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Tenants Are Forcing Bay Area Landlords to the Bargaining Table
San Francisco’s groundbreaking Union at Home legislation encourages tenants to organize in their buildings the way employees organize at work. Housing activists in Berkeley are hoping their city will follow suit — but landlords are pushing back.
When Brookfield Properties and Ballast Investments won an auction for the majority of Veritas’s delinquent loan and subsequently assumed ownership of the larger portfolio, they inherited the outstanding habitability issues, the rent strike, and tenants prepared to leverage their power at the point of transfer to change the terms and conditions of their housing. In doing so, the tenants also exercised the recently secured rights and protections granted by San Francisco’s “ Union at Home Ordinance,” which was passed in 2022 and has the potential to make collective bargaining sessions like the one that took place in February at the HRC office more common. Across the bay in Berkeley, a coalition is currently collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would expand tenant protections, reduce rent increase allowances, and enshrine the right to organize, modeled on San Francisco’s Union at Home Ordinance.
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