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OTU’s Mission

The Oakland Tenants Union is an organization of housing activists dedicated to protecting tenant rights and interests. OTU does this by working directly with tenants in their struggle with landlords, impacting legislation and public policy about housing, community education, and working with other organizations committed to furthering renters’ rights. The Oakland Tenants Union is open to anyone who shares our core values and who believes that tenants themselves have the primary responsibility to work on their own behalf.

Monthly Meetings

The Oakland Tenants Union meets regularly at 7:00 pm on the second Monday evening of each month. Our monthly meetings are held in the Community Room of the Madison Park Apartments, 100 – 9th Street (at Oak Street, across from the Lake Merritt BART Station). To enter, gently knock on the window of the room to the right of the main entrance to the building. At the meetings, first we focus on general issues affecting renters city-wide and then second we offer advice to renters regarding their individual concerns.

If you have an issue, a question, or need advice about a tenant/landlord issue, please call us at (510) 704-5276. Leave a message with your name and phone number and someone will get back to you.

Let’s get organized against the housing market. Come through!
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We are a group of Bay Area tenants who are fed up with rising rents, evictions, and harassment at the hands of landlords. We are fed up with our neighbors having no option but to live unsheltered and at constant risk of police harassment. We want to stop landlords, developers, and cops from looting our communities.

A council is a group of tenants who work together to wield collective power against a shared landlord in order to improve their conditions. While, in general, councils may organize for more affordable, habitable, and safer housing, the issues that a council decides to organize around is ultimately dictated by its members. Councils can be powerful because they can directly apply their collective pressure on their landlord without the permission of city hall or other third parties.

TANC will help organize councils and bring them together as a network. While councils interface directly with their landlord, they can find support from other councils who rent from different landlords. We will assist in getting the word out to tenants and researching landlords. Neighbors will get to know each other during dinners, BBQs, and other events that TANC will support. We will compile complaints that are common across councils and aid in seeking their resolution. Councils will discuss and demand timely repairs, and support tenants threatened with eviction. Ultimately, the point is to reconfigure power dynamics of landlords and tenants in the Bay Area.

KPFA Radio 94.1FM and Marcus Books present

Advance tickets: 
Marcus Books, Books Inc/Berkeley, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s, East Bay Books 

What happens to the black boys who come of age in neglected, heavily policed, and economically desperate cities that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have created? How do they learn to live, love, and grow up? Where should they turn when history rejects their very existence? Darnell explores these questions in NO ASHES IN THE FIRE.

When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured gasoline on him. He barely escaped with his life.  On many other occasions there were terrifying confront-ations, including some within his family…

Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation.  No Ashes in the Fire is his compelling Account of how that bullied, frighteneed teenager not only survived, but found such a unique calling. He traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city famously scarred by uprisingsa  and repression, to his search for intimacy in the gay gathering places in Philadelphia, and finally to soal movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson, where he could openly fight for others who survive on society’s edges.  An editor-at-large at the content distributor Urban One, and a columnist at Logo, Darnell L. Mooore describes his bold, candid memoir as “snapshots of my life”  molded by forces of “brutality, poverty, and self-hatred.”

Darnell L. Moore (born in 1976 in Camden, NJ) is an American writer and activist whose work is characterized by anti-racist, feminist, queer, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. His essays, social commentary, poetry and interviews have appeared ion various national and international media venues, including The Feminist Wire, Ebony Magazine, and The Huffington Post.

Moore’s scholarship focuses broadly on  Black Theology and Black Christian thoought that is inclusive of queer subjectivities.  He has published essays in Black Theology, Theology & Sexuality: An International Journal, and Pneuma: The Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies.

GREG BRIDGES is a radio dj and journalist living in Oakland. Currently he can be heard over KCSM and KPFA, where he has a weekly show and is a contributor to  KPFA’s Hip Hop and social affairs show HardKnock Radio. Greg has written for various publications including Jazz Now Magazine and Bayshore Magazine.

