The Advocate

The Big Tent calls on the City of San Leandro to implement housing reform immediately and to declare that there exists a housing emergency. Each year, housing scarcity and rents rising faster than wages cause many renters in the City of San Leandro to be evicted or priced out of their homes, resulting in housing turnover and unstable neighborhoods. This displacement damages our families and communities by increasing homelessness, food insecurity, pollution, mental illness, and lowering life expectancy. Community displacement hurts not only San Leandro’s residents; it also holds dire consequences for the resilience of our economy. San Leandro’s manufacturing employers, schools, and small businesses are already challenged in their effort to find adequately skilled, reliable, local workers. An insufficient workforce hurts business growth and San Leandro’s ability to increase revenues and improve our facilities and services. San Leandro’s housing supply was approximately 73% below its Regi...

Do you believe everyone deserves a safe place to call home? It's a simple question really, but for some people, the answer isn't. As far back as 1944 , we've known that housing is a human right. Even now, when we think of the "American Dream" we think of housing. We imagine a place to live and call our own. So much of our identity and community is intertwined with the place we think of as home. But for many people in San Leandro that's impossible. The minimum wage here is $15.50 per hour . Assuming you are getting shifts full-time, your annual earnings before taxes are $32,240. Meanwhile, the median rent for a studio apartment is $1,849 per month. That's $22,188 per year. You now have $10,052 left for everything else . Oh, but wait, taxes are actually $5,408! Now you only have $4,644 for groceries, utilities, internet, transportation, health insurance, and maybe some clothes to wear. For the entire year. After rent and taxes, you have to live on $387 pe...

(Image credit: Banksy) In the midst of all the discussions taking place about the problems facing San Leandro in the here and now regarding racism and policing, I think it's important we take a step back to look at part of how that happened. Well, it was on purpose. See, San Leandro was, as far back as the early 1900's, a sundown town. Look through the entry for our city by Bay Area historian, James W. Loewen. His holistic work is available here . What is a sundown town, you ask? Sundown towns, occasionally known as sunset towns or gray towns, is an all-White municipality or neighborhood in the United States that practices a form of racial segregation by excluding non-Whites. This is usually accomplished via some combination of discriminatory laws, intimidation, and violence. As a result, entire sundown counties and sundown suburbs were also created by the same process. The term originally came from signs posted that demanded Black people, and sometimes other racial minority g...