Author: marindsa

Marin Voice: Rent control, tenant protections will keep our neighbors in their homes

By Curt Ries, Marin DSA Co-Chair
Published Sep 7, 2023 in the Marin Independent Journal

Marin is in the midst of a housing crisis, with tens of thousands of renters struggling to make ends meet and keep a roof over their heads. Rent control and tenant protections are our best tools for keeping our neighbors in their homes.

More than one-third of all Marin County households are renters, approximately 37,000 families, or 87,000 people. More than half of those renters are rent-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income on rent. Nearly a third are severely rent-burdened, paying more than 50% of their income on rent.

According to Zillow’s “observed rent” index, Marin County has the highest rents in the entire state of California and the third highest among all counties nationwide.

A renter in Marin needs to earn over $50 per hour to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2023 “out of reach” study. However, the average Marin renter earns just $30 an hour. California’s minimum wage is $15.50.

These renters — I am one of them — include some of the essential workers who make our communities such wonderful places to live. Some are our teachers, nurses, maintenance workers, grocery workers and restaurant workers. Many are retired seniors who are trying to age in place with dignity. They include young people trying to start families and put down roots.

With rents through the roof and absurdly expensive house prices making home ownership all but impossible, we are barely able to survive here in Marin. Countless renters are forced out each year by the relentlessly high housing costs, tearing families out of their communities, kids out of their schools, and seniors out of their support networks.

Rent control and tenant protections stop this from happening. They are designed to keep renters in their homes by doing three things: placing a reasonable cap on annual rent increases, prohibiting arbitrary evictions and ensuring tenants have support if they are evicted due to no fault of their own.

These laws provide basic, commonsense protections for huge swaths of our community. Without them, renters are left never knowing if and when an exorbitant rent increase will force them out of their homes.

Opponents of rent control and tenant protections will say that we already have rent control at the state level. They are referring to the 2019 Tenant Protection Act, which caps annual rent increases at 5% plus the change in the Consumer Price Index, up to 10% total. The historic average for CPI is about 3%, meaning state law typically limits annual rent increases at 8%, though recently it’s been at or close to 10% because of high inflation.

This extremely weak state rent cap — and the toothless tenant protections that accompany it — are almost meaningless. Virtually no tenant can afford 8% or 10% rent increases year after year. For perspective, a $3,000 rent payment would balloon to almost $3,800 after just three years of 8% rent increases. It would nearly double after nine years.

In California, passing local rent stabilization and “just cause” eviction ordinances is the only way to provide real housing security to the working families and seniors who live in our communities. These laws have existed for decades and have successfully kept hundreds of thousands of people in their homes in neighboring areas, from San Francisco and Berkeley to Mountain View and East Palo Alto.

Claims that these policies meaningfully lower housing supply or drive up rents have no empirical evidence to back them up. They are empty talking points endlessly repeated by well-funded landlord and real estate lobbies who have a vested financial interest in seeing rent control and tenant protections defeated.

At the end of the day, the debate over these policies largely boils down to a simple moral question. Do we as a community think it’s more important to ensure safe and secure housing to our friends, families and neighbors, or do we think it’s more important to maximize profits and control for a small number of landlords and real estate interests?

It’s time for Marin’s elected leaders to pass rent stabilization and just cause eviction ordinances that put people before profits.

Curt Ries, of San Anselmo, is co-chair of the Marin County Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Marin DSA Statement of Support for Amazon Workers in Bessemer, AL

Marin DSA stands in solidarity with Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), who are engaged in a historic organizing drive to form the first-ever union for Amazon warehouse workers in the United States. 

All workers deserve a union. Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest person in the world and Amazon has made record profits throughout the pandemic, all while refusing to pay their workers a living wage, failing to provide proper safety standards, and subjecting them to dehumanizing working conditions. 

Capitalism runs on exploiting workers to maximize profits for the wealthy few. Workers organizing together in a union is how we fight back to build a more just, free, and equal world. We stand with RWDSU and the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama!

