Lower San Antonio Collaborative

Housing Workgroup

November 17, 2004

Meeting Minutes

I.  Welcome & Introductions

Attendees:

Jaimee Arnone, EBCLC

Catherine Firpo, Oakland CEDA

Ann Magovern, Oakland Community Organizations

Linda Maranzana,EBCLC

Jennie Mollica, Lao Family Net

Deb Montesinos, Making Connections

Carl Pascual, EBALDC,

Lisa Prigozen, EBALDC

EBCLC: The city has 2 contracts with them.  1. Courthouse – “Low-Income Eviction Defense Project” which helps tenants who are representing themselves.  2. A new contract to provide representation to tenants going to the rent board. This will be Linda’s job and will be paid for out of the $24 Rent Arbitration Board fee assessed to landlords.  (half of which can be passed through to tenants).

    -    Lisa: Presentation of Research / Brainstorming session

Discussion ensued on this topic after Lisa went over her various research work streams.  Much of the brainstorming involved the Pass-Through problem and is therefore listed below.

**What are the habitability requirements in California/US/Oakland? CC 1941 – required plumbing, no rats, etc. = IMPLIED guarantee of habitability contractually.  That’s why slumlords can be sued on the basis of ‘breech of contract’

Stephen Kasden – Oakland Rent Board.  Each decision gets a written decision, just like regular legal cases.  He’ll know what kinds of things get passed on and get through the rent arbitration process favorably to landlords.

Another issue: What is the state definition of rent control.  According to Catherine, Oakland is NOT a ‘rent control city.’

• White paper outline

With input from the group, the skeletal outline is now:

I.   Introduction

II.  Problem Statement

III. Oakland’s Case

       A.  Mandatory Inspection

       B.   Pass-Through Problem

       C.  Case studies

IV. Potential Models: Other Cities (include pass-through)

V.  Recommendations

       A.  Improved Oakland Process

       B.  Barriers and Opportunities

Lisa will be filling in these sections over the next two weeks, and requesting info from other housing workgroup participants as necessary.

• Update on case studies

Ann sent two case studies to Lisa.  A 3rd should be on its way from Laura Blair.  We think that’s the Pham cas.  The city filed a 17-200 and the case is in process now.  She owns 18 properties and all of them are in bad shape.  Ann is going to a meeting about this December 7.  Demographically: the tenants in this care are largely Vietnamese and Chinese. The landlord had even told the Neighborhood Law Corps that these Mien families shouldn’t be complaining because it’s worse in their country.

Site specific – Ann: 27th Avenue, will probably be settled very soon and won’t be the kind of well-publicized ‘city saves the renters’ kind of thing like the Pham case.  It will probably be a small settlement but the tenants are hanging tough.  They all say they will refuse to pay any increase.

• Updates on potential allies contacted: APEN, EBAYC (Carl), EBHO, FES (Carl) (FES is EBAYC for our purposes), Sentinel, Central Legal (Ann), Policy Link, EBCLC, Neighborhood Law Corp

Lisa has talked with APEN, EBHO, EBCLC, Neighborhood Law Corp.  She is waiting to hear back from Sentinel.  Lisa should contact Policy Link and Central Legal, if Ann doesn’t.

Lisa will run her draft of the white paper by all of these organizations before we take it fully public. 

III.  Pass-Through Problem/Capital Improvements

Jennie – The Pass-Through Problem is our big opportunity to propose change

Ann: The jugular/Achilles of the rent code is the “Priority 1” and “Priority 2.”  These are the repairs that CANNOT be passed on the the tenants, and include open gas, sewage regulations, tripping hazards, leaking roofs.

**A question we need to answer: How does getting a code violation citation effect the pass-through issue?

Ann: the 27th Avenue case had 150 code violations in 36 units.  Oakland Code Compliance gave them 6 months to bring to compliance, but the city filed a law suit before that period had passed (Ann- do I have this right?) The landlord is Kevin Wang, (who EBCLC just settled another case with in Berkeley).

When a pass-through is fought through the rent board, A petition is filed and during that time, the residents don’t pay the increase. The landlord has to show receipts to the board in order to prove that the increase is justified.

‘Deferred Maintenance’ – Landlords decide not to perform maintenance tasks, and instead let the issue go so that it will be a capital improvement rather than a maintenance cost (i.e. able to be passed through to the tenants).  Claims of deferred maintenance fight this problem by arguing that some replacements and repairs are ‘deferred maintenance’ rather than a new capital improvement.

