Holocaust survivor, 87, who faced eviction in California to keep his home
An 87-year-old Holocaust survivor fighting eviction in California will get to stay in his longtime home after outrage about his case prompted lawmakers to implement new tenant protections.
Musiy Rishin, who narrowly escaped the Nazis’ massacre of Jews in Ukraine in 1941, spoke to the Guardian in August about his landlord’s protracted battle to kick him out of his apartment in Alameda, a city in northern California. The owners of his apartment, where he has lived for 17 years, said they were evicting him because he rented through a US voucher program for low-income tenants and they wanted to charge higher rents.
His story prompted shock across the globe, and officials in the city of Alameda, between San Francisco and Oakland, passed an emergency ordinance this month to prohibit landlords from evicting tenants like Rishin for no reason. The law, which protects residents who rely on a program called Section 8, went into effect immediately, and Rishin’s attorney learned from the court Monday on that the landlords had officially dropped the eviction proceedings.
“This is a huge, huge relief for both of us,” Svetlana Rishina, Musiy’s daughter, said by phone on Monday just after she received the news. “I can finally focus on my father’s health and taking care of him.”
Rishin’s case was seen as a particularly egregious example of California’s severe – and worsening – housing crisis and the lack of basic protections for vulnerable tenants, including sick and elderly people. In addition to surviving the Holocaust, Rishin’s family had lived through wartime famine and an earthquake in Uzbekistan, and were also forced to flee political turmoil in 1998, leading them to California.
Rishin ended up in Alameda when he and his family were able to get vouchers from the US government’s Section 8 housing program, which subsidizes rent for low-income tenants. But his landlords, Margaret Tam and her son Spencer Tam, eventually wanted him out.
The landlords, whose efforts to evict Rishin began a year ago, also targeted his terminally ill son, Yaroslav, who lived with him in the apartment until his death in April. The owners sent multiple termination notices and threats to the family while Yaroslav was fighting cancer and while he was in hospice care, and his family said he suffered severe anxiety and anguish about the pending eviction in the final days of his life.
The landlords first tried to increase Rishin’s rent by nearly $700 (from $2,520 to $3,200) and then moved forward with a formal eviction. While an existing rent control law protected tenants from being kicked out for no reason, the policy did not previously cover Section 8 residents.
In a phone interview last month, Margaret Tam said Rishin was the only Section 8 tenant left in her building and that she did not want tenants with those vouchers any more.
“I’m not a greedy landlord, but I do want to make money when I’m legally able to,” she said at the time.
The new ordinance added Section 8 to local rent control, meaning the Tams could no longer evict Rishin simply because he is part of the low-income program.
“There is a lot of discrimination against the Section 8 program,” said Sarah McCracken, a tenants’ rights lawyer with Centro Legal de La Raza, who represented Rishin. “They are now protected against arbitrary evictions. This is extremely important. With gentrification, among the first tenants to be displaced are folks with Section 8 vouchers.”
Svetlana said the change in the law meant so much to her father: “He’s touched, he’s moved, he’s very grateful to the people of Alameda.”
She added: “It’s going to be a process of recovery now. He’s been living in constant stress for the entire year that they were trying to kick him out.”
She said her family was glad that positive change had come out of their struggle: “There are so many bedbound, crippled, elderly people who are unable to defend themselves and unable to speak up. Those are the most vulnerable people in the city, and we’re so glad they’ll get protections as well.”
Reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Margaret Tam declined to comment.
One of the landlord’s lawyers, Todd Rothbard, criticized the new Alameda law, arguing that expanded rent control wouldn’t help the housing crisis. But he added of Rishin: “I’m glad it worked out for him.”