READ: Our new comic, Broken Stems, is a story about how California prisons tear apart families by voluntarily colluding with ICE.

Know Your Rights: Protect Yourself from Wrongful Eviction

September 8, 2021 Guides & Reports

With at least 758,000 California households behind on rent, we’ve been hearing from community members throughout San Francisco facing harassment from landlords. Landlord corporations have a lot to gain from pushing out long standing tenants in rent-controlled apartments to raise rents. Meanwhile, tenants have the most to lose - not only their homes, but their ties to a multilingual, culturally rich, and supportive community.

Our clients are mostly elderly tenants and tenants with limited English proficiency--they are among the most vulnerable to unjust lease negotiations, landlord harassment, and illegal eviction. With few options and limited resources for relocation, displacement often means homelessness or moving miles and miles away from the community they depend on for support.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been helping San Francisco residents with communicating and providing written notices to their landlords when they cannot afford rent due to lost wages and jobs. In the past several months, we’ve also seen landlords use new tactics to evade local and state eviction bans and still move people out of their homes. More than ever, tenants need accurate, timely, and trustworthy information - in the languages they speak and read - to understand their rights.

Our team is regularly putting together new tools and resources to help our clients know their rights and stay in their homes. We also share those materials with partners across the city and region to ensure as many people as possible get the help they need.

We know threats facing tenants, especially tenants who may not speak or read English, elderly tenants, and tenants struggling to make ends meet, are constantly changing as landlords and corporations exploit loopholes in the law to make more money.

If you, a loved one, or a neighbor need help to stay in your homes, please reach out to our team for free legal help. If we miss your call, please leave a message and we’ll call back as soon as we can.