Resolution to Support Camp Ambition and Camp Compassion

Whereas Marin DSA believes that safe and secure housing and shelter are basic human rights

Whereas Marin DSA is committed to housing and tenant struggles throughout Marin and has been since our local’s inception

Whereas the commodification of housing is at the root of the Bay Area’s and Marin’s housing crisis

Whereas our unhoused comrades lead the struggle for housing in Novato manifested in their work at Camp Ambition and Camp Compassion

Whereas the residents of Camp Ambition aim to take land out of the private housing market and put it under direct control of the people who live on it through the use of a community land trust

Whereas the residents of Camp Ambition have been harassed by the Novato police department, and had their tents and tires slashed by vigilantes

Let it therefore be resolved that Marin DSA stands in solidarity with our unhoused comrades, and will give all possible support to our neighbors living in Camp Ambition and Camp Compassion

Passed in our January General Assembly, Date: 2021-01-02

A Radical Strategy for Marin

Note: this post is written by our members to generate debate and discussion and is not an official branch statement. Want to be part of the conversation? Join our mailing list.

By Simon V

Marin is a unique site of struggle for those looking to build a liberated world. It has the highest wealth gap in the state of California: some of the United States’ richest people own vacation homes here, while some of our country’s most disenfranchised live in what are little better than slums owned by corporate landlords headquartered far away. This all plays out along very clear race lines. 

Our county’s progressives focus on issues outside of Marin – in the American “south” – or are tied by foundation funding or liberal norms. Marin has an incredible quantity of not-for-profits dedicated to all sorts of causes, yet these have not been able to affect real meaningful change. Some institutions do amazing work, scraping by with barely enough funding to make their services available, often kept running by volunteers. Changes like the just-cause eviction and minimum wage clauses – pushed through electorally – have been piecemeal and crumbs, largely superseded by state-wide laws. Supervisors, the sheriff, and city councilors are happy to sit through 11 hour public comment sessions and ignore everything that was said by the public because they know that when elections roll around, they can rely on the status quo to keep their seats, or appoint their replacements.

Why is that? What is it about not-for-profits and the legislative strategy that has been incapable of affecting real long-lasting systemic change in our county, towns, and cities? Must we continue to wait on the state of California to enact laws that our county’s landlords and business owners can continue to ignore? Why do we let our housing prices soar, pushing those of us who mow the lawns, make the coffees, and staff our hospitals further and further out of the county?

For too long Marinites have focused on liberal technocratic solutions. Knowing the right things and the right people will get things done. A committee or a task force will come up with the right fix. If we just make them hear and understand, they’ll do what we ask. They see the county’s poor and working class as victims of a system without agency to create their own solutions. This is reflected in the Housing Authority’s attitude towards residents of public housing, advocacy group’s attitudes towards building actual tenant power, in actions that mobilize already convinced people for one-off events, and calls to the police and sheriff’s department to “deal with” someone who looks out of place in our neighborhood. 

This model of activism is appealing because it supposes a “quick fix”. It avoids the hard work of actually organizing a base, of building engaged and empowered citizens who can confront power in their homes, in their workplaces, and in their public life.

There is no quick fix to the multiple systems that oppress us. We need a strategy.

What is to be done?

We must confront patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and ableism wherever we find them. We must bring those struggles together to demand an end to all institutions that oppress us. While we can press forward with short term demands, we must do more. We must build our base. 

We must do the hard work. We must learn how to organize in our workplaces. We must learn how to confront our landlords and make demands as groups of tenants. We must focus on our block, our neighborhood, and our town. Talk to our neighbors and find out what is important to them. Talk to our co-workers and find the shared oppressions we can organize around.

We must look to models of organizing – theory and praxis – that are rooted in feminism, communities of color, and working class resistance to white supremacy and colonialism. We must build our own directly-democratic spaces and institutions that we can leverage against the capitalist and ruling classes when the time is right.

Industrial and workplace struggles

In Marin service workers can organize to demand a larger share of the corporate profits. Day labourers can organize for a living wage and better work days. They can organize for more time off and better working conditions. Care workers can organize around their work hours and their pay, as well as their patients’ health. Office workers must organize in their own workspaces while organizing in solidarity with the service workers that cater to their work environments. Teachers can organize to demand better funding for our schools, and students can organize for a better curriculum and liberated learning environments.

We must learn that we are the ones doing the work, and together we are the ones who have power over how it gets done, when it gets done, and how much we get paid for it.

We must learn that our bosses and those that oppress us are already organized. They have wealthy associations and meetings that argue for their needs. They operate within the halls of power, which is what keeps us out of them.

