Fresno renters, it is time to organize for a guarantee of a clean, safe, affordable home

Earlier this year, Fresnoland revealed the case of Manchester Arms, a Fresno apartment complex where residents were living in horribly unsafe conditions.

Inez Hernandez, a mother living in the complex, did what tenants are supposed to do when landlords fail to uphold their end of the bargain, which is maintaining their units in habitable conditions. She called city code enforcement. Despite multiple calls for help, the city did not enforce deadlines on the landlord, and she and her children were left to live in those conditions until they were evicted. Inez has a 7-year eviction record because our housing and legal systems were designed to protect property rights and our government continues to uphold them at the expense of renters.

As typically happens with injustice, when the story becomes public, it prompts outrage and action from the city. But contrary to the city attorney’s odd claim that this was a “unique” case, these experiences are neither unusual nor new in Fresno. We’ve been here before. Many of us organized against blighted vacant properties and slumlording and pushed Fresno to pass the Rental Housing Improvement Act in 2016. To say we are frustrated to see Fresno cycling through the same problems that leave families living in misery, falling into poverty, and facing being homeless is an understatement. Therefore we are delivering the following call to action.

To our city’s leaders: you’re on notice. We expect accountability, urgency, and evidence that you are taking unprecedented, bold, and courageous action to transform the long-term consequences of our broken housing system.

But we did not write this for our city leaders. We have done enough of that. Instead, we write for the renters and everyone who understands that our fates are intertwined and that we have a shared responsibility to unite and transform our housing system toward one that ensures everyone can live in a safe and secure home. We all know someone who’s been impacted by constant, recurring housing issues. The housing crisis affects us all.

To the thousands of renters in Fresno: we write this for you, for us, and for everyone whose loved ones and neighbors have been impacted by the housing crisis. We see you — sacrificing your well-being to keep a roof over your head, sitting on edge as the first of the month approaches, working around the mold and leaky pipes, trying to keep your families together and stay positive for your children. We see you, we hear you, some of us are you.

We, the members of the Community Cares project with Faith in the Valley, who all carry our own housing stories full of trauma, triumph, insecurity, and survival, are calling on renters across the Central Valley to see and support one another and work together to realize a shared vision. We call this vision the Homes Guarantee.

What does a Homes Guarantee look like? It looks like every person across the Central Valley having a safe, secure, accessible, and deeply affordable home. It looks like racial equity, community ownership, and keeping families whole. How do we get there? By creating and upholding a tenant bill of rights, forming strong and powerful tenant unions, ensuring tenant legal representation, establishing robust community land trusts, building social housing, and making housing reparations to Indigenous and Black people and other people of color for centuries of colonization, theft and exclusion.

If you want to dream with us, build with us and take action together, join our spaces. The Community Cares group meets every Monday evening to organize for housing justice and equity in the Central Valley by building connections. We call renters across Fresno to check in on them and connect them with resources they need right now.

We are actively re-imagining the housing system in the Central Valley, and we need your voice. If we don’t look out for each other, who will?