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Last night, the San Jose City Council voted to start negotiations with Google for the tech giant’s Diridon Station mega-campus. With hours of testimony from diverse members of our community, we made clear we expect to be a part of developing an agreement that delivers real benefits for all San Joseans.

The Council committed to a transparent community engagement process including affordable housing advocates, tenants’ rights groups, labor, and community and faith based organizations. But key questions remain about whether the City and Google will protect working families from the patterns of displacement that have come to be the norm for Bay Area tech development.

Dozens of workers, community members, labor leaders, and nonprofit representatives spoke at the meeting, saying that while we welcome Google to San Jose, this project must not displace families and create poverty jobs for service and retail workers.

While many members of the Council said they agreed, we have much work ahead to win enforceable commitments that benefit all of San Jose, like investments in affordable housing and standards on wages and working conditions for the thousands of subcontracted service jobs this project will likely create.

Over the coming months, we’ll need you to come out to community meetings, public forums, votes on planning and zoning changes, and other pivotal moments in this process.

Together, we can create a tech headquarters in downtown San Jose that’s an engine not of riches for the few but of shared prosperity for the many. That brings good jobs not just for programmers but also for cafeteria workers, janitors, security officers, and “Google Bus” drivers. That creates housing for the diverse communities that define our region.

Last night, the San Jose City Council voted 9-2 for the Just Cause urgency ordinance, putting crucial new protections for renters into effect immediately.

Now 450,000 tenants in San Jose can no longer be evicted without a valid reason.

Since the Council first voted to develop a Just Cause ordinance last month, we’ve seen a rise in no cause evictions as unscrupulous landlords sought to evict tenants before the new rules took effect. This urgency ordinance prevents any more last-minute evictions from landlords trying to game the system.

Thank you to Mayor Sam Liccardo, Vice Mayor Magdalena Carrasco, and Councilmembers Sergio Jimenez, Raul Peralez, Sylvia Arenas, Tam Nguyen, Don Rocha, Lan Diep, and Chappie Jones for acting to prevent a flood of last-minute evictions.

We couldn’t have won last night without everyone who came out to City Hall, signed our petition to the Council, and worked so hard for Just Cause and the urgency ordinance, especially our partners in the Silicon Valley Renters’ Rights Coalition.

Sixteen years ago, I came to San Jose as a young community organizer. Then as now, the housing crisis was out of control, and longtime residents were being thrown out of rent-controlled units.

We fought hard for Just Cause protections against unfair evictions, but at the time the votes just weren’t there.

Last night, thanks to the tireless work of the Renters’ Rights coalition and the labor movement to build power for renters and working families, we won Just Cause.

At a City Council meeting that stretched late into the night, tenants told stories of being evicted for reporting mold or requesting a working stove, and of ending up homeless after losing their apartment. As supporters fasted and waved signs, the Council passed two crucial policies:

• Requiring Just Cause for evictions, so landlords can’t kick out responsible tenants and hike up rents.
• Ensuring that landlords provide relocation assistance for tenants if their apartment is taken off the market for repairs or under the Ellis Act, and preserving rent-controlled units.

The Council also voted to study using the Consumer Price Index to cap rent increases on rent-controlled apartments. This would lower the ceiling for rent increases from 5% to less than 3% a year.

Thank you to everyone from the Renters’ Rights Coalition and Silicon Valley Rising who took up a hunger strike, marched, and fought so hard for this victory, and to Councilmembers Sergio Jimenez, Sylvia Arenas, Vice-Mayor Magdalena Carrasco, Donald Rocha, Raul Peralez, and Tam Nguyen for standing with San Jose’s renters. In the words of Bob Brownstein, who’s been championing these policies for forty years, this is a “historic” win.

These protections will help 450,000 San Jose renters — our neighbors, children, and co-workers — stay in their homes. But the fight to address Silicon Valley’s housing crisis is far from over. We couldn’t have won last night without your support, and we’ll need your energy and dedication as we keep fighting to keep hard-working families from being priced out of our region.

In solidarity,

Derecka Mehrens
Executive Director

As working families in San Jose struggle with sky-high rents and unjust evictions, the out-of-town corporate landlords who own most of the city’s apartments make millions in profits.

That’s the takeaway from a new research report, Cashing In on Renters, that we released at San Jose City Hall today. We found that a family now needs to earn $113,040 just to afford the average two-bedroom apartment, and that the number of “no cause” evictions has increased by 270 percent in the past five years. Meanwhile, the average large landlord earns $2.9 million each year from Silicon Valley’s extreme rents.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Since 2010, over 2,200 households suffered “no cause” evictions, losing the roof over their heads even when they played by all the rules.
• Data from neighboring San Mateo County showed “no cause” evictions disproportionately target female-headed households, families with children, seniors, low-income households, Latinos, African Americans and Spanish speakers.

On Tuesday, April 18, the San Jose City Council will consider two ordinances to help address this problem:

• Requiring “just cause” for evictions, so landlords can’t kick out responsible tenants and hike up rents.
• Ensuring that landlords provide relocation assistance for tenants if their apartment is taken off the market for repairs or under the Ellis Act.

San Jose’s housing crisis is displacing some of our region’s most vulnerable residents. Next Tuesday we can take two big steps to protect these renters.

The Santa Clara City Council has unanimously passed the first worker retention ordinance in Silicon Valley! This new ordinance will provide much-needed job security to some of our most vulnerable workers.

This law will protect food and building service workers from mass layoffs when companies switch contractors. It requires that if a company with an office or venue in Santa Clara hires a new contractor or brings services in-house, the workers who currently work at that location must be kept on for a 90-day transition period.

At a packed council meeting that stretched from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, workers shared moving stories about why this worker retention policy is so important.

Maria Guerrero, a cafeteria worker at Intel, described how “Intel has changed food service contractors twice in the last three years, and the first time, workers lost their jobs on the day before Thanksgiving. I worry constantly about losing my job to a contractor change.”

This win would not have been possible without people like you raising your voice together with the workers who feed, protect and clean for some of our region’s most successful companies.

Thank you to everyone who emailed the council, made phone calls, and came out to the vote. Your support was critical to this unanimous victory.

Today, San Jose’s Opportunity to Work ordinance went into effect. This policy will help tens of thousands of part-time workers get access to the hours they need to make ends meet.

We poured our time, resources, and hearts into Measure E: Opportunity to Work, and were thrilled to see it pass with support from 63% of San Jose voters in November.

Now we need to make sure the 64,000 San Jose workers who have part-time or variable schedules know about their new rights. Can you share the infographics we created that explain the policy?

This is a groundbreaking policy – Measure E was the first ballot initiative in the United States to require employers first offer extra hours to their current workers. We’ll continue working to make sure employees can exercise their rights under Opportunity to Work, and to encourage other jurisdictions to adopt similar legislation.

Share the infographics on Facebook in English and Spanish.