When Maria Montes de Oca and her family moved into their apartment in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland fourteen years ago, there were already problems. The apartment clearly hadn’t been maintained; the carpet was stained and damaged, and neither the stove nor the fridge worked. Later on, there were cockroach infestation and mold issues. When Maria tried to get the landlord, Calvin Wong, to carry out repairs or fumigate, he would ignore her requests or tell her he’d use her security deposit to pay for it — a practice that’s illegal in California.

Yet in spite of the mounting maintenance and habitability issues, the rent kept going up. Maria’s fourteen-unit building wasn’t protected by rent control as a result of California’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which precludes certain units from being subject to municipal rent ordinances. In Oakland, that includes apartments built after 1980.

In 2016, after carrying out structural repairs to the building while ignoring the tenants’ complaints, Wong raised the monthly rent by $500 dollars. In Maria’s case, that was nearly a 50 percent increase — an unthinkable amount. That’s when she began talking with her neighbors and discovered that they were facing similar issues. After reaching out to a legal center, the tenants were connected to the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a statewide grassroots organization that supports and organizes tenants locally. “We told them about the rent hikes, about the conditions of the apartments, and about our concerns, and ACCE taught us how to organize among ourselves and the ways in which we could fight back against this kind of situation,” Maria told Jacobin in Spanish.