Through our Reclaim the Future program, Ella Baker Center is focused on creating jobs in the green economy as a path out of poverty. Jobs are only part of the equation, however. To create real opportunities for struggling communities, cities need housing policy that makes a good place to live affordable and available.
Sadly, the City of Oakland is one step from making affordable housing even harder for its residents. While we work to create new jobs through projects like the Green Jobs Corps, three Oakland City Council residents are creating new barriers to progress: Something called “condo conversion.”
Simply put, condo conversion takes rental units and puts them on the market. In a housing market like Oakland, this prices out and ices out hundreds to thousands of renters, especially low-income renters and people of color.
In solidarity with our allies at ACORN, East Bay Community Law Center, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Oakland Tenants Association, EBASE and others, we’re working to stop “condo conversion” in Oakland. A rally and mobilization last Saturday helped educate tenants at risk of eviction, and put City Council on notice: Condo conversion is not the right move for Oakland.
To get involved, sign our Apollo Challenge and we’ll keep you updated.
For more information, check out the Oakland Tribune article below about Saturday’s event:
Opponents take condo fight to streets
Hundreds sign petitions against proposed law that could lead to fewer rental
units in city
By William Brand, Oakland Tribune
OAKLAND — Opponents of a plan to make it easier to convert rental apartments to privately owned condominium homes spread out across Oakland on Saturday, knocking on doors, urging residents to put pressure on the City Council to slow what they believe has been a fast-track process to change the law.
The proposed city ordinance, which would rewrite a 1981 law, is slated for first reading by the council Community and Economic Development Committee on Nov. 28. Presently, for each apartment converted to a condominium in prime areas around Lake Merritt and in Rockridge, among other locations, a new rental unit must be created somewhere in the city.
The new ordinance would allow property owners to pay a fee — which supporters say would raise $20 million — into a housing fund to help low income renters buy an apartment. Ordinance authors are Council President Ignacio De La Fuente (Glenview-Fruitvale) and Councilmembers Desley Brooks (Eastmont-Seminary) and Henry Chang (at-large).
But opponents charge the law is being rushed through while lame duck Mayor Jerry Brown is in office, before Mayor-elect Ron Dellums takes over.
The more than three-dozen Saturday canvassers, including Oakland City Councilmembers Jean Quan (Montclair-Laurel) and Nancy Nadel (Downtown-West Oakland) and representatives of several housing groups, collected more than 300 signatures on petitions expressing concern and asked the City Council for more information.
“People we talked to were glad to learn about what’s happening,” said Fanny Brown, of ACORN.
During a brief walk with Councilmember Nadel along MacArthur Boulevard above Lake Merritt, few people were home, but she collected some signatures.
Councilmember Quan said figures produced by supporters showing the new condos, expected to sell for
$350,000 to $400,000, would be affordable for many Oakland renters do not make sense.
“They use assumptions like the tax savings of homeownership,” Quan said. Most moderate income renters just take the standard income tax deduction; they don’t itemize, she said.
If the city law is changed, developers will be able to evict everyone from a building under the state Ellis Act, then convert the apartments, Quan said.
“This is really a ploy by developers,” Councilmember Nadel said. “The issue has not been properly analyzed. We’ve got to make sure renters are protected.”
Councilmember Jane Brunner also is on record questioning the ordinance as it now is written.
Converting apartments to condos has long been a contentious issue in the Bay Area’s urban core, and most cities have ordinances limiting conversions. But with the single-family housing market stalling, at least partly due to high prices, developers have once more looked toward city apartments as a source of relatively inexpensive housing.
This month, Berkeley voters overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to raise that city’s annual limit on condo conversions from 100 units a year to 500. The proposition, Measure J, also would have lowered a fee for affordable housing levied on conversions.
At the rally Saturday, James Vann, of the Oakland Tenants Union, said the pressure for condo conversion is easy to understand. “A developer can buy an apartment building for $150,000 a unit, put in $40,000 in improvements to each unit, then sell them for $350,000 to $400,000,” Vann said.
“That’s a $200,000 profit in four months. That’s why there’s such a push,” he said.
During council committee discussion of the proposed ordinance earlier this month, supporters predicted the conversion fees to be paid by developers could help renters buy their homes with a number of grants and supplements. The net effect would be to boost the percentage of home ownership in Oakland, which at 40 percent lags behind the county average of 55 percent.
