I built an entire climate commitment around a claim I never actually checked: that San Jose, despite being the largest city in the Bay Area, still lacks comprehensive tenant protections that would prevent displacement. I framed the plan as bringing East Palo Alto’s example to a city that had never tried anything like it. That framing is wrong, and I want to correct it before I organize a single person around it.
San Jose has had a Tenant Protection Ordinance since April 18, 2017, passed by an 8-3 city council vote as an urgency ordinance that took effect immediately, protecting nearly half a million residents. The ordinance requires landlords to have just cause, one of 13 specified legally acceptable reasons, before evicting a tenant from a covered building. It also requires landlords to notify the city directly whenever they file to terminate a tenancy, and bars retaliation against tenants who exercise their rights, with a legal presumption that any landlord action against a tenant within six months of them asserting those rights counts as retaliatory. This isn’t a proposal I’d be introducing. It’s been enforced city law for close to a decade.
The ordinance has kept getting strengthened since then, not left to sit unchanged. In 2019, the city added requirements that landlords post the ordinance conspicuously in every building and include specific good faith language in every termination notice. In March 2024, the city council approved a Tenant Preference Program specifically targeting displacement in historically vulnerable neighborhoods, reserving 20 percent of affordable units in city-funded properties for residents already living in high-displacement census tracts, and another 15 percent for residents of the same council district. Mayor Matt Mahan, announcing the program alongside Mayfair community leaders, said the city cannot continue to allow displacement to tear apart families and communities in the Bay Area. Maritza Maldonado, executive director of the Mayfair nonprofit Amigos de Guadalupe, described the ordinance as recognition that we are a community that has endured years of social and racial inequities.
None of this means the underlying crisis I was responding to is fake. A market rate one bedroom apartment in San Jose runs about 2,359 dollars a month, roughly double the national average of 1,207. Existing protections regulate how tenants can be evicted and how fast rent can rise in covered buildings. They don’t touch the base price of housing itself, and they don’t cover every rental unit in the city. Mayfair resident Maria Chavez, sharing a one bedroom apartment with her husband and three children, called the newer Tenant Preference Program a light at the end of the tunnel, not a solved problem.
So the actual gap isn’t the one I described. It’s not San Jose lacking any tenant protection framework. It’s whether the existing framework, just cause eviction rules, rent increase caps, a targeted preference program, is strong enough and well enough enforced to keep up with rents that have kept climbing regardless of the ordinances already on the books. That’s a narrower, more specific question than the one I built my whole commitment around, and it changes what 50 young people showing up at a city council meeting should actually be asking for.
I’m not walking back the mobilization plan. I’m walking back the premise. Instead of demanding San Jose create tenant protections that already exist, the youth I organize need to show up asking whether the protections we have are actually being enforced, and where the real gaps sit inside a law that’s been on the books since 2017.