All Stories

For major reform, for major structural change, you need to build political will. That is why lifting community voices is a cornerstone of Public Advocates’ work challenging the root causes of racism and poverty. In 2016, this resulted in an unprecedented partnership involving community groups in East Palo alto and Facebook to increase the supply of affordable housing in the Bay Area. Public Advocates won a tangible legal victory that beat back systemic racism and poverty through community partnerships and creative legal strategies.

In 2016 Facebook was planning to expand its campus in Menlo Park, bringing in thousands of new employees. Although Facebook’s corporate mission is to create community, questions arose about whether this move was in the interests of local residents. Menlo Park is adjacent to East Palo Alto, a predominantly Black and Latino community. From 2011 to 2015, the average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in East Palo Alto had almost doubled , and Facebook’s project proposed to inject thousands of new workers into one of the tightest housing markets in the country. Amazingly, the environmental study required by state law denied any impact on housing demand or displacement pressures.

A new fight to keep a community in place had begun.

The quotations and photos in this story are from ‘A Law Firm Like No Other,’ a ‘Visionaries’ documentary episode about Public Advocates which aired on several hundred public television outlets in 2019.

Javanni Brown, a preschool program coordinator and community advocate, got involved in affordable housing advocacy after she was served an eviction notice. She sought out the help of a local organization, Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto . As she said at the time of the documentary, “The way I see it is, [Facebook] didn’t create the affordable housing crisis, but we wanted to make sure that they understood the impact they were going to create on the people as they moved in. Sometimes, when you’re in a place of privilege, you don’t get to see that view and understand that very well.”

Community organizations involved in the effort included Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto , where Javanni received assistance, Youth United for Community Action , El Comité de Vecinos del Lado Oeste, East Palo Alto , a neighborhood tenant organization, and Faith in Action Bay Area , a multi-faith community organizing group.

These groups formed the Envision Transform Build – East Palo Alto Coalition, which worked to create affordable homes, protect tenants, prevent displacement and increase access to jobs.

These community groups, supported by Public Advocates , had initiated conversation with Facebook about affordable housing back in 2012, when the corporation first came to Menlo Park.  Since that time, they had only deepened their work on housing, displacement, jobs, workforce development, and a whole range of things that were reaching a crisis point  in the community.

Salima Hankins, a senior attorney at Community Legal Services : “we knew that we wanted to challenge this expansion, but we didn’t have that expertise, so that’s where Public Advocates came in.”

Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, managing attorney with Public Advocates : “There was a required environmental process and we worked in collaboration with the ACLU to really drive home the links between the lack of affordable housing, the crisis of displacement, and the huge expansion of jobs that would be coming to nearby Menlo Park and linked those social impacts to the environmental impacts that they would have.”

Javanni Brown: “Public Advocates had our back in a way of making sure that we were able to go to this negotiating table where there was disequilibrium of power.” It was important, and overwhelmingly true, that the people who came to these meetings had family members and friends who had already been forced out.

“Public Advocates had our back in a way of making sure that we were able to go to this negotiating table where there was disequilibrium of power.”

Javanni Brown

Community partnerships and creative legal strategies help Public Advocates win tangible legal victories that can combat systemic racism and poverty. These partnerships and strategies are important to its mission because in our system, “Low-income people of color are systematically disempowered. They never have a seat at the table in serious decision making and if they do their needs are sluffed off as ‘less important,’” says Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, managing attorney with Public Advocates. On the Facebook side, he says, “That there were legal reasons that Facebook needed to be thinking about – housing and displacement issues– certainly seemed to help bring them to the table in a serious way.”

As community members raised their voices, people at Facebook began to listen.

Javanni: “Although Facebook practices…technology, they don’t practice life in the way of affordable housing. They don’t lend themselves to be experts in that way, they don’t lend themselves as experts to be able to negotiate community benefits and things like this, and so at some point they understood that they needed to listen to what was being brought to the table.”

Sam: “One of the real objectives that our clients had in that set of conversations was to make sure that if Facebook was going to be their neighbor for years and years and years to come, that they started to better understand who their neighbors were.” Javanni says that to a certain extent, this happened: “At some point we were able to actually hear each other in a way that was real.”

Sam: “The leaders from East Palo Alto did an incredible job, of starting with their stories, from their lives, starting with how their community had changed, what their hopes for their community were. Everyone took these conversations extremely seriously, and the community groups in East Palo Alto that Public Advocates represented, and Facebook, entered a partnership. Monetarily, the partnership was close to $20 million.”

Jennifer Martinez, currently with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, PICO California: “about $18.5 million dedicated to affordable housing, a half million dollars dedicated to legal services for tenants who were at-risk of losing their homes,” an unprecedented partnership with Facebook and the cities of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

The other essential piece of the agreement was that Facebook and the community groups would work closely together. Jennifer says, “immediately after our agreement was struck and papers were signed, there was an interest on the part of Facebook to continue a partnership with the community organizations that were involved in that agreement; and that sense of recognizing the need to partner with local organizations, not just by writing a check, many companies do that, by being in ongoing dialogue and relationship with organizations and community members.”

The $18.5 million was leveraged to generate a $75 million fund, which has supported the creation and preservation of 600 units, of which 70% are reserved for extremely low and very low-income residents, and 150 more units are anticipated this year.

This article draws from part of an episode of “Visionaries,” a PBS series with Sam Waterston. The episode, ‘A Law Firm Like No Other’ is a documentary about Public Advocates that aired during their 23rd season on public television.