Advocating for Tenants to Protect Housing and Health

PHI’s Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP) program supports tenant protections that promote stable and healthy housing. With job losses and economic disruption, the coronavirus outbreak reinforced the importance of such protections.

In April 2020, in partnership with Health Leads’ Bay Area Healthcare for Healthy Communities Learning Initiative (BALI), RAMP hosted a presentation on tenant protections. Madeline Howard from Western Center on Law and Poverty (WCLP) provided an update on new tenant protection laws, as well as some COVID-specific tenant protection policies. You can view the webinar below.

As the COVID-19 outbreak expanded, RAMP supported a call for a statewide moratorium on rent increases and evictions. Following this advocacy, California issued new rules on evictions and foreclosures that effectively suspended nearly all evictions across the state.

Recognizing that a number of local policies were also put in place to support tenants, RAMP also worked with the Healthy Havenscourt Collaborative to host a training on tenants’ rights in Oakland, presented by Centro Legal de la Raza. View the training, below.

Unfortunately, many of the policies adopted during COVID are temporary, and RAMP stresses the need for long-term solutions to prevent evictions and ensure healthy, affordable housing for all.  Partnering with Tenants Together, RAMP continues to advocate for protections to keep people from losing their housing due to the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus.