News and Views
February 2, 2010
Tenant Attorney Dave Crow explains how tenants can get the best deal from a landlords buying them out of their lease.
February 2, 2010
Hundreds, if not thousands, of Connecticut renters, unaware of their rights in property foreclosure proceedings, have been illegally intimidated and evicted by real estate companies, banks, lenders and law firms,say the state's attorney general and legal aid lawyers.
San Francisco's city attorney has won Court-ordered sanctions against a labyrinthine web of defendants involved in the operation of CitiApartments and Skyline Realty, the residential property management and investment behemoth first sued by the city in 2006 for an array of unlawful business practices.
The New York Times published a great letter today from one of it's readers who calls out CalPERS and CalSTRS for their investments in a predatory equity scheme in New York in which profits were premised on the displacement of middle-income tenants.
February 1, 2010
East Palo Alto stands at a crossroads as one of the last affordable communities in the Silicon Valley.
February 1, 2010
East Palo Alto stands at a crossroads as one of the last affordable communities in the Silicon Valley. It is imperative that tenants, advocates, elected officials, and the foreclosing lender, Wells Fargo Bank, work together to make certain that safe, affordable housing is preserved in the City of East Palo Alto.
February 1, 2010
Consultants commissioned by the city of Santa Clarita say Polynesian Mobile Home Park owners are asking too much
January 31, 2010
A four-week investigation of the psychological and other health problems wreaked by the Merced area foreclosure crisis finds that renters are suffering from widespread stress and depression.
January 30, 2010
The trustee sale of 1,800 rental units in East Palo Alto owned by Page Mill Properties won't take place Feb. 1 as planned, according to city officials. Meanwhile advocates including Tenants Together insist that the portfolio be sold to a responsible owner at a price reflecting its true value based on rents in compliance with the city's rent control laws.
January 30, 2010
Due in part to the Palmer/Sixth Street Properties v. City of LA court decision, St. Helena city council is considering placing a moratorium on some new construction projects to give the city time to rewrite one of its housing laws and adopt its new General Plan.
January 29, 2010
Residents in 70 apartment buildings throughout unincorporated Santa Clara County would not be allowed to smoke in their homes under a proposal to ban cigarette smoking in apartment complexes.
January 28, 2010
San Francisco Tenant Union director, Ted Gullickson, shares some of his most extreme bad-landlord stories.
January 28, 2010
In east Boston where an estimated three-fourths of the residents evicted in foreclosures are tenants, citizens are fighting displacement through grassroots organizing, legal action, pressure on the banks and eviction-day sit-ins.
January 28, 2010
This article about Merced area tenants caught in the foreclosure meltdown is part of a series of articles on the impact of the crisis on mental health.
January 27, 2010
CalPERS' $500 million predatory equity investment in a New York real estate has officially gone by the wayside. CalSTRS wrote off its $100 million investment in the same project months ago.
January 27, 2010
Apartment owners are threatening to sue City Hall if the City Council adopts a proposal that would give tenants more time to fix lease violations before they could be evicted.
January 27, 2010
Amended legislation to protect families with children from being evicted during the school year was unanimously approved by he San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but it was a bittersweet victory for many tenants’ rights advocates who preferred an earlier version of the law.
January 27, 2010
Police were called to a San Franciso apartment to intercede in a landlord-renter dispute that culminated when "the landlord wielded a large kitchen knife at the tenant and threatened to kill the tenant."
The long-running showdown between the county and a Soquel mobile home park owner, which is testing the county's authority to preserve rent-controlled housing, appears headed back to court.