Refinery Town

by Steve Early

  In public McLaughlin remained diplomatic. She noted at one RPA meeting, in May 2015, that the mayor “has many, many good points but doesn’t understand the importance of movement building to build a better society” or the importance of “protecting the most vulnerable.” In a private message to the RPA steering committee—complaining about the role played by Butt and his lawyer son Daniel in Richmond’s rent control debate—McLaughlin’s tone was more critical, personal, and even plaintive. “I am soul sick,” she wrote, “over how the Butts have battered us during this whole process and batter us still.”16

  On July 21, the city council was scheduled to consider two rent control options presented by city hall staff. One created a process for mediating landlord-tenant disputes and the other instituted full rent control with just-cause protection. In the run-up to the meeting, things were not looking good for the latter choice, known as Option D. It could not be adopted without Vice Mayor Jael Myrick joining forces with the three already committed RPA councilors. Myrick, on several occasions, called for a forty-five-day emergency moratorium on local rent increases (that was never enacted). However, shortly before the July 21 meeting and vote, he gave mixed signals to a local newspaper reporter. The resulting Contra Costa Times headline predicted “No Fourth Vote on Rent Control.”

  In response to Myrick’s perceived waffling in the press, SEIU Local 1021 helped deluge his office with pro–rent control phone messages and e-mails. The RPA similarly urged its members to let Myrick “know that we do not consider an unenforceable ‘rent mediation’ procedure as a step toward rent stabilization.” On a local radio station, Mike Parker made the same point in a lively debate with Jeffrey Wright, a Richmond realtor and former CEO of the West Contra Costa County Association of Realtors. Behind the scenes, Myrick’s council colleague Gayle McLaughlin offered him compromises on the language of Option D. These changes tweaked the formula for permitted annual increases and created a separate rent control board, instead of having the council itself function in that capacity on an interim basis.

  The proposed regulatory regime would cost the city between $1.5 million and $2.2 million annually, but that amount would be raised through a landlord-paid fee, averaging about $370 per unit. Landlords were allowed to pass along half that cost to their tenants. Rent hikes would be limited to 100 percent of the Consumer Price Index or, at the moment, about 2 percent a year. By late afternoon on July 21, Myrick was “comfortable with moving forward” because of such tweaks and the assurance that rent control “wasn’t going to devastate the city’s budget.”17

  Myrick called Tom Butt to let him know he would be supporting the stronger Option D, as amended. At the council meeting that evening, more than 135 residents signed up to speak during the public comment period, for or against city council action on rent control. Local property owners lined up to criticize its unfairness to them and warned that it would limit their ability to repair roofs, appliances, and building foundations. One rent control foe was eighty-year-old Mon Lee, a twenty-five-year Richmond resident who described the ups and downs of life as a landlord. He objected to a “punitive law” that would require him to “subsidize” his tenants. “I’ve worked all my life since I bought this property,” he testified. “It has been in a negative cash flow and nobody helped me. Now that I’m retired and can’t work, you change the law?”

  Butt let exasperation with Myrick, his vice mayor at the time, and other irritants get the best of him. Just before the vote was taken, after a motion by McLaughlin to cut off debate, Butt threw up his hands and headed for the door. “I vote no, and I’m also leaving,” he announced. “I can’t deal with this.” The mayor took Vinay Pimple, the council’s one appointed member, by the arm and led him out too. This left only Nat Bates, Richmond’s most reliable tribune for the business community, to cast the only vote against rent control at the close of the council’s six-hour session.

  It was a jubilant crowd of labor, community, and tenants’ movement activists who left the council chambers near midnight on July 21. In addition to initial backers like the ACCE, CCISCO, the RPA, AFSCME Local 3299, SEIU Local 1021, and CNA, the pro–rent control coalition now included the Centro Latino Cuzcatlan, the Iron Triangle Neighborhood Council, Urban Habitat, Urban Tilth, and Saffron Strand, a group assisting the homeless in Richmond.