KPFA benefit

The trial of the Berkeley 5 started today, with three witnesses for the prosecution, a cop, a fireman, and the neo-fascist Quillinan (see details below), who will take the stand again tomorrow morning. The trial is expected to last at least through the rest of the week, and possibly into early next week.

Please come out and support our antifascist comrades again tomorrow, Thursday, June 14, 9am, in Department 109 at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse at 661 Washington Street (at 7th Street) in Oakland.

The SF Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety & Neighborhood Services Committee will hold a hearing on the injunctions.

The City Attorney, Public Defender, District Attorney, and SFPD will testify. We need a strong showing of public support and as many people as possible to give public comment.

The hearing will be held at 4 pm to allow more community members to attend. Share this event widely!  Meet beginning at 3:00 PM.

We need to let this committee know that gang injunctions should have never been implemented. If you can’t make it to the hearing give them a call, if you can make it,call the supervisors and urge them to oppose the gang injunctions. Share on Facebook!

At the end of April, the End the SF Gang Injunctions won a campaign milestone, compelling the SF Re-Entry Council to take a position against the gang injunctions! Thank you for supporting this action by amplifying the call, sharing the event with comrades, or attending. It’s time to keep the pressure on!

On April 24th District Attorney Dennis Herrera finally cooperated with an agreement he made over a decade ago, completing a review of his gang injunctions. Herrera announced his cooperation by issuing a press release chock full of absurd “facts” about gang injunctions. In the coming weeks leading up to the June 13th hearing on gang injunctions we expect he’ll be issuing more of his absurd “facts” on the injunctions. We need people power to set the record straight. We know that gang injunctions are a policy of sanctioned police racial profiling, oppression, and gentrification. Injunctions are unneccessary and a total waste of tax payer money.

Join us on May 30th for a End the SF Gang Injunctions press conference featuring community members from Young Women’s Freedom Center, CURYJ, public defender Jeff Adachi, and more. Come learn the truth, and support the struggle to end the injunctions! And then join us two weeks later for the next mobilization.

See the coalition’s San Francisco Gang Injunction Fact Sheet here.

Spread the word! End the SF Injunctions Flyer here.
And then don’t miss the Booklet from the No New SF Jail Coalition below.

Come to learn the strategic details!

o   We will be discussing preparing going to meet with supervisors

Hey @arstechnica fans!

Our next Ars Live in #Oakland on June 13 at 7pm, with my triumphant return to the Eli's stage!

We’re breaking format this time to have @Annaleen and I interview each other about our books, AUTONOMOUS, and HABEAS DATA. Both will be for sale at the event!

— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) May 31, 2018

The trial of the Berkeley 5 started today, with three witnesses for the prosecution, a cop, a fireman, and the neo-fascist Quillinan (see details below), who will take the stand again tomorrow morning. The trial is expected to last at least through the rest of the week, and possibly into early next week.

Please come out and support our antifascist comrades again tomorrow, Thursday, June 14, 9am, in Department 109 at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse at 661 Washington Street (at 7th Street) in Oakland.

TONIGHT, we will speak in San Francisco about the US government’s infamous attempt to deport Harry Bridges. Bridges was a labor leader who in the 1930s led the strike that resulted in longshoremen up and down the West Coast being unionized. As a result, the United States spent the next two decades trying to deport him. After four separate trials, and two Supreme Court opinions, they failed, and Bridges eventually became a naturalized citizen.

I am joining Peter Afrasiab, who authored  Burning Bridges: America’s 20-Year Crusade to Deport Labor Leader Harry Bridges, for this exciting discussion. The panel will be moderated by famed Constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky. Pre-registration is required.

Moderator
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean of Berkeley Law and Scholar of Constitutional Law

Panelists
 Peter Afrasiabi, Esq.
Partner at One LLP, Newport Beach, California
Author of Burning Bridges: America’s 20-Year Crusade to Deport Labor Leader Harry Bridges

Chip Gibbons, Esq.
Journalist and First-Amendment lawyer;
Policy and legislative counsel for
Defending Rights & Dissent, Washington, D.C.

