“Making a Complaint Can Feel Dangerous.” Oakland’s Slow Moves On Inspections Puts the Onus on Tenants

Despite high rates of dilapidated housing and an ongoing lead crisis, a proactive approach to rental inspections still doesn’t have a launch date.

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Maria de Los Angeles Carmona Sanchez has rented a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood since 2010 and has, over the years, reported problems in the building to her property manager with little response. Then, in early January 2024, her neighbor alerted her to an electrical fire that started in the building’s basement. The fire alarms, she said, did not go off.

Sanchez made it to safety, as did her neighbors, but after the fire, she endured 10 days of winter weather without electricity, while some building residents said they faced more than a month without power. They lived without heat, bathed in cold water, and spent money on food they didn’t need to cook but could barely afford. “We didn’t want to leave, nor did we have the ability to leave,” Sanchez said in Spanish.

Oakland tenants, like Sanchez, dealing with unsafe housing conditions have limited options: inform their landlords and file a code enforcement complaint if the landlord doesn’t respond to requests for repairs. But such a reporting system is considered reactive, placing the onus on tenants, and leaves residents vulnerable to unsafe housing conditions. And, as was the case for Sanchez and her neighbors, those conditions can go unnoticed until they become dangerous. The current system relies on tenant complaints, but tenants are often ill-equipped to navigate and advocate for themselves in the complicated system of code enforcement complaints. Many stay quiet out of fear of illegal retaliation.

The system results in situations like the one Sanchez and her neighbors faced. The fire and lack of alarms was part of a pattern of neglect, she said. Issues such as faulty light fixtures, a leaking bathtub faucet and a window that could only stay open if propped up went unresolved for years. 

Although media scrutiny and pressure from city officials eventually prompted the property owner to make repairs, progress was slow. By mid-October, some units still relied on a loud generator stationed outside the building for electricity, according to Sanchez.

Meanwhile, for at least a decade, Oakland officials have been considering a move to make rental inspections mandatory by designing a Proactive Rental Inspection Program (PRIP), a system where potentially dangerous issues are addressed before tenants are harmed. 

City officials now propose using funds from a legal settlement to launch a PRIP and a lead hazard abatement program simultaneously. The most recent push for a PRIP in Oakland is closely tied to the city’s ongoing lead contamination crisis. Lead exposure in homes has been a longstanding issue, with studies highlighting the dangers of deteriorating housing stock. In 2019, a legal settlement with paint manufacturers allocated $24 million to Oakland and Alameda County. The county has paid Oakland about $4.8 million of the settlement and is holding the remaining funds until Oakland develops a plan for how it will spend them.

A consultant hired by the city in the fall of this year has been tasked with delivering recommendations for a lead hazard abatement program that would work alongside a PRIP by mid-2025. These recommendations will guide how the programs are run and determine whether they will be rolled out concurrently or sequentially.

The limits of a reactive system

PRIPs vary by jurisdiction but focus on regularly inspecting rental properties and ensuring they comply with housing codes. PRIPs don’t replace complaint-based inspections, rather, they supplement them, shifting the responsibility for identifying unsafe conditions away from tenants.

In some cities, PRIPs have been paired with lead abatement programs to address lead hazards proactively. For example, cities like Rochester, NY, and Toledo, Ohio, inspect properties for lead risks before children are exposed, contrasting with Oakland’s current system, which relies on blood tests indicating lead exposure to trigger action.

“When a complaint is made, the harm has already occurred at that point, right?” said Amanda Reddy, Executive Director of the National Center for Healthy Housing. “The best time for us to invest is before people are exposed and harmed, and before repairs become big and costly and disruptive.”

Housing experts from the National Center for Healthy Housing, Movement Legal, Earthjustice, and ChangeLab Solutions agree that PRIPs could mitigate risks like electrical fires and lead exposure. 

“The reliance on people to make complaints means that people have to feel safe enough to make those complaints, and we know that’s not the case for a lot of people living in our worst housing,” Reddy explained. “If you’re an undocumented resident or a low-income resident who’s not sure how you’re going to make rent next month, making a complaint can feel dangerous.”

'False starts'

Even before lead paint companies had settled with Oakland and nine other jurisdictions in California, the city had been discussing a PRIP. According to multiple Alameda County officials, housing advocates and City of Oakland public meetings dating back to 2017, the city of Oakland has discussed the implementation of proactive inspections for at least a decade.

“When I came here in 2013, Oakland was already talking about a proactive rental inspection program. Here it is, 2024, now we’re approaching 2025, and they don’t have one,” said Larry Brooks, who was then the deputy director of Alameda County Healthy Homes, in a July interview.

In 2015, the city of Oakland ran a pilot inspection program, called the Safe Housing Inspection Program, to identify fire hazards. Two years later, the Oakland Community & Economic Development Committee directed city staff to develop a proactive inspection program with lead hazards in mind, but nothing came of it. 

E/J Solutions founder Marybelle Nzegwu Tobias, a consultant hired to develop a Racial Equity Impact Analysis for Oakland officials in 2021, said it was her understanding that the city of Oakland was already underway in developing a PRIP with separate funding from the lead settlement. She added, however, that as a contractor she was not privy to all internal communications on the matter. 

