Today we sent a letter asking the Alameda County Board of Supervisors asking them to sustain the existing Eviction Moratorium for Alameda County, not weaken it.
For far too long, police, sheriffs departments, prisons, and jails have used our tax dollars to kill, injure, and imprison Black people. We join the masses of people across this country in saying no more.
Day and night people keep taking to the streets because we are demanding no more murders of Black people by police, no more indifference to systematic anti-Black inequality and the suffering it creates. We asked Alameda County Residents to join us in demanding a strong eviction moratorium remain in place, and call on the Supervisors to shift funding from imprisoning and jailing Black residents into investments in Black health and healing, which necessarily includes housing. https://ebho.salsalabs.org/alamedacountyinvest
We center housing justice as racial justice in our organizational values for a reason. And this means we must go beyond weighing in on housing issues to advance a new vision of interconnected systems – where our public dollars and the power of governance are used to house and heal, not police and imprison.
In May, in the midst of the pandemic, which has decimated local government revenues, the AC BOS voted 3-2 to spend $318M on staffing and behavioral health at Santa Rita over the next 3 years. The Ella Baker Center estimates the $106m a year could provide 3,100 hotel rooms for currently unhoused people for 6 months.
During the pandemic that is harming Black and Latinx residents in the East Bay at higher rates than white residents because of racial and economic inequality, we call for the County Supervisors in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties to divest funds from police and jails and invest in Black futures of health and healing, which requires quality affordable housing.
They must also use their governance to defend low-income people Black, brown, and white residents from harm, which includes the extension of a strong eviction moratorium.
Read the full formal letter we submitted to the Supervisors here.
East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO) encourages the Supervisors to adopt a regular ordinance, without amendment or delay, establishing a moratorium on evictions during the COVID-19 public health emergency that mirrors the urgency ordinance previously adopted by the Board. We believe that the provisions of the urgency ordinance were well-crafted; any attempt to weaken or dilute these provisions will inevitably result in a wave of evictions of some of our most vulnerable residents, disproportionately Black and Brown households.