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by Terry Messman
When autumn winds blew the roof off Kendra Wilson's apartment last October,
followed by a five-day rainstorm that ruined all her belongings and flooded
her out of her home, she thought she had weathered the worst of the storm.
She soon found that the hard rains had only begun to fall in Oakland, a city
where tenants forced out of apartments closed due to uninhabitable
conditions or natural disasters have virtually no rights, no protection from
becoming homeless, and often no relocation assistance.
Apartment buildings can be repaired and belongings replaced, but Wilson has
not been able to recover from the final blow: her landlord evicted her from
her rain-damaged apartment after she and other tenants spoke out about their
losses on a KRON TV news broadcast.
In an interview with Street Spirit, Kendra Wilson charged that after she
exercised her First Amendment rights to speak to the press about the
intolerable conditions she faced after the roof blew off her apartment, she
was subjected to a retaliatory eviction by her landlord, Jerry Curtis, a
Deputy Attorney General for the State of California.
After huge chunks of the apartment building's roof landed on the walkway
below her second-story unit, the rain poured in through 30 leaks in her
ceiling, soaked her bed, ruined her furniture and stereo, and destroyed a
closetful of books for her college courses. Finally, the ceiling began to
buckle and sag and the rain began streaming in through all the electrical
fixtures, forcing the Oakland Fire Department to cut the power off as an
electrocution hazard and shut down the building.
Then her real troubles began. Cold, tired, exhausted from the ordeal, the
shell-shocked tenants were ignored by their landlord, by Oakland officials,
and even by the Red Cross. Finally, Wilson and other tenants spoke out to
the press about these unendurable conditions in a desperate attempt to get
help. After the tenants described their plight on a KRON news broadcast, the
Red Cross responded by providing temporary motel vouchers. But her landlord,
Jerry Curtis, responded by locking Wilson and other tenants out of their
apartments for criticizing his inaction.
It was a one-two punch for Wilson - a disaster followed by an eviction that
left the 26-year-old college student homeless. Wilson and at least two of
her fellow tenants were reduced to sleeping in their cars or living with
relatives. As of April 1, more than four months after being ousted from her
apartment, Wilson has not been able to find or afford housing, and has been
forced to move out of Oakland to live with relatives.
The morning after the Fire Department cut the power off, Wilson said Curtis
finally returned his tenants' calls, and "he said we should pack up
immediately and look for apartments in the city of Richmond where he said it
was a little cheaper."
Wilson said she was stunned and disheartened by the landlord's refusal to
help beyond an offer to pay for moving trucks and return their security
deposit. "His response was extremely cold," she said. "When we first called,
we asked him if he could just put us up in a hotel or somewhere dry because
we were cold, we were wet, we were extremely exhausted. He told us he could
not because he didn't have the money. I told him I'm a starving student and
I don't have money to pack up and move anywhere. I told him it was the end
of the month and I didn't even have the money for a hotel room."
Wilson was left homeless by the disaster in the middle of her senior year in
college at Cal State Hayward, where she is majoring in English and pre-law.
"It's extremely hard because I'm going to school and I'm exhausted by this,"
she said. "I've been looking for housing for four months. I can't find
anything I can afford. This delays my graduation by six months."
Wilson was finally forced to move out of Oakland altogether, part of an
exodus of low-income tenants who have been squeezed out of the city in
recent months due to rising rents and no-cause evictions. She is now
bouncing back and forth between her mother's house in Hayward and an aunt's
home in Vallejo, while commuting to school.
Curtis told Street Spirit that he bore no blame for locking Wilson out of
the eight-unit apartment building he owns at 3474 Boston Avenue in Oakland,
nor any responsibility to pay for her damaged possessions or relocation
expenses. Curtis said that the City of Oakland's legal codes do not require
landlords to pay tenants for any relocation expenses or even grant them the
right to move back into an apartment after a natural disaster unless it was
caused by the owner's actions or negligence.
Asked why he had refused to let Kendra Wilson and two other tenants move
back after repairs had been completed, Curtis said, "If not for them
speaking out against me on television, all three could still be living in
their apartments."
