The world of housing policy can feel outlandish and inaccessible so we’re bringing in the experts to help us understand the policies that are affecting our lives today and what is possible in the future. Some of the fun stuff we’re going to dive into:

SB 1079

This bill was passed in California and is meant to prevent Wall Street firms from creating artificial scarcities like they did in 2008 by buying thousands of homes and keeping them vacant. It reduces land grabs resulting from foreclosure auctions. There are updates and we want to know what they are!

Community land trusts (CLTs)!

These non-profit affordable housing developers play an important role in how these policies are implemented. CLTs were created to protect tenants and keep housing off of the speculative market. What are some real life examples of how policy impacts non-profits?

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA)!

This is a statewide housing movement with the aim of preventing tenants from becoming forcibly unhoused. Tenants need to have the first right of refusal! Who’s leading the way and what can we learn from them?

Organize and Agitate!

People power is just a piece of the puzzle. You’ll be given a crash course in how to organize your elected officials. If they won’t listen, then run a successful campaign to get radical housing policy on the ballot.

This is an online event. ASL and Spanish interpreters. RSVP below!

PRESENTERS

Avery Yu
Political Strategist and Co-Founder of Red Bridge Strategies

Avery Yu is an experienced political organizer and strategist, with expertise in winning field strategies for grassroots campaigns. She has worked on state and local races and served as a Supervisor Aide. Originally from San Francisco, Avery is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America and holds a Bachelors in Political Economy from UC Berkeley.

Christine Hernandez
Legal Apprentice at Sustainable Economies Law Center

Christine Hernandez is a proud sister of UNITE HERE! International Union, where she learned to strategize, organize and mobilize. Since moving to the Bay in 2010, she has applied these skills to advance the right to self-determination through her work in job training, food sovereignty and housing justice. In September of 2015, Christine, emboldened by desperation, took possession of a vacant property in East Oakland, to secure housing for her family of 6. In June of 2020, their continued fight and struggle for housing culminated into a rent strike and the collective purchase of a 7 unit house with family, friends, neighbors and the Bay Area Community Land Trust.

Now with secure and affordable housing, and a first hand understanding of the significant impacts of being unhoused and the existing structures that consistently prioritize profit over people and planet, Christine is dedicated to working in collaboration, to create opportunities and expand access, so that others might also secure and maintain this basic human right. She is equally dedicated to the disruption and interference of efforts to displace and dehumanize her comrades and neighbors. Because Christine recognizes that the law has a profound impact on every aspect of life, she is committed to contributing to efforts that make the law accessible to everyone and is delighted to be advancing that objective, as an apprentice with the Radical Real Estate Law School, at the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Hope Williams
Legal Apprentice at Sustainable Economies Law Center

Hope Williams is the Co-Director of the Radical Real Estate Law School and legal apprentice at the Sustainable Economies Law Center. As a black queer woman in the Bay Area she is devoted to housing rights and organizing people-power to fight the oppressive white supremacist regime. She spends most of her time making sure that the law is accessible to the people. She is a San Francisco City Commissioner, and serves as a board member for the San Francisco Community Land Trust, California Community Land Trust Network, and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. Her background includes managing political campaigns, organizing within the boycott division of UniteHere!, organizing endorsements for Berkeley's Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, and coalescing with tenants rights organizations. In her spare time, she secretly trains people on how to get arrested through coordinated acts of civil disobedience.

Michael Trujillo
Attorney and Organizer at East Bay Community Law Center

Michael joined the Community Economic Justice Clinic in 2021. Prior to working at EBCLC, Michael represented low-income tenants in eviction cases, supported activists in forming the South Bay’s first community land trust, and brought affirmative lawsuits to enforce fair housing and civil rights laws at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley in San Jose. Michael graduated from law school in 2018. During law school, Michael represented low-income tenants in the Housing clinic and served small businesses and nonprofits in the Community Enterprise Project. Michael also worked to advance voting rights and enforce civil rights laws through clerkships at the ACLU of Massachusetts, Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Terris, Pravlik & Millian, LLP.

Saki Bailey
Executive Director for the San Francisco Community Land Trust

Saki Bailey (JD & PhD) has a decade of experience in nonprofit management and program development roles, as well as, in teaching and training roles both in the academic and non-profit sectors with a focus on the legal regulation around Community Land Trusts, Co-op formation, and incorporation. Saki is a published author on property law, community land trusts, and the commons with three books and multiple articles published by both academic and non-academics publishers and journals translated into multiple languages. Saki’s work as an attorney, policy advocate, and researcher on shared equity ownership models based on her six plus years of international research offers her a unique perspective on the theory and practice of community land trusts. She serves currently on the board of the California Community Land Trust Network and in that capacity worked to oversee the design and execution of an unprecedented statewide survey of Community Land Trusts in 2021, as well as, acted as Chair of the California Community Land Trust Network’s Subcommittee on Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives in 2019-2020, responsible for incubating and drafting the Housing Justice Tax Equity Act (AB 1206). Prior to coming to SFCLT, she was a founding member of the working group for the City of Berkeley Mayor’s office, which drafted the Berkeley Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act.

Richard Hulbert
Radical Real Estate Attorney

A broker since 2005, Richard has handled dozens of real estate transactions in San Francisco and the Bay Area, commercial and residential. He represents non-profit housing providers, converting existing apartment buildings to affordable housing or acquiring new sites for development. He is thoroughly versed in San Francisco's Community Opportunity to Purchase Act ("COPA"). Richard also represents tenants buying their apartments and groups of tenants organizing to buy their buildings. [Calif. DRE Broker No. 01479543]
Richard is also a tenant rights attorney, having litigated full-time on behalf of San Francisco tenants for over 20 years. His cases included wrongful eviction, habitability, harassment, retaliation, discrimination, and enforcement of tenant rights to purchase, such as during a condominium conversion, rent-to-own contracts, or pursuant to a right of first refusal or purchase option. [Calif. State Bar No. 179072]

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