We were talking about some way to assist landlords with repairs that will take the burden off renters. Catherine says there have been city funding programs for landlord repairs in Oakland:  A city assistance program for landlords to do repairs, similar to the one they do for homeowners, but no one ever applies for it.  They’ve had 3-4 proposed rental rehab programs but have never gotten a single application.  This is because there would be restrictions imposed by the city as part of the loan.

What about a TIF-targeted fund?  Could TIF money be used, or would this still have the problem of disinterest because of the city’s imposed regulations.

Other cities: Pass-Through problem.  How do other cities handle this?  For example, Berkeley.  Linda: Berkeley has a bigger infrastructure to deal with it. 

Jaimee mentioned Washington, DC and New York City who have a reputation for good laws protecting tenants from this problem.

‘Receivership’ Oakland has this program in which rent money goes for repair.  It takes 2-3 years and is usually for single-family homes.  Oakland does about 3-4 per year and they each require ‘an incredible amount of work’.  For our purposes, this doesn’t appear to be applicable.

Catherine noted: There is very high turnover among hearing officers (for the rent arbitration board).

• Wording in rent codes

Jaimee: The problem is in the regulations, this is the part that needs to be changed.  Jaimee then went over several phrases in the regulations that were unclear and subject to subjective interpretation that can work against tenants.  Linda: The regulations were reissued sometime in the past few years.  The appendix sections are a decade old – maybe out of date, but more importantly, they’ve been around long enough for us to be able to assess how well they work, and how they effect this pass-through problem.

Catherine: We need to change the regulations.

-     “Walk-through” with Pat from SACDC

Seen as premature at this point, so I won’t do it.  Experience of others is that it will raise people’s expectations that help is on the way, only they don’t understand the time-frame of what we are dealing with, and we’re not equipped to help individual units right now.  Ann told us about a similar walk-through that she and others had done years back.  The people they visited were calling all the time afterwards.  Catherine:  This is the same reason they decided to hold off on doing the workshops.  People will start calling.

As Carl pointed out, there are two separate items, research and organizing, so we should save this since we’re still in the research phase.   On organizing, Carl: “We’re not going to start from scratch”, meaning that we will leverage other collaborative members’ community organizing capacities.

IV. Other Issues

• Resident Surveys: FES and APEN

FES Survey: 400 parents of children in local schools (Garfield Elementary and Roosevelt Middle School).  These are potential neighborhood leaders.  Only 10% own their homes.  P. 8 where they list the ‘Mobilizing Issues’ – 7. Housing Repairs by Ethnicity and Race highlights compliance issues.  

** Lisa needs to get FES questions and long answers from David.  Housing workgroup folks want to see the whole thing, not just the summary.

• Catherine SDS Meeting Update (Compliance Checklist). 

Service District 3 is mostly in Councilman Danny Wan’s district, although some is Ignacio De La Fuente’s district.  In three weeks there will be another meeting that will be focused on code compliance, but Catherine wasn’t sure why this would be the focus. Wan and De La Fuente’s aids will be there, and Lisa will have a white paper draft for Catherine before this meeting.  Again, Catherine underscored that the political climate in Oakland is ripe for this kind of proposal right now.  The landlords didn’t support measure Y, and are therefore not as popular in the city as in other times.  is a bit peeved at them.

Catherine reports to the SDS team on our monthly LSAC housing workgroup meetings. Why? The SDS wants to be informed of any big public upswell.

    -    LSAC Townhall Meeting

Lisa reported briefly on this community outreach effort by the 23rd Avenue workgroup, Urban Ecology, and others.  The contact names collected will be kept in a database for future outreach efforts and can be accessed by the housing workgroup.  We are still waiting for minutes from the meeting, as well as a list of community members who are interested in housing issues.

V.  Workplan

Jennie has written a draft of the workplan.  Members went over it briefly, but did not have much time to go over it.  Lisa, Jennie and Sandra from Making Connections will finish this workplan and distribute at the next meeting.  Everyone was given a copy of the draft workplan -  Comments are very welcome.

VI.  Next Steps, Next Meeting Date, and Things to Keep in Mind

Make sure white paper notes that we’re pushing for affordable housing development as well as the code enforcement stuff.  i.e., short-term and long-term goals

A note of warning from Jeff Levine – This process has the potential to deplete the stock of affordable housing units that the city has because some units will likely be declared unhabitable.  Watch out for that!

Next meeting: December 15, 2:00