Five years ago, an immigrant mom named Mili brought an eviction notice left on her door to a meeting for CAUSE, the community organization she is involved in, working for the rights of renters and immigrants in Santa Barbara. Mili worked hard to pay rent and keep a roof over her children’s heads, but out of nowhere she was told to leave their home. It took her months of searching to find a new apartment, feeling like many landlords were rejecting her for being a single mother — all while having no home. Eventually, she found a place that was an hour’s bus ride from her son’s school.
Mili and others in the committee wanted to see something change, for renters to be protected from suddenly being kicked out of their homes for no fault of their own. They had seen their neighborhoods in the Eastside and Westside, once affordable communities for Santa Barbara’s Latino working class, become more and more expensive, with families like theirs pushed out by corporate real estate investors to make room for higher-paying residents.
Mili and her friends in the CAUSE committee began to speak before the City Council, sharing their stories of eviction and displacement and calling city leaders to action. They faced a long road ahead: A city-commissioned taskforce stacked with three landlord lobbyists to one tenant advocate drafted recommendations that would have excluded the majority of local renters. An endless series of council and committee meetings deliberating during the middle of the day when most renters were working. They took on seemingly impossible odds against the wealth and power of Santa Barbara’s real estate industry.