In May of 2019, Public Advocates was profiled by the long-standing PBS series, Visionaries, hosted by Sam Waterston. The show, “A Law Firm Like no Other,” was shown on several hundred public broadcast and online stations throughout the country. The program featured stories about two major advocacy campaigns led by Public Advocates and our community partners leading to a watershed school financing law known as the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF); and a $20 million community benefits agreement between Facebook, East Palo Alto residents and other local cities to help address the impact  on housing when Facebook expanded its Menlo Park campus, drawing thousands of new workers.

CQE v. CA​ was a state constitutional challenge to the underfunding of CA’s public schools. The challenge came from an unprecedented coalition, Public Advocates, community-based organizations including Campaign for Quality Education, CFJ, PICO, ACCE , and low-income parents and students. With California ranked with the bottom five states in the country in the adequacy of school funding, the case attacked a system that provided little more than an obligation for Districts to open the schoolhouse doors. A divided appeals court panel found no right to a quality education under the California constitution, despite the earlier Serrano decision and a divided California Supreme Court refused to hear the case given the recent enactment of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) legislation. Many of the claims for more rational and equitable spending in the case became law in LCFF in 2013.

Public Advocates was one of the creators, and is still one of the leading members, of the 6 Wins for Social Equity Network, a bold group of strategic allies from social justice, faith, public health and environmental organizations across the Bay Area that came together in 2010. The 6 Wins for Social Equity Network is the region’s only collaborative focused on targeting and shaping how regional planning decisions will affect struggling working families in the Bay Area for decades to come. Its goal is to break the long-standing patterns of segregation, sprawl and health risks that plague the Bay Area.
1. Frequent, reliable and affordable bus service
2. Affordable housing
3. Investment without displacement
4. Quality jobs
5. Healthy and safe communities
6. Community power

In 2011, the 6 Wins for Social Equity Network developed a proposal for the Bay Area’s regional agencies to consider as they planned for decades of growth and development affecting the housing and transportation needs of millions of people and dozens of communities throughout the region. This proposal presented by 6 Wins came to be called the Equity, Environment & Jobs Scenario, or EEJ. When regional leaders developed Plan Bay Area, a massive, $300 billion dollar investment, we asked the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments to evaluate it for inclusion in the plan. They refused but after months of organizing and advocacy by 6 Wins members, they agreed to study EEJ in the environmental impact report for Plan Bay Area. Their analysis concluded that the EEJ was not only better for low-income communities of color but was “the environmentally superior alternative” and better for the region as a whole. Since that time, EEJ continues to be the basis for 6 Wins advocacy around regional housing and transportation planning.

In a major step towards greater educational equity, on July 1, 2013,  California passed Local Control Funding Formula legislation creating a new education finance system, the LCFF. Public Advocates, along with our grassroots partners, played a major role in shaping the LCFF by bringing in community voices along with our partners. In 2014, regulations for implementation of the LCFF were enacted. Public Advocates helped shape the regulations to ensure the funding flows to high need students. LCFF directed some $9.5 billion per year to school districts serving some of California’s highest-need student groups: low-income, foster youth, and English language learner students. The new law also required a higher level of community engagement and input into district spending priorities and plans than anywhere in the county, addressing the full spectrum of community partner priorities and established a new multiple-measures accountability system. To this day, Public Advocates works alongside community partners to deliver on the promises of LCFF. 

Beginning in 2014, carbon cap-and-trade auction revenues brought billions of dollars each year into California’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Public Advocates, in coalition with climate justice allies, not only worked to ensure a dedicated source of revenue for affordable housing and public transit from these revenues, but tackled the thorny question of how to ensure that all of the revenues in the Fund benefited residents of disadvantaged communities. The entire history of Public Advocates’ work demonstrated it was not enough that public investments be made in those communities: such investments could just as easily displace existing residents as benefit them. Reflecting on that history, and on the guiding principle that public policy and investment should follow the lead of directly-impacted residents, who know the needs and priorities of their communities, we developed a framework. That framework, which directs funds to priorities identified by the community, which provide a substantial benefit targeted at low-income residents, and avoid harmful impacts, was incorporated into California statute and the guidelines of the CA Air Resources Board. It provides a model for community-led decision making that not only guides the investment of billions of dollars in state funding to truly meet the needs of the communities in which those investments are made, but is also being considered for climate investments that may be made at the federal level.