  Richmond organizers—who had responded promptly and effectively to the landlord-tenant tensions already occurring over rent hikes and evictions—saw little downside to the council’s action. State law restricts rent regulation to housing constructed before 1995. In Richmond, that would leave about nine thousand residential units covered, giving nearly thirty thousand people “real tenant protections,” according to ACCE. The just cause for eviction requirement would apply to all landlord-tenant relationships in rental apartment buildings, condos, and single-family homes, new and old.

  Randy Shaw, the San Francisco housing lawyer who had warned about the Oaklandization of Richmond, hailed the vote as a great rent control breakthrough, California’s first in nearly thirty years. In Shaw’s view, the “absence of massive new federal funding for housing” left affordable housing advocates with few other tools for “protecting economically diverse neighborhoods in urban America.” By following in the footsteps of thirteen other California cities, Shaw wrote, “Richmond is saying that displacement and gentrification are not inevitable but instead can be limited through the political process.”18

  Even Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson declared that the city had made “the right call on rent control.” The crusty Johnson is, like Butt, no fan of “lemming-like behavior among uber-liberals who jump on the bandwagon for any and all policies that carry the ‘progressive’ stamp of approval.” He praised the new mayor for being “one of Richmond’s most consistent politicians for years” but rebuked him for taking “a vacation from otherwise sound thinking” on the issue of rent control. “In a part of the country where market-rate housing is beyond the financial reach of a majority of the residents . . . rent control, while far from perfect, is one of the few ways middle-income residents in the Bay Area are able to hang on,” Johnson wrote. According to the columnist, Richmond should not let “political ideology” (in this case, the mayor’s) stand in the way of “a better public-policy idea.”19

  In the flush of victory, Jovanka Beckles weighed in with characteristic flourish. In a Facebook post she warned that some rent control foes might try “evict people to get back at the city” or hike rents before the new ordinance went into effect in early September. “The light will shine on those greedy, selfish, arrogant landlords,” she predicted. Some landlords did contact the Richmond Housing Authority (RHA), seeking to opt out of the Section 8 federal voucher program, used by some of their tenants, due to the impending greater difficulty of evicting problematic ones. Under new just-cause protections, landlords would have to justify eviction notices, based on bad tenant behavior, with police reports or complaints from neighbors, some of whom might fear retaliation. Without proof of just cause, landlords could be on the hook for two months’ worth of rent, plus relocation costs. According to RHA executive director Tim Jones—no friend of rent control—building owners “don’t want the headache. They would rather get off the program, sell the unit, and go to another city where they don’t have to deal with this.”20

  Just a month later, Richmond landlords won a rent control reprieve, thanks to the rapid response of their industry group, the California Apartment Association (CAA). In a replay of past corporate counterattacks in Richmond, the CAA retained a political consulting firm that in turn hired professional canvassers. These door knockers received up to $12.50 per signature, six times the normal rate, to secure the names of 7,000 Richmond voters. Only 4,100 valid signatures were needed to suspend rent regulation until reaffirmed in a citywide vote. The cost of overturning a majority decision by a democratically elected city council, estimated at $50,000 or more, was a small down payment on the CAA’s anticipated spending against rent control a
s a Richmond ballot question.

  Truthfulness is not always a strong suit of signature gatherers paid on a piece-rate basis. When some Richmond residents inquired about the purpose of the CAA’s anti–rent control petition before signing, they were assured it was “to stop unfair evictions in Richmond!” On the petition itself, any indication of industry sponsorship was omitted. One CAA subcontractor, interviewed by the Contra Costa Times, described a training session in which even canvassers like him were told that the Richmond petition drive “was for rent control.”21

  Based on questions he fielded from residents confused about the petition’s intent, RPA volunteer Zak Wear estimated that “up to half of the signatures obtained are from rent control supporters who have been fooled.” (County officials later invalidated about 20 percent.) Of course, not all petition circulators made fraudulent or misleading claims, because doing so is a misdemeanor in California, although a rarely prosecuted one. California legislators have passed bills requiring disclosure of those paying for the petitioning and making it an additional misdemeanor to pay signature gatherers based on the number they collect. Governor Brown vetoed both measures, along with other reforms of California’s now corporate-dominated initiative process.

