In Sonoma County and elsewhere in California, some are taking the law into their own hands.
More and more, landlords in Sonoma County, Calif., are taking the law into their own hands in evicting Latino tenants — changing their locks, cutting off their utilities, removing their belongings, or shoving their way in and starting “renovations.”
Under California law, all this is patently illegal. And in normal times, acts like these could land the landlord in jail for a year, with judges awarding the tenants as much as $2,000 in punitive damages.
But these are not normal times.Tenants can still win these legal remedies — and they should try to do so. But hard times have emboldened landlords in Sonoma and throughout the state to operate outside the law.
Some smaller landlords are staring poverty in the face themselves, overstretched and near foreclosure, and they are driven to desperate means. But many, the larger landlords particularly, are just taking advantage of hard times to cut costs and increase profits.
Sonoma Latinos new to the country generally do not know the law and fear the authorities. Sometimes all it takes for a landlord to evict them is a threat to call ICE or the police — even though making these threats is also illegal under California law.
Besides that, Sonoma courts are overflowing with bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, debt collection, and other legal matters caused by the economic crisis. And that makes it more difficult for tenants to get even what the law allows.
The halls of the county courthouse in Santa Rosa are packed, with people standing in long lines, even to dispute traffic tickets. And the number of clerks has been cut — one in seven county workers have been laid off as the state shunts its budget cuts to the county.
“The reason we’re all standing in line is because we can’t afford to pay the initial fine,” one unemployed woman told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. “Now, since I’m poor, they are going to charge me more.”
That pretty much sums up where people stand in other legal areas as well. Thousands of people in foreclosure are also being evicted — legally or illegally — by the banks that have bought their houses at auction on the courthouse steps.
In almost 40 percent of the housing that the banks are foreclosing on, the people living there are renters. And they are also suffering illegal evictions. Federal law requires that they be given 90 days to vacate (or until the end of their lease). But new owners and bank agents often hit them with a 30-day notice and harass them as well.
The struggle of tenants to be fairly treated has a long history in California. In the 1970s, tenant unions in a number of cities — San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles — won rent-control laws. They also won wider renters’ rights against evictions.
Now those rights are under attack in the California Supreme Court. And at the state capital in Sacramento, the powerful landlord lobby shoots down every attempt to provide renters with relief in the economic downturn.
In the 1970s, the landlord lobby consisted mostly of the owners of apartment complexes. But the crashing economy has brought a new, more powerful force to the fore — the world’s biggest and most politically influential banks.
In the 1970s, tenants when they organized found few natural allies. But in Sonoma County — and elsewhere — today, almost everybody has a serious housing problem of one sort or another.
People are having trouble meeting their rents or their mortgages. They’ve had to double up. Or with the crash in house prices, they’ve lost the money for their retirement. Or the mortgage is more than the house is worth. Or they’re in foreclosure. Or they’ve been evicted, and they’re sleeping in their car or in the woods somewhere.
And if it hasn’t happened to them, it has happened to a friend, or a relative, or somebody they know from work.
That is why it is important for us to organize for our rights and our survival — all of us, Latinos and Anglos together. And that is why organizing Latinos and Anglos together is now possible. El pueblo, unido . .
