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Abstract

In April 1988, I returned to East Palo Alto, California, to join its Community Law Project as a staff attorney. After two and a half years as a housing and employment law litigator at a legal services office in Fresno, I was glad to return to the San Francisco Bay Area. I was particularly eager to work in East Palo Alto because of its history, demographics, and a political climate that was refreshingly out of step with most of the rest of the nation in the eighth year of the Reagan Administration. Thirty miles south of San Francisco, five miles from the Stanford University campus, East Palo Alto lies across a small creek from the suburban mansions of Palo Alto. In 1988, the five-year-old city was home to approximately twenty-three thousand predominantly working- class and lower-income residents of color. The day after I started work in East Palo Alto, voters in the city's third general election decisively shifted the composition of the City Council. Reacting to a municipal fiscal crisis, the electorate ousted two of three incumbents running for re-election. Both of the defeated incumbents were original proponents of East Palo Alto's incorporation as a city and longtime supporters of rent control. The election created, for the first time in the city's brief history, a city council without a solid majority in favor of rent control.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

6

Issue

2

First Page

427

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