Strains hinder housing goals: Redwood City Council hears from residents

“Please, we really need help,” said Dorcas Garcia, a Redwood City resident who added many tenants, especially Latinos like herself, have struggled in silence for years. “This life is so hard so please pay attention to this situation and help.”

Many residents testified to similar negative experiences with landlords and to seeing their neighbors being mistreated and pushed out of their homes. Councilmember Lissette Espinoza-Garnica became emotional while listening to the residents testify to their struggles and also pushed for protections to be expedited.

“We are more convinced than ever that there must be something public-facing for these tenants, there must be mechanisms for these tenants and there must be something robust in our anti-harassment and just-cause policies,” Espinoza Garnica said, asserting that Latino and Black residents are often the most affected by displacement.

Tenant protections are one of three areas meant to be addressed under the city’s recently adopted anti-displacement strategy document. The high-level document does not contain ordinances and fully developed program suggestions but does call out anti-harassment policies and a limit on renovation-related evictions and establishing a right to return as key objectives.

Those ordinance amendments would take time and staff hours to develop though, with staff estimating the time frame for adoption beginning about 18 months out. The plan in total spans the next four years with the city identifying the preservation of unsubsidized affordable housing and mobile home parks as the two other key policy initiatives.

“I don’t know what we need to do, but you can’t put a timeline on the livelihood of people and to me, that’s what we are doing,” Councilmember Alicia Aguirre said, who added she was once displaced as a single mother living in Redwood City. “We need to change something, to make something happen and not take this to a five-year timeline.”

But the city’s housing team is currently a team of one, Housing Leadership Manager Alin Lancaster. Two fellows have been assisting her but those roles have recently ended and while the council has backed Lancaster’s work by giving her the green light to hire permanent support, the hiring process has not gone well, Lancaster said.

To focus her attention on the anti-displacement strategies, Lancaster said she would have to end her work on other programs like the Community Development Block Grants. Doing so would put a number of other vital housing programs and initiatives in jeopardy, Lancaster and other councilmembers noted.

“I would love to do more and on a faster timeline but with the reality of it being myself only and we have other mandatory housing initiatives, that faster timeline is really challenging to meet unless the City Council wants to make some serious tradeoffs,” Lancaster said.

City Manager Melissa Stevenson Diaz said the staffing shortage and hiring strain is being felt across city departments. During the pandemic, a hiring freeze was implemented as a financial precaution but demands on staff increased. The city’s recent budget, also approved Monday night, has permitted departments to start bringing on more staff but that process takes time and places pressure on a Human Resources department that has faced its own staffing struggles, Stevenson Diaz said.

Even if Lancaster was to fully staff her department in the coming month or two, she still argued onboarding new employees or consultants would make it unlikely staff would be able to present the tenant protection ordinance amendments by the end of the year without compromising the rest of her duties.

Unwilling to put funding opportunities at risk, the council agreed to approve the plan as drafted while also directing staff to prioritize a search for more funding that would assist their anti-displacement work.

“We have to keep an eye on the moment we’re living in as well as looking ahead to the children who are going to be here or the next generation,” Councilmember Jeff Gee said. “We have to tackle all these things together because they’re not isolated.”

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