Summary
The Bay Area housing crisis often takes the form of tenant injustices such as wrongful evictions, discrimination, and displacement. Though there are tenant protection laws, these laws are largely inaccessible to lower-income and immigrant tenants. This became the foundation for the birth of our youth organization, BAYTREE (Bay Area Youth for Tenants’ Rights Education and Empowerment), which aspires to make these laws more accessible to all people. To take action, we are going to educate community members about tenants’ rights by hosting both in-person workshops at local community centers and online seminars for accessibility reasons. In the workshops, we will present the background information regarding the Bay Area housing crisis and we will invite expert guest speakers such as lawyers and members of tenants’ rights organizations to talk about the specific rights that tenants have and what to do if one believes that those rights are being violated. We will then close our workshop by recommending community action that can be taken and conducting a closing survey to gather data about the information absorbed by participants. Our goal is to strengthen our community by providing them with the tools needed to successfully combat tenants’ rights violations.