City Government
Kalb Proposes Ordinance to Protect Renters from Landlord Harassment
An ordinance was introduced at the city’s Community and Economic Development meeting this week to provide additional protections for Oakland residents who could be harassed or intimidated into not asserting their tenant rights.
Introduced by City Councilmember Dan Kalb, the Tenant Protection Ordinance would offer tenants the ability to protect themselves against various forms of harassment by their landlord, including “failing to provide, or threatening to interrupt housing services required by contract or by law;” removing a tenant’s personal property without prior consent; “and “attempting to influence a tenant to vacate a rental unit through fraud, intimidation, or coercion.”
Coupled with rising rent prices in Oakland, this kind of harassment has displaced many Oakland residents, pushing them out of the city, according to housing rights activists.
“The primary goal of this is to deter these kinds of inappropriate or, in some cases, harassing behaviors that take place from time to time,” said Kalb at Tuesday’s meeting.
“I think we have a certain obligation to protect our tenants and protect what we would call the economic diversity of our city and those who want to continue to live and work here,” he said.
A similar law prohibiting landlord harassment already exists in San Francisco, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and East Palo Alto.
Council members heard over 60 speakers on Tuesday, landlords and tenants, who shared their experiences of harassment.
According to Ana Baires Mira, a tenant’s rights attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza in the Fruitvale District, “Of the approximately 480 Oakland tenants who receive legal services at Centro Legal de la Raza, approximately 40 percent face some type of harassment outlined in the ordinance.”
One of Mira’s clients, Maria, an immigrant single mother, was living in “deplorable conditions,” and her landlord refused to make any repairs. Her landlord threatened to evict her if she went to the rent board, Mira said.
Maria still went to the rent board, and her rent was decreased by 40 percent. However, her landlord has yet to make repairs on her apartment.
“Many tenants fear making complaints because of landlord intimidation and retaliation,” said Wendy Georges, manager of the TRUST Clinic with the Alameda County Public Health Department, which supports the proposed ordinance.
Several members of the housing rights organization Causa Justa: Just Cause highlighted the need for tenant protections.
“My landlord has entered my home on many occasions without giving me prior notice,” said an emotional Alice Kennedy, an Oakland resident and member of Causa Justa: Just Cause.
“My electrical wires in my garage have been crossed with my neighbor’s wires, so my neighbor controls my electricity in my garage,” she said. ”I’ve talked to my landlord about the issue, and he says there’s nothing to do about it to reverse what has been done.”
“I believe the tenant protections are needed in Oakland now because they will protect seniors and the disabled from harassment from landlords who violate our rights,” she continued.
The CED Committee is scheduled to vote on the Tenant Protection Ordinance at its Oct. 14 meeting.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
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Bay Area
Evidence Appears to Show Cover-Up of Previous Charges of Discrimination Against Jewish and Black Jurors, D.A. Says
Today, District Attorney Pamela Price announced that attorneys assigned to review the office’s death penalty cases found evidence revealing that instead of investigating claims of prosecutorial misconduct—excluding Jewish and Black residents from juries — a former senior Alameda County District Attorney’s Office prosecutor who is now a sitting judge in Alameda County, Morris Jacobson, and a team of investigators appeared to have taken part in covering it up.
Special to The Post
Today, District Attorney Pamela Price announced that attorneys assigned to review the office’s death penalty cases found evidence revealing that instead of investigating claims of prosecutorial misconduct—excluding Jewish and Black residents from juries — a former senior Alameda County District Attorney’s Office prosecutor who is now a sitting judge in Alameda County, Morris Jacobson, and a team of investigators appeared to have taken part in covering it up.
During a press conference, Price presented a copy of a handwritten note by a former DA office employee who attended a meeting with employees from the office.
Jacobson, a deputy district attorney at the time, led the meeting in preparation for an evidentiary hearing ordered in the Fred Freeman case.
That hearing was ordered after former capital trial prosecutor Jack Quatman, the prosecutor in People v. Freeman, signed a declaration revealing that he and other capital case prosecutors routinely struck Black women and Jewish jurors in death penalty cases.
Jacobson was assigned by former district attorneys Tom Orloff and Nancy O’Malley to coordinate the ACDAO’s response during the evidentiary hearing.