  Vice mayor Jael Myrick opposed taking city council action to put the suspended measure before Richmond voters. So rent control advocates had to gather and submit more than 5,500 signatures on behalf of a revised “Fair Rent, Just Cause for Eviction, and Homeowner Protection Ordinance.” About a hundred volunteers participated in this petition drive, along with some Local 1021 members paid by the union to help out. In July 2016, county election officials certified that the initiative, sponsored by the Fair and Affordable Richmond Coalition, had won a spot on the November ballot. The California Apartment Association’s “Vote No” campaign against it insured that big money, from at least one new source, would be flowing into Richmond in the fall of 2016. In addition to deciding three council races, voters would have the final say on rent control.

  MOVING FORWARD, RPA-STYLE

  For a supposedly well-oiled and all-powerful political machine, the RPA seemed to be suffering from the summer doldrums a year before Richmond’s next election cycle. On a Saturday afternoon in late July 2015, the crowd gathered for a report from Gayle McLaughlin about the city council’s vote for rent control was modest in size. In fact, those filling the chairs at the Bobby Bowens Progressive Center were the same twenty-five to thirty dedicated members, predominantly white and older, who attend every monthly meeting. Quite a few belonged to the RPA steering committee, helped plan the agenda, or chaired subcommittees scheduled to make reports. Missing, as McLaughlin noted, were most of the hundred or so local activists who jammed the same Macdonald Avenue storefront eight months before in the flush of progressive victory over Chevron. “Right after the election,” she said, “this room was so crowded you could hardly breathe.”

  A brief membership report confirmed that there was some internal organizing to do. During the 2014 election campaign, more than 80 new recruits had signed up, pushing RPA membership to an all-time high of 382. Not everyone who pays twelve dollars to join bothers to renew a year later or is asked to do so. So more than half of the total membership was by mid-2015 in arrears on its dues. The RPA counted 450 people—members and additional election-year helpers—on its “key list,” and another 3,400 Richmond voters were part of its overall e-mail database. These supporters got regular organizational updates, with 500 to 700 recipients actually opening their messages from the RPA.

  After McLaughlin spoke about rent control, she introduced a visitor to the Bay Area who had come all the way from Syracuse, New York, to check out the RPA. A frequent Green Party candidate in his home state—most recently running for governor—labor radical Howie Hawkins was duly impressed. He praised the RPA’s singular dedication to maintaining a year-round, issue-oriented organization, with dues-paying members, rather than just fielding a pickup team of election-year volunteers. As Hawkins surveyed RPA headquarters, he could see plenty of evidence of past campaigning. The high-ceilinged, single-room office looked a bit like a theatrical company prop room, albeit one with chairs, desks, a conference table, and copy machine. Stacked in the back corners and posted on walls were handmade banners and printed signs accumulated during a decade of issue-oriented campaigns—from taxing sugary drinks to stopping crude-by-rail “bomb trains.” For information and membership education purposes, there was a bulging bookshelf against one wall, crammed with old paperbacks on labor and black history, environmental issues, workers’ rights, and community organizing.

  Next to this community library was a radicals hall of fame—several dozen head shots (a few looking like mug shots) of an eclectic group of movement heroes, heroines, and martyrs ranging from Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones to more contemporary political icons like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Subcomandante Marcos. Also displayed were the portraits of three South American presidents, two of them dead (Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez) and the other, Richmond’s Ecuadoran comrade-in-arms, Rafael Correa, still alive and kicking. On the opposite wall, the late Bobby Bowens was memorialized. In 2013 the RPA renamed its office in his honor to recognize his long record of community service, beginning with his Black Panther years in Richmond. Next to Bowens’s smiling face, a big, hand-painted blue and green RPA banner declared “A Better Richmond Is Possible.”22

  Members of the RPA were justifiably proud of their electoral success. During the ten-year period between 2004 and 2014, progressive candidates racked up a total of eight election wins (half of them by McLaughlin) versus only six losses (three by candidates who later won a city council seat after running a second or third time). Few similarly constituted electoral coalitions with a focus on city politics boasted a better win-loss record anywhere in the country during the same decade. Hawkins, for example, has run as a Green Party candidate twenty times but never successfully; he has done best in several campaigns for municipal office in Syracuse.

