A resurgent tenants' rights movement has found a home south of the traditional progressive capital of the Bay Area.
"After years of punishing rent increases, activists across Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area are pushing a spate of rent control proposals," reports Conor Dougherty.
The Bay Area's contemporary tenants' rights movement is centered in the suburbs of the Peninsula. Among the examples cited by Dougherty, there's the Mountain View Tenants Coalition, which is "collecting signatures for a voter initiative in hopes of putting rent control on the November ballot." Efforts for similar measures are underway in San Mateo and Burlingame as well. If successful, the combined impact would be "the largest expansion of tenant laws since the 1970s," according to Dougherty.
The article also describes in more detail the politics of housing and tenants' rights in California.
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Journal of the American Planning Association