Opinion

Opinion: Housing Affordability Crisis Requires Bold Action

Published

9 years ago

March 27, 2017

Oakland Post

By Assemblymember Rob Bonta

In times of crisis, all options must be on the table.

Many parts of California are suffering from a rental housing affordability crisis. According to a January 2017 Public Policy Institute of California report, our state has six of the nation’s 11 most expensive large metropolitan rental markets. People renting in the Bay Area and Los Angeles are feeling this crisis most acutely.

Another report by the Department of Housing and Community Development showed 84 percent of rental households are now considered “burdened,” meaning these individuals and families are being forced to spend 30 to 50 percent or more of their income on rent.

How can we provide our California tenants with the protections needed to ensure a roof over their heads during this crisis?

One proposal I have put forward for consideration, along with my colleagues Assemblymembers Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) and David Chiu (D-San Francisco), is the repeal of the Costa Hawkins Act.

Passed in 1995, Costa Hawkins imposes blanket, statewide prohibitions that prevent cities from protecting tenants in three main areas.

First, Costa Hawkins permanently exempts new construction from any local rent control. New construction is defined as a structure built after 1995. The impact of this law is magnified each year.

It means that years from now, in 2045 or 2095, for example, a 50-year-old building or a hundred-year-old building, originally built in 1995, will remain exempt from rent control under the theory that the building is still considered “new!”

Second, Costa Hawkins prevents local communities from ever extending rent control tenant protections to single family homes or condominiums. In our current housing crisis, California tenants living in these critical forms of housing are suffering too.

Third, and finally, the law imposes a statewide bar on “vacancy control”– or rent control that continues in a unit after a previous tenant has moved out and a new tenant has moved in.

This guarantees that landlords of rent-controlled units have the unfettered ability to hike their rents up, often by hundreds of dollars, to market rates whenever a tenant moves out. The odd logic here is that a community’s need for affordable housing is somehow diminished because a single tenant moves out of an apartment.

This provision of the law has had damaging results. In the years since Costa Hawkins took effect, the affordability of 77 percent of these rent-controlled units has been lost thereby reducing the inventory of affordable units and stripping away protections from countless tenants.

The repeal of Costa Hawkins would remove these three absolute, statewide prohibitions, and, in their place, insert local control.

Because they are closest to it, our local leaders know best the full gravity and destructive impact of our current affordability crisis. Families are being displaced and pushed out. People cannot afford to live in the communities where they grew up.

Workers are having to drive greater distances to their jobs because they can’t afford to live where they work, thus increasing traffic congestion and air pollution and further damaging our already-fragile environment.

Our local leaders see these tragedies play out every day in their communities. And they should be armed with the ability to address them.

Repeal of Costa Hawking would not mean that every local community would subsequently impose or expand rent control laws.

But rather than barring the consideration of tenant protections in these three areas during this time of crisis, it would place an important tool back in the hands of local government leaders.

For those cities that really need it, rent control can be an appropriate and effective tool to protect tenants.

This effort clearly will not be easy. But when 84 percent of renters are struggling, this is an “all hands on deck” moment in which we must act– and act boldly. Repealing Costa Hawkins must be on the table.

Rob Bonta is the assistant majority leader of the California State Assembly representing the cities of Oakland, Alameda and San Leandro.

Oakland Post

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Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

Published

22 hours ago

June 9, 2026

Oakland Post

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.