Solidarity economy

We must start building the institutions that lift each other up. We can look to networks of worker-owned cooperatives like Arizmendi here in San Rafael and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi that provide good working class jobs while building housing and liberated spaces for their employees and their neighbours. These cooperatives are unique because they support each other, funding the creation of new cooperatives in a network that challenges capitalist and patriarchal notions of hierarchy and agency. 

Cooperatives on their own are not enough. We must bring education into these spaces to ensure that they continue to strive against oppression and towards liberation. As Fred Hampton said – without education, you just have neo-colonialism. But cooperatives can provide good paying jobs where the workers retain control over their work environment, while giving them the breathing space to build the communities that they want to see.

But we don’t have to focus on just workplaces. A solidarity economy relies on community gardening efforts to supply us with food, it relies on rapid response and mutual aid to build resilient communities. All these efforts have long histories of being rooted in the struggles of people of color. 

Tenant and neighborhood councils

Forty percent of Marin’s residents are tenants, while a large chunk of the remainder pay off mortgages on homes they can barely afford.

We must fight rising rents, evictions, and harassment at the hands of landlords. We must fight the system that gives some of us no option but to live unsheltered and at constant risk of police harassment. We need to confront landlords, developers, and cops when they loot our communities on the path to gentrification.

Housing communities in Marin are already organized and we must join in their struggle against corrupt public housing agencies, while initiating tenant councils in our own buildings and rental units. 

We must come together in block and neighborhood assemblies. We can look to the block organizations in Detroit for models of organizing around hyper local issues, while looking just across the bay in Oakland for models of organizing tenants in corporate buildings.

A liberated press

Marin’s news sources are beholden to liberal politics at best and corporate coffers at worst. We need news outlets that don’t hide behind curtains of apoliticallness and reporting on the status quo. We need space that gives voice to citizens, controlled by citizens. We need a forum of debate and conversation that moves beyond the norms set by Marin’s elites.

Solidarity is how we win

This is not the first crisis that has been dumped upon us by a system that thrives off of crises, and as the climate disaster deepens, it will not be the last. If we do the hard work of real organizing now, we will be better prepared to handle the next one. 

When we all contribute to the hard work, we give voice to struggles of marginalized people.

Let’s build the new world in the shell of the old.

Systemic Change

Note: this post is written by our members to generate debate and discussion and is not an official branch statement. Want to be part of the conversation? Join our mailing list.

Over the past few months we’ve noticed that some folks are using the phrase “systemic change” to talk about the changes they want to see, and, well

Spurred to debate, the Marin DSA branch had a good conversation about how we understood systemic change. 

Folks pointed out it can be understood both as “changes to the system” as well as “changing the system at the root”. In the first sense, the phrase gets used by liberals to signal they want to change the laws to be fairer. The second sense calls into question the system itself, and asks what would be required for the system to be completely different. Both definitions are technically correct, but our intent with the phrase is important.

One member used the metaphor of seats at a table to explore systemic change. If your system has a certain amount of seats at a table for decision making, reforms can change the amount of seats at the table, who gets to sit in the seats, even the shape of the table, but ultimately, without a change of system, it’s only the people who have seats at the table that make decisions. 

Systemic change wouldn’t just affect our economy, but transform our work and groups as well – how do we value time and the labor that gets done? Do we acknowledge the need for rest and relationship building? Is the growth of our group more important than the health and personal values of our group? Members brought up the parallels to conversations about decolonization. That just saying “decolonization” doesn’t make it so.

We are democratic socialists because we realize that reforming capitalism (redistributing capitalist wealth while keeping the capitalist for-profit value system) does not ensure actual freedom. These reforms can make space for exploring alternate systems, but because they depend on capitalism to generate the wealth needed to implement them, they do not inherently pose a threat to it. 

If we want to make sure that everyone’s voice gets heard, we have to get rid of the table, and come up with something new.

Endorsements

Our electoral working group spent two months researching propositions, designing questions to ask candidates, and corresponding directly with candidates about their positions on various issues.

The endorsement proposals were presented at our General Meeting on October 11th.

Members present at the General Meeting discussed and approved the endorsements presented in this voting guide.

