Dear Mayor Mahan, Vice Mayor Kamei, and City Council:
This letter was prepared by the Housing Justice Workgroup of the Race Equity Action Leadership (REAL) Coalition.
The undersigned organizations support the staff recommendations to adopt a tenant preference policy. Since even before the City of San José adopted an anti-displacement strategy in 2020, we have been working to prevent the displacement of local residents. One of the strategies that the city plans to implement is a strong Tenant Preference policy that will benefit low-income households, allocate certain affordable housing units to those in need and help San José residents stay in their communities.
Prioritizing a collective vision aimed at fostering a future where every household in San José can sustainably remain within their community, fostering deep connections with neighbors, and nurturing a profound sense of belonging and stability is imperative. Housing discrimination and segregation have been pervasive issues in our nation's history, with far-reaching consequences for BIPOC communities. In San José, this has led to the displacement of those communities. A tenant preference policy can serve as a proactive measure to mitigate the effects of past discrimination and promote housing equity. Such a policy holds significant potential to address long standing racial inequities in housing policy and promote greater fairness and justice in our community.
By prioritizing the local neighborhood and those at most risk of displacement, we are targeting affordable housing production resources to where the risk of displacement is the greatest. It is also a critical way of using new developments to facilitate sustained communities.
We applaud Council and city staff for their tireless efforts to draft this policy through many community meetings and outreach. With this input, staff have drafted a policy that includes many important community priorities championed by the Anti-Displacement Coalition listed below:
Support setting aside 35% of eligible affordable units for the Tenant Preference Program, and direct staff to revisit Disparate Impact Analyses yearly to potentially increase this percentage.
Include language that directs Property Managers to accept alternative documents as part of the application processes besides Social Security Numbers, such as (ITIN#, school records, medical documents, and tax returns, etc.)
Identify steady funding sources to support the implementation of the Tenant Preference Program.
Allow sites that already include similar Tenant Preference language in their development documents to apply the preferences.
Support current affordable housing developments to include Tenant Preferences when/as vacant units become available.
Work with the community to define and implement a Displaced Preference, for individual tenants who have recently been displaced from their homes in San José.
By adopting a program with these criteria, we take a big step in completing an important action in the city’s newly certified housing element (S-20: Tenant Preferences that Help Fight Displacement).
The Tenant Preference Policy will also help to affirmatively further fair housing because it will allow the city to better use its investments in affordable housing to address displacement of lower-income residents from their neighborhoods and the city. In the city's recently adopted Housing Element, it identified displacement, which disproportionately harms Latinx households, as the number one factor contributing to racial segregation in San José. Accordingly, the Tenant Protection Policy—along with other anti-displacement measures like tenant protections--is an important component of an overall fair housing strategy to promote integration and access to opportunity in San José.
We appreciate staff taking our requests and incorporating it in the staff report. For example, the report states that no new funding will be needed since “There are no immediate cost implications from this program. Existing staff from the Housing Department’s Residential Development Division and Policy Team would implement this Program.”
It is also important to recognize that housing stability is closely linked to economic security, educational attainment, and overall well-being. By taking bold and decisive action, we can move closer to realizing our shared vision of a city where everyone has access to safe, affordable housing and the opportunity to live with dignity and respect.
Signed,
Signatories
About the REAL Coalition
The REAL community of nonprofit leaders and allies has been meeting since June 2020 to use our positional power to advocate for a more racially-just and equitable society; to establish a peer network of leaders committed to fighting white supremacy and systemic racism in ourselves and our institutions; and to hold each other accountable to the promises we made in the Nonprofit Racial Equity Pledge. The REAL coalition is broadly representative of the nonprofit community including human and community services, behavioral health and health, arts and culture, domestic violence, older adults, food distribution, education, environmental, farming, legal, disability rights, LGTBQ rights, ethnic, immigrant rights, housing and homelessness, criminal justice reform, urban planning, and intermediary organizations, and others. Over 125 organizations have participated in the REAL coalition.
