn’t
protected by rent control as a result of California’s Costa-Hawkins
Rental Housing Act, which precludes certain units from being subject
to municipal rent ordinances. In Oakland, that includes apartments
built after 1980.

In 2016, after carrying out structural repairs to the building while
ignoring the tenants’ complaints, Wong raised the monthly rent by
$500 dollars. In Maria’s case, that was nearly a 50 percent increase
— an unthinkable amount. That’s when she began talking with her
neighbors and discovered that they were facing similar issues. After
reaching out to a legal center, the tenants were connected to the
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a statewide
grassroots organization that supports and organizes tenants locally.
“We told them about the rent hikes, about the conditions of the
apartments, and about our concerns, and ACCE taught us how to organize
among ourselves and the ways in which we could fight back against this
kind of situation,” Maria told _Jacobin_ in Spanish.

The tenants began holding meetings, sending written maintenance
requests, and carrying out various actions. Eventually they engaged
Oakland Community Land Trust (OakCLT), which focuses on preserving and
expanding affordability in Oakland’s low-income areas. Founded in
the wake of the foreclosure crisis, OakCLT works closely with ACCE and
has a track record of purchasing both vacant and tenant-occupied
properties, removing them from the speculative market, and placing
them under community control. But when OakCLT, with the tenants’
support, reached out to the landlord to inquire about his interest in
selling the building in late 2018 and again in 2019, they were
rebuffed. In response, the tenants launched a rent strike in October
2019 that would ultimately become the longest rent strike in Oakland
history. It ended in victory.

The situation the Fruitvale tenants found themselves in, facing an
exploitative landlord seeking to squeeze profits through continuous
rent increases, legislative loopholes, and maintenance neglect, is
emblematic of the state of tenant-landlord relationships in cities
across the United States. As a result of financialization,
gentrification, and the rollback of tenant protections, housing has
been thoroughly commodified — the use value of a place to live
subordinate to the potential for profit maximization. And with rents
that continue to soar to historic highs, combined with decades of wage
stagnation and, more recently, rampant inflation, tenants are
increasingly facing displacement at the hands of their landlords, be
they corporate
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so-called mom and pops.

The narrative of the mom-and-pop landlord who owns just a few
buildings or units and depends on tenant income for their livelihood
has been promoted by the real estate lobby for years, and particularly
during the pandemic, to argue against renters’ protections like
eviction moratoria and rent control. Grace Martinez, director of ACCE
Oakland, told _Jacobin_:

You have these large landlords, and this entire industry, using that
narrative about poor grandma and grandpa, these small landlords. But
really, it’s grandma and grandpa evicting and terrorizing other
grandmas and grandpas. So what exactly is more valuable? Is it
someone’s investment? Or is it someone’s ability to live and be
sheltered?

Regardless of size or institutional configuration, landlordism remains
an inherently exploitative system premised on profiting off someone
else’s need for shelter, enshrined by a legal framework that
protects property rights over housing needs at every turn. Within the
current structure, tenants have very little control over their own
housing or how it’s managed, and are instead subject to the whims of
landlords who can raise rents, deny basic repairs, and in many cases
carry out evictions with limited recourse for tenants and very few
deterrents and consequences — even when they fail to follow legal
procedures already stacked in their favor.

For the Fruitvale tenants, the lack of control was a sticking point.
In addition to their frustration with their apartments’ disrepair,
many worried about being displaced by the consistent rent hikes. So
when nine of the tenants initiated their rent strike, they wanted to
force their landlord to the negotiating table with the hope of
eliminating him from the equation altogether — decommodifying their
homes and ensuring tenant control in the process.

Decommodify and Democratize

When their rent strike began, in late 2019, the Fruitvale tenants
demanded that the landlord either carry out the much-needed repairs or
sell the building to OakCLT. They intensified the pressure through TV
and radio interviews and by reaching out to tenants from other
buildings owned by their landlord, showing up at his home and
business, and holding a Halloween-themed protest. In response, the
landlord hounded tenants via texts and letters placed under and on
tenants’ front doors demanding they pay their mounting rent debt or
“face the consequences” (i.e., eviction) while taking punitive
measures like denying Maria access to the building’s washing
facilities when her apartment was infested with cockroaches.