On July 11, 2015 Public Advocates filed lawsuit on behalf of parent Reyna Frias and the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for not accounting for billions of dollars in funds earmarked for high need students. In the first case brought to enforce the Local Control Funding Formula, this coalition suit challenged the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) failure to direct some $450 million annually to the required increased and improved services for high-need students. This extraordinary first victory resulted in the California Department of Education requiring LAUSD to properly allocate all of this funding going forward. A final settlement regarding the funding for lost services from years past allocated $150 million in services over 3 years to the district’s 50 highest-need middle and high schools.

Public Advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California, and PolicyLink represented four community organizations in East Palo Alto in raising cutting-edge legal arguments under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) about the environmental impacts of Facebook’s proposed expansion of its corporate headquarters in Menlo Park. These legal concerns and the prospect of litigation over the Facebook expansion project led to negotiations with Facebook culminating in a groundbreaking legal agreement between the corporation and the four community groups. The agreement, which resolved the groups’ CEQA claims, brought $20 million in community benefits to local low-income residents. The agreement also created an ongoing partnership between local community members and Facebook to work on solving the crisis of housing affordability and displacement plaguing Silicon Valley. The community groups represented in this matter were Youth United for Community Action, Faith in Action Bay Area, Comité de Vecinos del Lado Oeste, East Palo Alto, and Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto. The December 2016 “Compact to Increase Equity, Opportunity and Access in Silicon Valley” was designed to bring funding to build and preserve affordable housing, protect tenants from displacement, and train local residents for jobs. In August, 2017, after further legal work advising these community groups in discussions with Facebook, a fund manager was chosen to administer the affordable housing fund, which is expected to result in leveraging the initial $18.5 million in affordable housing funding into a $75 million fund that will help to finance more than 500 units for low-income households in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. This agreement set a new precedent for local community investment by Silicon Valley companies, pointing the way toward corporate-community partnerships and more robust corporate social responsibility in the tech sector. Such partnerships offer the promise of mitigating the negative impacts of the global tech industry on low-income communities of color in the Bay Area.

In 2017, Public Advocates co-founded Housing Now!—a coalition dedicated to winning ​housing justice and to holding state decision makers accountable to the community by seeking, among other things, to challenge uncontrolled rent increases and the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, a law placing severe limitations on local rent control policies. The work of this unstoppable coalition resulted in the passage of AB 1482, the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, bringing into effect the first statewide rent regulation and just cause eviction protections in California. That was followed by enactment in August, 2020 of the Small Landlord Relief and Stabilization Act of 2020 with its statewide eviction moratoria during the height of the Covid pandemic. 

AHJ was formed in 2017 following the 2016 presidential election that put Donald Trump into the White House. The coalition, made up of Public Advocates, PolicyLink, Lawyers’ Committee, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, and Right to the City Alliance, came together to address the nation’s affordable housing and displacement crisis, advance the rights of tenants, respond to harmful public policy actions, and shift the narrative from housing as a commodity to a human right. AHJ’s primary strategy to achieve these goals has been to build and support the infrastructure needed for a powerful, grassroots-led housing justice movement. Since it’s inception, AHJ has developed advocacy and education materials on federal fair housing and housing justice issues that have garnered over a million video views and digital explainers that have been accessed tens of thousands of times. The coalition produced a Housing Justice National Platform as the basis for its work.

In 2017, among other assaults on the rights of people of color and others,  the Trump administration moved quickly to gut a critical portion of the federal Fair Housing Act. In response, Public Advocates’ Sam Tepperman-Gelfant reached out to allies from the Western Center on Law & Poverty and the National Housing Law Project to craft legislation that would put the federal requirements to affirmatively further fair housing into state law in California. After a year of determined advocacy work, in September of 2018, Governor Brown signed AB 686, sponsored by Assembly member Miguel Santiago . Beginning in 2019, hundreds of cities, counties and state agencies in California were required to take proactive measures to fix housing inequality on the basis of race, national origin, disability and other protected classes. An important consequence of the law is that all cities and counties must reach out and engage constituents on issues of inequity and discrimination in housing. Public Advocates is currently involved in implementation of that watershed state law.