Curtis said that he was so upset that the tenants had spoken out on KRON
about the conditions in their uninhabitable apartments, that he had written
to them that they would not be invited back if they had taken part in what
he called "slanderous attacks against me in the media." Curtis added, "This
in effect precluded them from moving back."
Asked if this was a retaliatory eviction for speaking to the press, Curtis
said that he was justified because the tenants had "slandered and libeled"
him by telling the press he had failed to fix the roof.
Curtis said he especially resented the tenants' complaints because they
could cast a cloud on his professional work as a Deputy Attorney General.
"In essence," he said, "judges who hear me in court in future cases might
think: there's a problem with his integrity because he lets his tenants
suffer unjustly." Curtis emphasized, "There is no relationship with what I
do for [State Attorney General] Bill Lockyer, and what I do with my
tenants."
In a letter to Ira Jones, one of three tenants he expelled and locked out
after the roof blew off the building, Curtis described the damage he
believed had been done to his professional reputation: "Every judge who
knows me may now question everything I represent to him because I have been
characterized as someone who is taking advantage of poor tenants."
Curtis wrote to the tenants that those who spoke to the press criticizing
his actions would be evicted: "Assuming that you may return under the
provisions of the City codes, you are informed that I will file a notice to
evict against anyone who defamed me. I am thinking about filing a defamation
suit against each person who appeared on the KRON broadcast.É My daughter
told me that her mother's priest told her that he had seen a broadcast about
me, and that I was a bad landlord."
Wilson said that, simply by speaking to the media, she suffered the hardship
of losing her home, and said she feels intimidated that a Deputy Attorney
General, a state official with so much legal status and prosecutorial power,
would issue threats to her warning that the mere act of speaking out about
unendurable housing conditions could result in a defamation suit. But Wilson
vowed that she would not be silenced by the threats of her landlord.
"These types of malicious acts are happening all around the Bay Area,"
Wilson said, "and most tenants are afraid or they simply do not know their
rights. Hopefully, the fact that we are standing up to a man such as Jerry
Curtis with his status will encourage others to speak up and fight back.
Other tenants are cowed by Jerry Curtis' high status. For me, my personal
feeling is that if I don't voice or stand up for my rights, there's really
no reason for me to be on this earth. I just refuse to be intimidated."
Wilson said she turned to the media only because she and other tenants were
exposed to health-threatening conditions in the building, and no one would
help - not their unresponsive landlord, not the City, and, at first, not
even the Red Cross.
"Our intentions were not to defame him," Wilson said. "Our intentions were
to seek help. For neither he nor the Red Cross would assist us. The Red
Cross only assisted us after the media came out. We were desperate, cold,
wet, exhausted, and the only thing we stated to the press were the facts of
what had happened. We didn't say anything about his character or family."
Anne Omura, managing attorney of the Eviction Defense Center in Oakland,
said, "I think the conduct of Jerry Curtis is reprehensible. I think it's
really ironic, since he's a Deputy Attorney General and works in the
California Department of Justice, that he's doing things to oppress people
and make these women homeless. To lock them out is illegal. You can't just
lock tenants out of their house. It's retaliatory because he did it after
they went to Channel 4."
Omura said that the tenants have a legally protected right to go to the
media and expose the hardships and hazardous conditions they endured. "You
can't get angry when people go to the media, and call it slander when it's
the truth," Omura said. "Truth is 100 percent defense in cases of slander.
Curtis just doesn't want the public to know how dirty his hands are. All
that matters to him is this public perception as an official who works for
the Department of Justice when actually he's a perpetrator of injustice."
Before being expelled, Wilson said the monthly rent for her one-bedroom
apartment was $625, an amount that was raised to $681 in May, 2000. "He knew
by law in Oakland he couldn't raise the rent more than 3 percent, but he was
able to use banking and stick it to me," she said. "I remember him making a
comment to me then about raising the rent and how he hoped we would just
move out - that was his intent."