More recently, in the city’s 2023-2031 Housing Element, which outlines a jurisdiction’s plans to address housing needs, Oakland committed to implementing a PRIP. According to the Housing Element, the program was set to go before Oakland City Council for approval in early 2023 with the goal of inspecting more than 96,000 rental units over an eight-year period. That has not yet come to fruition.

The city has also been confronted with increasing pressure to spend the millions of dollars it has in its accounts from the lead paint settlement. Earlier this year, the Healthy Housing Champions, a group of Havenscourt neighborhood residents, sent a petition to Mayor Sheng Thao, urging the city to use the settlement funds to develop a PRIP and lead hazard abatement program. Around 60 local physicians also signed a letter calling for the same. And, an August report that revealed lead contamination in Oakland Unified School District’s water at 30 schools has resulted in calls for the city to use the funds to correct infrastructure issues.

Oakland city officials said previous attempts for a PRIP never got off the ground due partly to staff turnover and budgetary restrictions. Oakland’s Planning and Building Director William Gilchrist said efforts before 2017 took place before he began working for the department that oversees code enforcement. Those efforts also happened before Housing and Community Development Director Emily Weinstein, who will oversee the city’s lead hazard abatement program, was hired. 

Moreover, “the city of Oakland has weathered at least 10 to 12 years of budget reductions, and so our internal capacity and our ability to design a program 100% is leveraged against available resources,” Assistant City Administrator LaTonda Simmons said, adding that since 2010, the state has changed laws around code enforcement standards and the city has developed policies to require all programs be designed with equity in mind.

They also said once it was determined that lead hazards should be factored into a proactive program, they decided it would be best to wait until a lead abatement program was developed before proceeding further. 

“We’re not walking into this exercise with some predispositive outcome,” Gilchrist said. “We’re really going to let the study lead us to the best approach.”

However, Leah Simon-Weisberg, a tenant’s rights attorney with Movement Legal who has helped other cities, such as Fresno, develop proactive inspection policies, said Oakland’s slow action on proactive inspections has left many renters vulnerable to unsafe living conditions. “We have an entire decade where this didn’t need to be happening,” Simon-Wesiberg said. 

While Oakland has not carried out a survey of substandard housing, according to Oakland’s 2023 Housing Needs Assessment, it is estimated that about 3.5% of the city’s housing stock is substandard, more than 800 occupied housing units have incomplete plumbing facilities, around 3,500 have incomplete kitchen facilities, and more than 5,500 properties were blighted in 2021. The report also explicitly notes that through community outreach for the 2023-2031 Housing Element, many community members reported concerns about mold and lead, both serious hazards to health. 

“I think it’s irresponsible,” Simon-Weisberg said of the city’s decision to wait further to launch a PRIP. “It’s on their heads—every child that gets asthma because there is mold or cockroaches or gas stoves that are leaking too much. They are responsible for every child who has lead poisoning. That is not acceptable at all, and I think there’s no excuse for it.”

Brandon Kitagawa, a senior policy associate at Regional Asthma Management and Prevention, said he and many others have long advocated for a PRIP. He is hopeful this time that the efforts will yield results. “Despite all of the false starts, I think we have some optimism that this time, Lucy won’t pull the ball away,” he said, referencing the Peanuts comic strip.

Hopes for Oakland’s PRIP

Earlier this year, Oakland’s Office of Planning and Building and Housing and Community Development Department reported that the city hopes to launch the proactive rental inspection and equitable lead hazard abatement programs concurrently. The report also stated that the city must use $3 million of the lead settlement funds or identify other funding sources to launch the PRIP. However, in a joint interview on Nov. 13, Gilchrist and Weinstein said that the consultant’s recommendations will drive how the programs launch and are sustained. 

“You can either go wide, breadth, or you can go with depth. That’s one of the things that we have to consider as we look at how many people, how many households we’re looking to impact, and also just the amount of resources that we have,” Weinstein said. 

Recently, the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI), a nonprofit dedicated to addressing social determinants of health, was hired as the city’s consultant. According to the scope of work, GHHI will have until mid-2025 to analyze existing lead hazard remediation programs and help the city develop an equitable lead hazard abatement program that would work in tandem with the city’s proactive rental inspection program. Once the city of Oakland receives those recommendations and solidifies a plan, it will need approval from both the Oakland City Council and Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors before accessing the remaining lead settlement funds.

El Tímpano has not seen the final contract, but internal emails obtained via public records requests in early September show the year-long contract with GHHI is estimated to cost $160,000, and the rest of the funds will likely be used to launch the programs. However, city staff anticipate that the millions allocated to Oakland residents from the lead settlement will not go very far. 

When asked about a timeline for that rollout, neither Weinstein nor Gilchrist could provide an estimated window, saying that it will depend on the recommendations from the consultant. Gilchrist and Weinstein said part of the reason the process has been so lengthy is Oakland’s deliberate steps to move the programs forward in a way that is sustainable and equitable. 

“I don’t think we have the luxury of doing this twice,” Gilchrist said. “While I can appreciate everybody’s urgency, I mean, I share it also, we don’t want to do the program a disservice by getting out of the gate too early when we knew we could have done better diligence in getting it started.”

Senior Health Equity Reporter and Editor Jasmine Aguilera contributed to this story.