Hundreds gathered outside City Hall yesterday to tell how the unfair rent moratorium imposed by the City Council is ruining their lives. The moratorium, which says renters don’t have to pay rent and cannot be evicted, was imposed years ago by the woke City Council, which as of this writing refuses to rescind it.
The stories are terribly sad. One elderly gentleman, who hasn’t been paid rent for years, said his tenant is renting the apartment she’s not paying rent for, as an Airbnb! Another lady, over 90 years old, cried as she described how she had saved her meager income for many years, in order to buy a rental property that would help her survive in her retirement. Now, her future is at risk. Another elderly gentleman said that his tenant, who has not paid him for years, smirks whenever she sees him.
Who are these squatters? What makes them believe they’re entitled to live for free in someone else’s property? Morallly, they have no right to rip off these homeowners. Except the problem is, they do have the legal right, thanks to an evil, stupid City Council, who says that renters don’t have to pay their rent if they don’t feel like it. Who do these people think they are? Nikki Bas, Dan Kalb, Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan. And how about the Mayor, Silent Sheng Thao, who has nothing to say about this crisis? They’ve set themselves up as Commissars, in a top-down dictatorial regime out of the old Soviet Union, issuing ukases, playing with peoples’ lives, all in service to a discredited ideology. It is municipal theft: Oakland is now, not a democracy, but a kleptocracy, with a craven, corrupt City Council stealing money from elderly property owners.
Think about it: these property owners still have to pay their mortgages, their PG&E, their property taxes (high and getting higher due to special assessments), their insurance, they still have to maintain their properties even in this current inflation. Another old lady, who is owed $85,000, described how her deadbeat tenant never even bothers to acknowledge her messages. The tenant accuses her of “harassment” whenever the old lady asks about the unpaid rent. Not only that, but the landlady was able to get inside her property at one point and discovered that the tenant is a hoarder. The place was filled with garbage. The landlady said the house will be uninhabitable in another few months. Another speaker asked, How long would Dan Kalb and Nikki Bas continue to work as Council members if the City stopped paying them? The answer is, not very long. Nobody works for nothing, except slaves and the homeowners whom the City Council is destroying.
This rogue, criminal City Council must be stopped. Look: We worked our tails off to defeat Nikki Bas last November. She is, in many respects, the worst of the worst. I have looked into her eyes during a debate and seen the madness there. Angry, vengeful, unbalanced, Bas has perceived that her career’s honey trail is paved with woke ideology. She pretends to care for people but she doesn’t. If she did, she would have been at the Rally and shed tears (as the rest of us did) to hear these stories.
The Council is under intense pressure to lift the rent moratorium as quickly as possible and to not impose six so-called “just cause” conditions that would, in effect, make lifting the rent moratorium impossible—conditions that would enable the Council to extend the moratorium forever, because the conditions they attach are impossible of being satisfied. That way, they can say to their critics, “Hey look, we did what you wanted: we lifted the moratorium.” Except for those pesky “just causes.” It’s like telling firefighters they can use hoses to put out the fire, but then are prohibited from access to water.
This is such a calculatedly grifting, cowardly City Council. I run out of words to describe the extent of their atrocities, the violence of their ideology, their cynicism. All they’re doing is dividing our city, kicking it in the teeth, telling homeowners and businesses they’re not wanted, and making Oakland into a decrepit, crime-ridden, bankrupt slum. As one speaker noted, a limited rent/eviction moratorium at the height of the pandemic might have made compassionate sense. But the pandemic is over. The Federal government says so. So does the State of California. There is no legitimate reason to continue the rent moratorium for another minute. And—get this—Oakland is the only city in America that still has a rent moratorium! Yes, once again, we’re number one—in stupidity, in cruelty, in wokeness.
Kudos to Ignacio de la Fuente for giving such a passionate, eloquent speech at the Rally. And major props to Seneca Scott, who organized the Rally. If there’s any justice in this world, we’ll have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after we sweep this current regime of scoundrels from office. We’ll have trials, and people will have to answer for the crime of murdering a once-great city with malice aforethought.
Steve Heimoff