  By the spring and summer of 2016, the RPA was gearing for another round of frenetic campaigning. Its goals were re-adoption of rent control, in a citywide vote, and securing more RPA seats on the council. In a presidential election year, senior city councilor Nat Bates seemed assured of reelection, running as a loyal Democrat on Hillary Clinton’s coattails. His junior colleague, Jael Myrick, would also benefit from incumbency, if he ran for a second time. The council’s appointed member, Vinay Pimple, seemed most vulnerable to defeat, due to his lower name recognition and opposition to rent control, police commission reform, and other progressive initiatives.

  RPA members voted to back the council candidacy of forty-five-year-old Ben Choi, a Marin Clean Energy staffer and six-year member of the Richmond housing commission. Choi favored the rent regulation that Butt, Bates, and Pimple opposed and Myrick was ambivalent about because he feared retaliatory rent hikes by local landlords. Unlike these incumbents and the mayor, Choi refused to accept corporate contributions. In 2016, when landlord money (or Chevron largesse) started flowing in the form of maximum donations to individual candidates or much larger “independent expenditures” on their behalf, Choi would not be among the beneficiaries. Joining him on the RPA’s “Team Richmond 2016” slate was Melvin Willis, now twenty-six years old and also a veteran of planning commission work. Without Willis’s tireless door-knocking as an ACCE organizer, rent control might not have made it onto the November 2016 ballot.23

  To succeed in 2016, the RPA first got its own house in order. As RPA activist Kathleen Wimer admitted, the group had too many “old, white, economically comfortable retired people of leisure running things.” Despite fitting that description herself, Wimer was among the RPA leaders most actively trying to recruit a younger and more racially diverse membership, including “working people with kids at home and jobs.” She and others on the RPA steering committee believed it should be member elected, not self-selecting. The latter method was not only
politically embarrassing; it didn’t reflect the democratic values that local progressives had long promoted in Richmond.

  The RPA succeeded in reforming itself, by adopting most of the recommendations of its internal “restructuring committee.” In late 2015 new draft by-laws were approved at a meeting of about fifty members. That was followed by a first-ever membership vote on a new steering committee that represented both individual dues payers and affiliated organizations. In January 2016 older activists like Wimer stepped aside, enabling others in the group to assume bigger roles. In her case, she handed membership recruitment duties to twenty-seven-year-old Zak Wear, a past canvasser for that purpose.

  Other leaders elected included Choi and Willis, Janet Johnson from the Sunflower Alliance, ACCE organizer David Sharples, worker co-op advocate Najari Smith, CNA organizer Marie Walcek, immigration lawyer Sharron Williams, Friends of the Earth staffer Michelle Chan, and Latino activists like Claudia Jimenez, Tania Pulido, Sergio Solis, and Marcos Banales (who replaced Parker as co-coordinator of the RPA). Women and people of color constituted a majority of the RPA’s new leadership body. The average age was much lower than ever before. Two RPA city councilors, Beckles and Martinez, remained on the steering committee; McLaughlin did not, hoping to find more time for writing about her mayoral years.

  At his invitation, a delegation of RPA leaders, old and new, conferred with Mayor Butt about working more collaboratively on city problems, while continuing to disagree about rent control. As a New Year’s resolution for 2016, Butt pledged to develop “a more productive relationship with the RPA.” He praised its members as “critical allies” in past struggles over “hugely controversial issues” but questioned its current “aggressive social agenda” and affiliation with “special interest organizations” like ACCE, the California Nurses Association, and SEIU Local 1021.