In that capacity, he and others assigned to the capital case team went to great lengths to distract the courts from the substantive legal allegations by besmirching the whistleblower Quatman’s character and credibility—a strategy that succeeded.
Key sections of the note include, “left it w/ Morris saying he would give us direction. Wants to find dirt on Quatman,” and “How good are your memories? His point was he doesn’t want any documentation of what we do unless it is agreed upon???”
“This note provides the public some of the missing clues regarding who appeared to be involved during previous administrations in covering up prosecutorial misconduct at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said Price. “The note from this meeting in 2004 gives insight into why prosecutors’ notes containing evidence of discrimination against potential Jewish and Black jurors may not have been subjected to a comprehensive review and were not disclosed to the Court in most of the cases until my office was ordered by Honorable Judge Vince Chhabria to review death penalty cases.
“What the public should know is that prosecutors have special duties as ministers of justice to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees the right to a fair trial and to be judged by a jury of one’s peers, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation,” she said.
United States District Court Judge Chhabria determined earlier this year that there was “strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were … excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.”
He subsequently issued an order directing ACDAO to disclose jury selection files in all Alameda County cases which resulted in a death sentence.
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is the source of this story.
Bay Area
In the City Attorney Race, Ryan Richardson Is Better for Oakland
It’s been two years since negotiations broke down between the City of Oakland and a developer who wants to build a coal terminal here, and the issue has reappeared, quietly, in the upcoming race for Oakland City attorney. Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.
By Margaret Rossoff
Special to The Post
OPINION
It’s been two years since negotiations broke down between the City of Oakland and a developer who wants to build a coal terminal here, and the issue has reappeared, quietly, in the upcoming race for Oakland City attorney.
Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.
Richardson has worked in the Office of the City Attorney since 2014 and is likely to continue current City Attorney Barbara Parker’s policies managing the department. He has committed not to accept campaign contributions from developers who want to store and handle coal at a proposed marine terminal in Oakland.
Retired Judge Harbin-Forte launched and has played a leading role in the campaign to recall Mayor Sheng Thao, which is also on the November ballot. She has stepped back from the recall campaign to focus on her candidacy. The East Bay Times noted, “Harbin-Forte’s decision to lead the recall campaign against a potential future client is … troubling — and is likely to undermine her ability, if she were to win, to work effectively.”
Harbin-Forte has refused to rule out accepting campaign support from coal terminal interests or their agents. Coal terminal lobbyist Greg McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committee “SOS Oakland” is backing her campaign.
In the 2022 mayor’s race, parties hoping to build a coal terminal made $600,000 in contributions to another of McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committees.
In a recent interview, Harbin-Forte said she is open to “listening to both sides” and will be “fair.” However, the City Attorney’s job is not to judge fairly between the City and its legal opponents – it is to represent the City against its opponents.
She thought that the 2022 settlement negotiations ended because the City “rejected a ‘no coal’ settlement.” This is lobbyist McConnell’s narrative, in contrast to the report by City Attorney Barbara Parker. Parker has explained that the City continued to negotiate in good faith for a settlement with no “loopholes” that could have allowed coal to ship through Oakland – until would-be coal developer Phil Tagami broke off negotiations.
One of Harbin-Forte’s main priorities, listed on her website, is “reducing reliance on outside law firms,” and instead use the lawyers working in the City Attorney’s office.
However, sometimes this office doesn’t have the extensive expertise available that outside firms can provide in major litigation. In the ongoing, high stakes coal litigation, the City has benefited from collaborating with experienced, specialized attorneys who could take on the nationally prominent firms representing the City’s opponents.
The City will continue to need this expertise as it pursues an appeal of the judge’s decision that restored the developer’s lease and defends against a billion-dollar lawsuit brought by the hedge fund operator who holds the sublease on the property.
Harbin-Forte’s unwillingness to refuse campaign contributions from coal terminal interests, her opposition to using outside resources when needed, as well as her uncritical repetition of coal lobbyist McConnell’s claim that the City sabotaged the settlement talks of 2022 all raise serious concerns about how well she would represent the best interests of Oakland and Oaklanders if she is elected City Attorney.
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