After the building was closed and repaired following the rainstorm, Wilson
said that one of the displaced tenants learned that one apartment would be
rented out for $950 a month. Curtis told Street Spirit that he had always
charged Kendra Wilson and other tenants a very fair rent. After repairs,
Curtis said, he has rented one of the vacated apartments to a woman for $900
a month, and had rented another unit to one of his friends for $800 a month,
both significantly higher rents than charged to the dislocated tenants prior
to their eviction.
The Oakland City Council voted last summer to make it more difficult for
landlords to evict tenants simply to raise rents by imposing a two-year
freeze on rent increases on rental units that are emptied through "no-cause
evictions." Tenant activists warned at the time that the measure had no
teeth and would not be enforced because Oakland landlords are not required
to register their rental units and thus escape detection if they raise rents
after no-cause evictions. These warnings appear to have proven prophetic in
Kendra Wilson's case.
"Isn't that the most disgusting thing, that he's capitalizing on locking
these women out by raising rents?" asked Omura. "That's 100 percent illegal.
I think it's gross to profiteer off what he did in locking them out. The
terrible thing is that these women are now homeless with no place to live.
And he's not in any trouble with city officials at all. He's making more
money because of their tragedy!"
Letter from Kendra Wilson
On October 22, 2000, the roof of our apartment building at 3474 Boston Avenue, Oakland, CA blew off during a windstorm. After notifying the owner, Jerry Curtis, Deputy Attorney General for the State Justice Department, nothing was done. Mr. Curtis left town, leaving us without a roof and exposed to the elements. On October 25, 2000, rain poured into our apartments, seeped into our walls, floors, and light fixtures, along with ruining our personal property. We were later evacuated by the Oakland Fire Department, and the building blue tagged, due to an electrocution hazard. Unable to obtain aid from Mr. Curtis or the City of Oakland, and in our desperate quest for help, we contacted Channel 4 news to cover the story. Because of the news broadcast, we were finally able to obtain help from Red Cross, who had previously denied us because it was a tenant/ landlord issue. The City of Oakland cited our landlord and required he correct the violations. On November 19, 2000 Andria Crosby, Ira Jones, and myself, Kendra Wilson received notices from Mr.Curtis stating that we were to vacate immediately so the repairs could be done. We voiced that we had no place to go, or the financial resources to do so with. This did not matter to him. He said he was not required to help us, and nevertheless, we still needed to leave. Approximately a month later we received a letter stating that we were not welcome back to our apartments, after the repairs were completed, because we brought shame to he and his family by airing the news broadcast.
As of January, and the first of February 2001, the locks to our apartments have been changed and they have been re-rented for $280 - $325 more than the rent we were paying. We never received an eviction notice, only a letter stating his embarrassment and his disgust with our exercising our First Amendment rights. We were not shocked by this behavior, especially since he attempted to raise our rents several times in one year and openly informed us of how much more money he could get for our apartments as opposed to what he was charging us.
We are still homeless, but we are fighting back! We are holding a peaceful demonstration on Thursday, April 26th, 2001 at 1515 Clay Street, Oakland, CA (Oakland’s State Building). It will be held from 12:00 p.m. noon until 2:00 p.m. We are asking that your organization attend, sponsor, and/or speak at our demonstration. This is important to us because we are everyday people and feel we represent many people in our community. We desperately want to stand up to Mr. Curtis to let him know what he did was not only illegal, but malicious and moral less. Our hopes are that our opposition to Mr. Curtis, despite his position in society, will encourage other displaced, oppressed, or fearful tenants to do the same.
If you choose to join us, please feel free to contact Kendra Wilson at (510) 915-3434. Any assistance, no matter how large or small, will be greatly appreciated. We are in need of speakers, donations of food, and amplification for the demonstration. Most of all, your attendance and support will be cherished. There will be a press release, and we anticipate this to be a great forum for all those who are interested in voicing their housing issues. We are also interested in introducing and supporting any housing remedies your organization may have. Enclosed is a flyer that further details the support we have successfully acquired, and other pertinent information about the demonstration.
It is clear that housing is a huge concern for numerous renters in the Bay Area. Silence is a form of acceptance, and we refuse to permit our voices to be smothered. Please assist us in allowing our voices to be heard. Thanks for your time and we hope to see you there!
Sincerely, Kendra M. Wilson
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