Four months into the rent strike, after having rejected their initial
offers, Calvin Wong caved and agreed to meet with OakCLT in February
2020 to discuss a possible sale. But when the pandemic hit a month
later, negotiations fizzled. The tenants continued their rent strike,
now with the protection of the COVID-19 eviction moratoria.
Nevertheless, Wong raised the rent by an additional $100 dollars a
month, in the middle of a global pandemic, and later tried to pressure
the tenants to apply for rental assistance through the rent relief
program. Maria described a heated exchange in which the landlord came
to her door, and her daughter, who was translating for Maria, grew
fearful that the landlord would get physical with them: “I kept
telling him that we are not going to apply. ‘Either you do the
repairs or we’re going to keep the strike going.’”

Even with the eviction moratoria in place, some of the Fruitvale
families moved out, fearing that displacement was inevitable. Others
lost hope and ended their participation in the strike. For the
families who stayed and watched their rent debt grow month after
month, the pressure took a toll. Jesus Alvarez, who moved in eighteen
years ago and lives with his wife and two children, said in
Spanish:_ _

It was just a really hard time. I was very worried for my family
because if we didn’t reach our goal, we didn’t know what would
happen. It was hard to fall asleep at night because the worrying was
constant. It wasn’t good for my health.

In mid-2021, with the tenants nearly two years into their rent strike,
OakCLT submitted a letter of intent and reengaged Calvin Wong about a
possible sale. OakCLT spent much of the rest of the year negotiating
the deal, and in December 2021, just as the tenants were preparing for
a Las Posadas–themed protest, reenacting Mary and Joseph’s search
for shelter, they learned that Wong had agreed to sell, turning the
protest into a celebration.

OakCLT purchased the building for $3.3 million dollars using municipal
bond funds from Oakland’s Measure KK
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an infrastructure bond passed in 2016. The use of municipal
infrastructure bond funds for the decommodification of housing
indicates an emerging commitment to the preservation of affordability
as well as a recognition that homes, and existing tenants of those
homes, are part of the city’s critical infrastructure — a
testament to years of hard work put in by tenants and organizers.
(Although the funding available under Measure KK has run out, ACCE and
other organizations are campaigning for another housing and
infrastructure bond measure that will be on the ballot in November.)
It’s also a departure from the last forty years of entrepreneurial
city governance that has prioritized for-profit projects and policies
strategically designed to attract investment, encourage economic
growth, and improve the city’s standings with bond-rating agencies
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public need.

OakCLT assumed ownership in June of this year, and is starting a
process of building capacity with the tenants to ultimately transfer
ownership of the building through a Limited Equity Housing Cooperative
(LEC) — a housing model that grew out of the labor movement in the
early twentieth century and draws on Scandinavian cooperative housing
traditions. The tenants will eventually be collectively responsible
for the management, maintenance, and financing of the building in
partnership with OakCLT, which will continue to hold the land in trust
and provide tenants with a ninety-nine-year ground lease that renews
automatically. Combined with the LEC resale formula and the use of
municipal funds, this prevents the building from returning to market
rate, and OakCLT will have a right of first refusal if a tenant moves
out. The rent, meanwhile, will be affordable in perpetuity and
regulated through the city, which means the tenants will no longer
have to worry about annual rent hikes. Steve King, executive director
of OakCLT, explained:

We’re not doing this work to create a traditional affordable housing
organization. We’re really trying to create an infrastructure where
we can bring properties in through this pathway, stabilize tenants,
and eventually transition them to resident ownership. That will free
up our capacity to keep the cycle moving.

The emphasis on resident ownership is significant, because although
community land trusts provide a mechanism for decommodification, not
all share or maintain OakCLT’s commitment to tenant control.
Instead, many fashion themselves more as affordable housing providers,
not the harbingers of collective participation and ownership
envisioned by the Civil Rights Movement organizers who pioneered the
concept in the 1960s. The root cause of this development, writes
Olivia R. Williams
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the dependency on external funding streams that necessitates both a
professionalization of the organization and a reorientation of goals
to meet intricate grant stipulations and requirements rather than
ideals about housing democratization and participation.

