This Q&A is part of Lessons from the Field, Next City’s series of interviews with anti-displacement practitioners across the country.

For years, low-income, single room occupancy residents of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown had been battling developers. The Asian Law Caucus, a locally-based legal aid organization founded in 1972 with a mission to keep Asian tenants housed, began working to defend the residents in 1975. Two years later, the developer evicted 60 elderly Chinese and Filipino residents before demolishing the building.

That didn’t stop Asian Law Caucus’s work to defend Asian tenants across the region. Five decades after its founding, in 2022, the organization helped a group of Chinatown-based, single-room occupancy tenants — low-income Chinese immigrants, nearly all seniors — win an unprecedented $618,000 settlement in a discrimination and harassment case against Valstock Management, a major property management firm. In 2023 alone, they oversaw 1,800 cases.

“The International Hotel case represents for ALC a model of community lawyering that we are rooted in: lawyering side-by-side with community and supporting the advocacy and leadership of impacted people,” says housing rights program director Shelby Nacino, who led the effort.

Next City spoke to Nacino about ALC’s legal aid model and its work supporting Asian immigrant communities in tenant organizing efforts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about your organization and your role in it. What issue is it trying to address and how did your organization get started?

Asian Law Caucus is a civil rights organization based in San Francisco. It started in 1972 in an office in Oakland.

Our housing practice has historically and currently had a focus on the Bay Area, which is a ground zero for displacement. We have roots in San Francisco and in Chinatown, and we’re particularly focused on serving new immigrant communities. A lot of our client base is limited English proficient, and that was one of the focuses on the Valstock case.

We continue to see a lot of tenants regularly who have language access issues. Being able to communicate effectively with your landlord, in our experience, is a really important part of being able to sustainably live in a place. That’s one of the continued focuses of our program: empowering tenants, particularly immigrants, to be able to successfully communicate so that they can fight for better conditions and understand what is going on day-to-day.

It’s rare to come across organizations that are doing this type of work that make it this long. How have you been doing this work for so long?

From my perspective, it’s about the community that we serve. We are really clear about the client communities that we care about and we’ve continued to be a resource for.

Unfortunately, a lot of the problems that existed in the past continue to exist today in different ways. One case that the caucus worked on about 12 years ago was an Ellis Act eviction case of the Lee family in Chinatown. And Ellis eviction cases continue today; we still see people with super longterm tendencies who are being evicted by landlords in San Francisco today. We still have vacancy decontrol; that’s still something that long-term tenants have to contend with. When you read the findings in the rent ordinance about why we enacted the rent ordinance, so much of it still applies today.

Tell us about your organization’s model for combating displacement.

ALC embraces a lot of different ways to fight for housing rights. Our program is really passionate right now about supporting tenant organizing in San Francisco. It’s a city of renters, so it’s really important that tenants be able to actually have a determinative role in their buildings — having more self determination, rather than just, like, “I live here and I follow what the landlord says.” We’re really excited to be working with organizers, working with tenants to form associations and to bargain with, directly with their landlords.

One reason that our team has identified it as a priority is because most landlords will have legal counsel. But it’s not sustainable and it’s not realistic for every tenant and every tenant association to have an attorney. Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t afford attorneys. The private bar isn’t accessible to everyone, and there’s not enough nonprofit attorneys. So the idea is that if we can have strong systems of tenant organizing that work in conjunction with legal advocates, then tenants can actually – without having to access an attorney — meaningfully negotiate with their landlords.

What have you all accomplished through ALC’s housing rights unit and what has been your greatest success?

The Valstock case was a really meaningful case for us because it involved a lot of the tenant populations that we work with, who are more hesitant about asserting their rights. It’s a small step, but even in cases where we’re able to empower the community members, [it’s a win]. The plaintiffs were primarily monolingual seniors living in single room occupancy units (SROs). Ultimately, we were able to reach a settlement where the tenants won a form of language access, and the reversal of fines and fees that had been implemented against them.

We continue to work with a lot of clients who are similarly situated today. In my view, even that is kind of a win because our client population is often so hesitant about coming out and asserting their rights. I really think our win is when we’re able to see that the tenants, even after we work with them, continue to exercise their rights. In the Valstock case that we just mentioned, at least two of the tenants later went on to be tenant leaders, which is really meaningful, especially because they’re seniors.

It’s logistically difficult to assert your rights if you’re not able to talk to your landlord. And so in one of the buildings that we worked with recently, most of the tenants in the tenant association were monolingual Chinese speakers. Before forming an association, where they had the support of a bilingual organizer, they had a lot of difficulty seeking repairs. But once they came together, they were able to communicate, and they were also able to show that this is something that we all care about. It was a lot easier to request repairs and to actually see results. I think the structural issue in a lot of the cases is language access.

How do you measure your anti-displacement successes?

One very concrete form that I can speak to is that we are a part of the Tenant’s Right to Counsel [program] in San Francisco, which is the city law that says that if you’re facing an eviction, you get an attorney. According to TRC’s 2024 report, 92% of tenants who received representation through Tenant Right to Counsel avoided homelessness.

What are the biggest challenges you all have faced in your work?

The nonprofit sector is facing a lot of existential issues. There’s unprecedented fear and uncertainty throughout immigrant communities right now as the current administration seeks to undermine immigrant rights across the board.

In the housing context, we’re concerned about access to federally-subsidized housing. However, the vast majority of tenants in California live in privately-owned rental units. While some landlords have used this moment to threaten or harass their tenants, we think that those landlords are the exception rather than the norm. Immigration status doesn’t bear on a family’s ability to pay rent. On this point, landlords’ and tenants’ interests are aligned and by knowing their respective rights and responsibilities, landlords and tenants can mitigate fear and foster safety in our communities. We put out a guide for housing providers on how to keep their communities safe in light of increasing immigration enforcement.

What guidance would you give to other organizations starting this work? Any particular resources you would suggest tapping into?

This is not something anyone wants to hear from a legal organization, but [it’s important to be] continuously centering the community members that you’re working with, making sure that at every step of the way, they understand the situation and what the advocacy options are and what their rights are. Making sure everything is translated, and translated well, instead of just like a Google translation. Making sure the meetings you have are accessible in different languages in a meaningful way – we’ve run our fair share of chaotic multilingual meetings. Making sure that you’re being available to folks, whether that’s doing things at times that are convenient for tenant association numbers or choosing the right spaces. These are small process issues that really contribute to the quality of the advocacy effort that you’re engaging in.

If you were starting over, what would you do differently, knowing what you know now?

If I were starting over, I would have learned Spanish at some point.

I’m kind of kidding. In seriousness, if I were able to start over, I would have wanted to spend time working directly with families facing housing challenges in a social work or organizing context. In so many of the cases I’ve worked on, it was a social worker or organizer who made a pivotal difference to materially improve the tenants’ situation. I wish I better understood these types of work and the advocacy that our social worker and organizer partners do.

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.