Oakland City Attorney’s Housing Justice Initiative
ONN – Introduction to the City Attorney’s Housing Justice Initiative
Sign of the times: Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker’s last YouTube video was uploaded to her channel three years ago. This new video was uploaded three hours ago, today. The City Attorney’s Housing Justice Initiative was introduced December 19th 2019:
This month, the Oakland City Attorney’s Office launched our Housing Justice Initiative to significantly expand our work to secure justice for tenants and hold abusive landlords accountable.
This work is particularly important now as Oakland’s housing crisis continues, forcing more and more families to leave our city or, in many cases, to become homeless. We won’t accept the current state of affairs as the new normal.
The Housing Justice Initiative will build upon our ongoing work to increase housing security and protect vulnerable tenants in Oakland’s diverse neighborhoods. Many attorneys and support staff in my Office have contributed to this work, however for many years our Neighborhood Law Corps unit has taken the lead on litigation and other actions to protect tenants from abusive landlords. Our Office has provided leadership in developing laws to protect tenant rights.
The Neighborhood Law Corps will continue to play a critical role in housing justice. The Housing Justice Initiative will be spearheaded by our Affirmative Litigation, Innovation & Enforcement Division. The Initiative will expand this work, leverage our existing resources to a much greater degree and continue our partnership with other housing and legal advocates in Oakland. On December 9 th former Neighborhood Law Corps Attorney Scott Hugo began his work as our first Housing Justice Initiative attorney.
Not only will the Housing Justice Initiative enable us to secure justice for more, individual tenants, our mission is to transform the environment so that bad landlords know that they will be held accountable, and that the cost of violating the law will be astronomically greater than the cost of following it.
I will keep you updated on this work in future newsletters.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.