But beyond permanent affordability, resident control and influence on
land-use decisions should be at the center of housing, whether public,
private, or provided by a CLT. Tenant control is necessary to combat
what David Madden and Peter Marcuse
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“residential alienation,” describing the psychosocial experience
of home as another precarious place that results from our
hypercommodified housing system — the feelings of dread, anxiety,
and disempowerment Alvarez described suffering. Housing should be a
manifestation of the residential needs of those who live there, not a
vehicle for someone else’s profit accumulation.

That is what the Fruitvale tenants achieved, with support from ACCE
and OakCLT, through a six-year struggle, using a nearly
two-and-a-half-year rent strike and a CLT as tactic and tool. They
forced the decommodification and democratization of their housing,
putting tenants at the center of decisions regarding their homes, and
winning both stability and agency. They hope their victory can be used
as a blueprint for other tenants in similar situations.

Alvarez says: “I feel a huge weight off my shoulders. It’s been a
massive change for my family. It brings me peace that I can finally
sleep well at night knowing that this whole situation is over.”

A New Tool in the Belt

More tenants will likely have an opportunity to achieve what the
Fruitvale tenants did using a type of legislation known as Tenant
Opportunity to Purchase Acts (TOPA), which are being passed or
reviewed in cities across the United States, including in Oakland.
TOPA legislation requires landlords to notify tenants if they decide
to sell a property, giving tenants the chance to purchase their
building or, in some cases, transfer that right to a “qualified
purchaser” — typically a nonprofit or CLT with community ties and
a track record of managing housing. Tenants then have a limited period
of time to form an association and secure funding as well as the right
to match an offer from another buyer, putting them in position to
collectively purchase and own their homes, often in an LEC structure.

Giving tenants a first right of purchase helps level the playing field
with corporate landlords that are buying up large shares of the
housing stock while also helping stabilize neighborhoods by preventing
“flipping.” Ideally, invoking TOPA removes homes from the
speculative market entirely, although that is not always the case. In
Washington, DC, where the legislation was first implemented in 1980,
the TOPA regulations lack a permanent affordability requirement unless
public funds are used for the purchase, meaning tenants who purchase
their building using private funds can later sell it at market rate.
DC tenants are also allowed to sell the right to purchase
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the highest bidder, whether nonprofit or for-profit, counteracting
TOPA’s potentially stabilizing effects on tenants and neighborhoods.

But if crafted carefully, TOPA can be a tool for decommodification and
democratization, and most cities that are drafting this type of
legislation are putting permanent affordability and community control
covenants in place to prevent the pitfalls of the DC version.
(Although many buildings in DC remain LECs as a result of TOPA, as
Amanda Huron writes
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In addition to these safeguards, cities and states need to expand
funding streams to make TOPA accessible, since tenants invoking TOPA
are still required to pay market rate, as well as provide adequate
support and guidance for those looking to exercise their right to
purchase. If those elements are in place, however, tenants whose
landlord decides to sell their building can achieve what the Fruitvale
tenants did and avoid being at the mercy of slumlords or corporate
landlords, ultimately securing a permanent right to stay put.

As eviction rates skyrocket across the nation, reaching or even
exceeding pre-pandemic levels, and corporate finance deepens its
colonization of the rental-housing sector, it’s imperative to invest
in not only the preservation but a massive expansion of housing stock
that remains off the speculative market and under tenant control. This
will require a commitment to a host of different policy interventions
and housing models, ranging from public housing, housing cooperatives,
limited equity co-ownership, and universal rent control to expanded
tenant protections that secure tenant tenure, expropriation
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expiring affordable and vacant housing, regulation of corporate
landlords, and CLTs — as well as TOPA legislation.

If crafted with an emphasis on tenant control, these models and
interventions can help combat residential alienation and bring us
closer to the realization of housing as a human right, not a tool for
profit maximization.

_Mathilde Lind Gustavussen is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Free
University of Berlin._

* tenants
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* rent strike
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* Oakland
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* landlords
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* Housing Crisis
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