This event is free and open to the general public!
To reserve a space, you must register online.
Tickets will not be available at the door.

The Bridges saga has wide ranging implications:

The Bridges deportation case was never just about Harry Bridges. First and foremost, it was about smashing a successful labor union by decapitating its leadership. Following the successful 1934 strike, the ILWU grew into one of the country’s most powerful, most militant trade unions. For anti-radical ideologues, this could only be the work of outside forces.

Since the inception of the labor movement, immigrants had been blamed for bringing “foreign” radicalism to the US and injecting discord into otherwise harmonious capital-labor relationships. Labor organizing was viewed as tantamount to disloyalty, and immigrants were suspected of working to remake the US in the image of their “un-American” ideas. All that was needed to make America great again, and roll back working-class victories, was to remove them from the country.

The Bridges case was also a stand-in for a larger anti-immigration politics. When asked about one of the many efforts to deport the ILWU leader, Senator Robert R. Reynolds (D-NC) told the media, “Bridges should not be permitted to make the trip out of the country alone. There are thousands of others who ought to be deported or put into concentration camps until we can get rid of them.”

Camps, mass deportations – these are the tools of those who want to “make America great again.” A xenophobic streak is unquestionably at the root of this. But make no mistake: in Bridges’ time and in our own, reactionaries’ ultimate vision of policing – and expelling – political heresy from the body politic extends far beyond the foreign-born.

Are you eager to power your home with clean electricity? At the same price (or less!) than PG&E, you finally can. East Bay Community Energy, Alameda’s Community Choice Energy provider, is already serving commercial customers in Alameda County. Residential customers will automatically be enrolled this fall. Learn about your choices as a customer, how this energy program advances climate mitigation and environmental justice efforts, and how you can get involved as an advocate for community choice energy. Light snacks and beverages provided.

Please RSVP.

JOIN US TO DEMAND AN END TO FAMILY SEPARATION AND DETENTION

MoveOn members across the country are joining Families Belong Together events on Thursday, June 14, to oppose the cruel, inhumane, and unjustified separation of children from their parents at U.S. borders. Communities are seeing the devastating and lasting effects this policy could have and are ready to speak out. This day of action was planned by local activists across the country, not a national organization, because they know families can’t wait. Action is needed now.

Under this Trump administration policy pushed by Attorney General Sessions and defended by Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen, ICE and Border Patrol agents have torn more than 650 children from their families in  just two weeks in May! Thousands of children have been taken from their parents and detained in cages since this policy was adopted in 2017.

With Father’s Day approaching, now is the time to protest these abuses and demand reform.
JOIN US TO DEMAND AN END TO THIS INHUMANE PRACTICE!

Safety Is… Rethinking Violence Using a Restorative Justice Lens

The Ella Baker Center will host a panel discussion and planning session where community members can engage with advocates on how we can re-envision safety. The panel discussion will be followed by small group facilitated action planning. Dinner will be provided.

Moderated by David Muhammad, Executive Director of National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

Panelists include:
Reverend Daniel Buford (Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action), John Jones III (Community and Political Engagement Director, East Oakland Black Cultural Zone) and Jessica Travenia (Development Coordinator, Roots Community Health Center).

Join us for SAFETY IS… panel discussion and planning session where community members can engage with advocates on how we can re-envision safety. Dinner will be provided.

The Follow-up meeting to Caring For Our Community – Responding to the Houseless is Thursday evening. So often the message to the homeless seems to be top down. The last meeting included a panel of homeless people who responded to the question of what are their most immediate needs. The responses included: access to bathrooms (or porta potties), drinkable water, showers, food, a place to store their belongings, pick-up of trash, a place to be (evictions, raids, towing of vehicles)

Agenda: 2^nd Street eviction of houseless people, closure 9^th Street Shelter, ongoing threat of citing and towing of RVs and campers.