If you are interested in seeking our

endorsement please email: [email protected]

State Propositions

No Endorsement-Prop 14

Yes-Prop 15

Yes-Prop 16

Yes-Prop 17

Yes-Prop 18

No Endorsement-Prop 19

No-Prop 20

Yes-Prop 21

No- Prop 22

Yes-Prop 23

No-Prop 24

Yes-Prop 25

Local Propositions

Yes-Measure L: Approved

Yes-Measure M: Approved

Yes-Measure P: Approved

No Endorsement-Measure Q: Approved

No-Measure R: Approved

People

No Endorsement-President: Approved

No Endorsement-U.S. House District 2: Approved

CA State Assembly District 10

Veronica Roni Jacobi: Approved


Marin County Office of Education, Trustee Area 4

Felicia “Fel” Agrelius: Approved

Marin Community College District Governing Board Member: 

Robbie Powelson: Approved

Paul De Silva: Approved

Philip Kranenburg: Approved


Petaluma Joint Union School District Governing Board

Linda Judah: Approved

San Rafael Board of Education Governing Board Member, Trustee Area 1: 

Endorse: Samantha Ramirez: Approved (pending okay). 

Tamalpais Union High School District Governing Board Member: Endorse: Leslie J Harlander: Approved
Endorse: Brandon Johnson: Approved

Night School: Philantrocapitalism

Here’s what we are reading, and what we’ll be talking about. See you then!

Who’s Afraid of Philanthrocapitalism? (Introduction & 3B: Transforming nonprofit institutions) 

The philanthropic state: market–state hybrids in the philanthrocapitalist turn

How does the Gates Foundation spend its money to feed the world?

Have the Rich Become “Super Citizens”?

Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation

The Gates Foundation’s Hypocritical Investments

Hindsight for 2020

US backed coups in Venezuela, ICE raids and new detention centers, teacher militancy and strikes in LA, Oakland, and in Sonoma, tenant strikes across the country – the list goes on. 2019 was a show of force for both capital and labor militancy. Across the country and here in Marin, DSA is in the middle of the fight.

In late 2018 we started our first meetings, and really ramped it up for 2019.

  • Our housing working group distributed $500 worth of goods directly to the homeless in Marin, and helped distribute more across North Bay.
  • We kicked off the Let’s Own PG&E campaign in Marin with canvassing, a rally, and phone banking, as part of a bay area wide campaign to own our utilities. 
  • Together with North Bay DSA we raised $1000 for abortion access (and we had bowling!)
  • We can’t win the fight against capital on our own. We are building relationships with organizations like Marin Organizing Committee, the Sunrise Movement Marin, SURJ Marin, Marin Young Democrats, Indivisible Sausalito, ICE out of Marin, ISOJI, North Bay Jobs with Justice, etc.
  • We are organizing tenants in two buildings, and together with housing activists across the county are laying the groundwork and connections for a Marin tenants’ union.
  • We’ve hosted education sessions on PG&E, political activism, and the Green New Deal, open to the general public .
  • Led a public discussion at the San Rafael library on political organizing.
  • Supported North Bay Jobs with Justice (and SEIU) to pass an accelerated minimum wage schedule in Novato.
  • We hosted a needlework class and created revolutionary gifts.
  • We provided strike support for the biomedical engineers at Marin General, standing on the sidewalk, getting honked at.
  • Supported Marin Organizing Committee in passing basic tenant protection rights in San Rafael.
  • Spoke at Larkspur city council meetings in support of tenant protection ordinances and urgent action to protect residents of Marin Park, a mobile home community.
  • Tabled at several farmers markets and College of Marin.
  • Had some good beer and stimulating conversations at our First Friday socials.
  • We did Anti-ICE support and flyering in the Canal alongside ICE out of Marin and Canal based organizations, and some of us were trained in Rapid Response and as dispatchers.
  • Hosted a screening of ¡Las Sandanistas! at the Museum of International Propaganda, to standing room only.
  • Two of our members represented the Marin branch at the DSA National Convention
  • Our housing working group organized mutual aid during the fall power shutdowns (PSPS BS!)
  • Got yelled at by local business leaders for standing up for workers.

At our first January meeting we’ll have a conversation about priorities for our work in 2020. A better world is possible.

Come build it with us.

Universal / Single Payer Healthcare

January 15, 2020 7pm – 9pm
199 Greenfield Ave, San Rafael

Recommended Reading:

Additional Reading: