Bay Area Housing: The Path Forward – Protection

Overview

Meeting Immediate Needs by Ensuring Housing Stability in the Bay Area

News coverage often centers on the visible homelessness crisis, with more than 36,000 Bay Area residents experiencing homelessness on any given night in 2022.[1] Less visible are the families with low-income who are precariously housed and just one health emergency or missed paycheck away from eviction, displacement, or falling into homelessness.

Bay Area rents are among the highest in the nation. An astounding 80% of the region’s renters who earn less than half of the area’s median income households pay more than 30% of their incomes on housing costs.[2] By comparison, 26% of moderate-income renters put the same fraction of their paychecks toward covering housing. Often living in overcrowded, unsafe spaces, many very low income households have children, are single-parent families, or are headed by seniors. Families of color are most burdened, with Black households more likely to fall into the very low-income category than their white counterparts.

The availability of government housing assistance falls far short of the need. Less than 20% of the nation’s ELI households receive housing subsidies.[3] Meanwhile, the mortgage interest deduction is a $25 billion government subsidy that largely helps people with moderate incomes and above.[4]

As so many people struggle with the region’s high cost of living, it’s clear that tenant protections are essential. Policy strategies include rent control/stabilization, codifying “just cause” for eviction, and penalties for harassing tenants. Direct service responses include rental assistance, legal services, and tenant-rights workshops. Without these safeguards, renters are vulnerable to pernicious landlords. Many will leave their homes without knowing their legal rights, and those without financial reserves will join the unhoused on the streets or in shelters. Here, again, Black families are disproportionately harmed; they are one-fifth of renters, but they receive over half of all eviction filings.[5] Black individuals are five times more likely to experience homelessness than white individuals.[6] Tenant Protection strategies include policies such as just cause eviction, rent control/stabilization, and tenant anti-harassment. It also includes legal services, rental assistance, and tenant rights workshops.

Homelessness Prevention programs help vulnerable households remain in or find stable housing so that they don’t land on the streets in the first place. The programs can prioritize “precariously housed” residents with no legal lease or tenancy who are not literally homeless (e.g., sleeping on a couch).

Keeping people in their homes is significantly less expensive than getting them back into housing after they’ve become homeless. Both tenant-protection and homelessness-prevention programs tend to include pre-eviction and eviction legal services, emergency rental assistance, and relocation assistance. Homelessness-prevention assistance is often more service-rich and typically includes case management. These efforts work. Santa Clara County’s Homelessness Prevention System (HPS) has a 93% success rate in keeping families housed, at a one-time cost of $10,000 per family. That’s a fraction of the annual cost to provide services to unhoused residents, of $35,000 to $80,000 per person.

[1] Terner Center for Housing Innovation, August 2024, Addressing the Housing Needs of Low-Income Households in the Bay Area: The Importance of Public Funding

[2] Ibid.

[3] Terner Center for Housing Innovation, December 2021, “On the Edge of Homelessness: The Vulnerability of Extremely Low-Income Households in the Bay Area.”

[4] National Low Income Housing Coalition, May 2021, “Misdirected Housing Supports: Why the Mortgage Interest Deduction Unjustly Subsidizes High-Income Households and Expands Racial Disparities.”

[5] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America(PNAS), October 2, 2023, “A comprehensive demographic profile of the US evicted population.”

[6] Community Solutions, February 7, 2020, “Racism and Homelessness are Inextricably Linked. Here’s What We’re Doing About It.”

Our Priorities

Tenant protection legislation

We support tenants by advocating for legislation that helps keep them housed (such as the pandemic eviction moratorium) and that expands tenant protections and legal representation for tenants facing eviction.

Comprehensive programs

We prevent homelessness by supporting comprehensive programs, like Keep Oakland Housed, that meet people’s needs across a broad continuum of services.

Protection in Action

Examples of SFF grantees keeping people in their homes.

Photo courtesy of Rolando Rubio III, Catholic Charities East Bay.

Keep Oakland Housed

In its first 15 months of operations, Keep Oakland Housed helped prevent more than 2,100 Oakland households — representing more than 4,000 individuals — from becoming homeless. Keep Oakland Housed services are available to Oakland residents who risk losing their housing. Priority is given to extremely low income households. Legal representation is also available for tenants with an active eviction lawsuit.

Aileen Joy, Tenants Together Development Director, and Victoria Zacarias, Tenants Together Director of Community Leadership, at a UC Hastings event to recruit law student volunteers for the organization’s hotline and research projects.

Tenants Together

Tenants Together is based in San Francisco and has helped keep Californians across the state in their homes. They trained tenant organizers to build tenant power and counselors to help tenants access resources. They helped a network of over 50 service provider partners stay up-to-date on the rapidly changing local and statewide eviction protections this year.

Evictorbook

Evictorbook is a web-based tool from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project that gives tenants and organizers essential information about properties and landlords. Its goal is to help community organizers and tenants prevent illegal evictions, organize tenants, and increase transparency around corporate housing ownership. SFF initiative Great Communities Collaborative and their partners in the Oakland Preservation Table helped support this work.

Bringing more resources to the field

A powerful community of donors is helping provide the deeply needed resources to fuel this work.

In 2022, SFF held a donor briefing on reducing homelessness with a panel of SFF-grantees: All Home, Bay Area Community Services, and the Eviction Defense Collaborative. Panelists stressed that we know how to solve homelessness: We must double down on investing in and implementing the solutions we know work.

Photo of Joan Levison, SFF donor.

Joan Levison is passionate about ensuring seniors with low incomes have a safe place to call home. As the Executive Director of Menorah Park and steward of the Menorah Park Community Impact Fund, Joan worked closely with SFF staff that have expertise in housing strategies to allocate $1.8M in donations to SFF-vetted organizations doing the most effective work ensuring seniors thrive in stable, affordable housing.

Bright Spots

In addition to SFF grantees, our whole community is working hard to address our housing needs. Here are some bright spots.

Rental Registry

In 2023, the City of Palo Alto approved a new registry that requires landlords to provide information on rents, vacancies, and evictions at their properties. The effort, which is planned to roll out gradually in the summer of 2024, will give the City the information needed to craft new policies to assist tenants. Eventually, it could also enable the City to respond to illegal rent increases and evictions.

Tenant Right to Counsel Program

In 2018, voters in San Francisco approved a new program that provides tenants who have received an eviction notice or are subject to an unlawful detainer action with access to a free attorney. With legal services provided through a network of nonprofit organizations, the program has successfully helped tenants remain housed, with 67% of those helped during the first year of the program (and 80% of Black tenants) avoiding displacement. Read more here.

Anti-Displacement Strategy

In 2021, the City of Redwood City approved a comprehensive anti-displacement strategy that included several important tenant protection policies, including stronger just-cause eviction protections. The City has a relocation assistance ordinance that provides tenants forced to relocate with financial assistance to obtain replacement housing. Additionally, the City requires that landlords offer tenants the option of a 12-month lease.

Homelessness Prevention System

Administered by the County of Santa Clara, the HPS works with 19 community partners in the South Bay to provide direct financial assistance, legal support, case management, and other services to ensure that people stay housed and don’t fall into homelessness. As of January 2024, the HPS had served 16,818 individuals from 6,107 families, with 93% remaining stably housed while receiving prevention services.

Legal Resources

Legal Link, a nonprofit organization, partners with more than 50 nonprofit agencies throughout the nine-county Bay Area to remove legal barriers that lead to housing insecurity. The organization provides tools and training, embeds community navigators, increases the skills and capacity of frontline community partners, and provides resources and links to tenants seeking help to remain housed.

Homelessness Prevention

A partnership of two nonprofit agencies, KPH works in both Oakland and Contra Costa County to assist residents at risk of displacement using a three-pronged emergency response—legal representation, emergency financial assistance, and wrap-around services. In the first three years of its pilot effort (ending in 2021), KPH provided legal services to 2,078 clients and emergency financial services to 3,866 clients, with 99% of those receiving services experiencing successful outcomes.

Community Conversations

Through op-eds and speaking on panels, SFF is an important part of regional conversations around housing.

Bay Area Housing: The Path Forward – Protection