She's six months pregnant and has two young children. She's lived in the same two-bedroom apartment in Oakland for the past seven years.
But then, much to her surprise, she got a 60-day eviction notice.
So on Wednesday morning, the woman found herself among dozens of renters hoping for a favorable outcome in eviction court at the Hayward Hall of Justice. It's the last hope for desperate Alameda County residents fighting to keep a roof over their heads after landlords file an unlawful detainer lawsuit, a legal requirement for evicting tenants who do not voluntarily move out after being served notice. Tenants have five days to respond to the lawsuit.
"There's no way I can find another place I can afford in Oakland," said the 36-year-old schoolteacher, who asked that her name not be published for fear of jeopardizing her case.
Department 511, where eviction court was taking place that morning, was so crowded, there weren't enough seats for everybody. The hallway outside the courtroom was teeming with tenants, lawyers and landlords talking strategy, deals, offers and counteroffers.
Dejected renters sat on benches along the walls, fiddling with their cellphones. Seniors leaned on canes. Other tenants pushed walkers.
One man told his attorney he'd kill himself if he lost his home in Berkeley, where he'd lived for 18 years.
There were nearly 12,000 unlawful detainer lawsuits filed at the Oakland and Hayward courthouses between Jan. 1, 2014, and April 28, 2016, according to Alameda County Superior Court records. The disposition of the cases and aggregated data are not readily available to the public without significant cost.
Still, the sheer volume of eviction filings suggests a worsening housing crisis, fueled by the toxic combination of escalating East Bay rents, stagnant wages and layoffs.
According to tenants rights advocates, as shocking as those numbers are, eviction data doesn't begin to capture the magnitude of people losing their homes because of high increases in units not covered by rent control and other tactics by some unscrupulous landlords.
"The number of cases that actually get to court and go through a hearing process are only a minimum," said James Vann, co-founder of the Oakland Tenants Union.
"Many tenants think they have no choice but to move," he said. "They feel like they can't fight it."
That's not the case with the tenants, many from Oakland and Berkeley, who flocked to the Hayward court, where all unlawful eviction detainers are heard.
Many of the renters turn to the Eviction Defense Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit that provides legal aid to low-income tenants.
The center's three staff attorneys and a volunteer law student were in court representing several clients Wednesday. The nonprofit has 150 open unlawful detainer cases and handles as many as 35 per week. The crushing caseload was evident by the mountainous stack of files that attorneys Anne Omura and Amy Sekany lugged down the hallways as they huddled with landlord attorneys in an effort to arrive at a pretrial settlement.
"The financial incentive to evict somebody right now is so high if you can rent it out again for double, triple the rent," Omura said.
But that's not the motivation in many other eviction lawsuits.
Jill Broadhurst, executive director of the Oakland-based East Bay Rental Housing Association, said most evictions are due to tenants not paying rent, period.
"By and large you have a lot of small property owners by themselves trying to get possession of their property," Broadhurst said. "There's no army of rental property owners to help you on the fly."
Alan Horwitz, an Oakland-based lawyer who represents landlords in eviction disputes, said many of his clients are families who rely on rental income to live.
"They can't afford thousands and thousands of dollars in unpaid rent," Horwitz said.
Without a doubt, there are bad tenants who are being evicted for good reason. Yet, Omura said, she's noticed a shift in the past couple of years. Now tenants who haven't really done anything wrong are also getting the boot.
One of Omura's clients, a woman in her 60s, had lived in a studio apartment in San Leandro for 10 years when she got an eviction notice. She'd recently lost her job as a secretary. She had been late on her rent in the past but said she always paid within the month. The trouble began, she said, when the management changed.
She got a court settlement allowing her to remain in her apartment and got one month knocked off the rent. But a 36-year-old schoolteacher was not as fortunate. In court, her landlord offered to drop his eviction lawsuit -- if she'll agree to pay more than $4,000 for the two-bedroom apartment in Uptown that she's been renting for $1,012 under an affordable housing program.
She said she got the eviction notice after she applied to add her boyfriend's name to the lease. She said she asked beforehand if her status would change, and the management company said it wouldn't.
Now her case is headed to trial.