The kids aren’t all right: How the housing crisis hurts the Bay Area’s youngest residents

It's not a good sign when middle-schoolers know all about rent control and just-cause eviction.

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ALAMEDA — On a recent Wednesday evening, while her classmates were doing their homework, having dinner with their families or attending ballet and piano lessons, 13-year-old Frida Cassidy Schiesser was at City Hall, making an impassioned plea for rent control.

After watching one friend after another move away because their families could no longer afford to live in the Bay Area, the 8th-grader, Girl Scout and drama enthusiast decided she’d had enough. Frida wanted her City Council members to understand the impact the housing crisis is having on her community, but from a perspective they don’t often hear — a kid’s point of view.

“Over the past year, some Girl Scout meetings have had to turn into Girl Scout going away parties,” Frida, whose mother is active in the Alameda Renters Coalition, told the City Council. “The main cause of this is lack of rent control.”

As high prices and a shortage of available housing continue to squeeze local families, issues that once were the purview of adults, such as rent control and just-cause eviction protection, increasingly are entering the vocabulary of Bay Area kids. Children of renters wonder when the rent increase will come that forces them out of their house, away from the friends they’ve grown up with and the places that feel like home. For students about to graduate from high school, housing prices come up in conversation alongside talk of college plans.

Experts say those constant worries, exacerbated if students are forced to relocate or become homeless, can damage children’s emotional health, prompt them to act out or cause them to fall behind in school.

“The data is pretty scary for homeless youth, for foster youth … any young person experiencing significant transition,” said Macheo Payne, president and CEO of Youth UpRising, a community center that offers services and supportive programs for at-risk youth in East Oakland. “School can’t be the priority that it ideally should be when you don’t have clean clothes, you don’t have a place to keep your clothes.”

At least three girls have left Frida’s Girl Scout troop over the past three or four years because their families couldn’t afford to stay in the area, said troop leader Demeter Lamb. After one girl left, she missed the troop so much that she joined a few meetings via Skype. Another troop leader considered moving out of state to buy a house, but ultimately decided to stay, Lamb said. It’s meant a lot of uncertainty and upheaval for the tight-knit troop of nine remaining girls, many of whom have been together since 2nd grade.

“There is a level of anxiety among the families that I feel like has just increased over the years, because more and more of their resources are going toward housing with less stability and less security,” said Lamb, who noted that she was not speaking as an official representative of the national Girl Scouts organization. “And that anxiety I see to a certain extent translated to the girls.”

In San Jose, as 17-year-old Emma Everett approaches her high school graduation, she and her friends are worrying about more than just college acceptance letters. They’re already fretting about the rents they’ll pay once they leave their parents’ homes.

“I’m a little bit concerned about where I will be in the future,” said Everett, a senior at Notre Dame High School.

Her brother and sister, in their 20s, still live with their parents because they can’t afford to move out — even though both work full time.

At Leadership Public Schools’ Hayward campus, housing costs are a constant stressor, particularly for seniors, said staff member Wendy Rivera, who counsels students in her role as a student ally.

It’s impacting younger students too. The family of one of Rivera’s students — a sophomore — is considering moving to Utah or Colorado at the end of the school year to find cheaper housing.

“That means he has to start all over again in another state, having no friends,” Rivera said.

Chris Edwards-Phillips, 20, of Oakland, worried about housing throughout his childhood. He and his mom moved constantly — around California, to Georgia, to Oklahoma, and back to Oakland — looking for housing they could afford, and stability.

“I went to like 15 schools total,” he said.

During Edwards-Phillips’ junior year, he and his mother lived in a homeless shelter in Stockton. They woke at 5 every morning, she drove him to the Concord BART station, and from there he took the train to Street Academy alternative high school in Oakland. But the frequent moving, losing credits and falling behind in his classes made it hard to care about school, and Edwards-Phillips didn’t graduate. After high school, he spent months living in an abandoned apartment building, unable to hold down a job at Jamba Juice because he had nowhere to wash his uniform.

Things are looking up for Edwards-Phillips now — he’s enrolled in an internship program at Youth Uprising and living with his uncle in Oakland.

In Alameda, Frida, her twin sister, Katya, and their older brother have grown up watching their mother struggle to pay the $1,700 rent. It’s a lot for a single mom with three kids, and it goes up about 5 percent every year, said their mother, Jenya Cassidy, who works at a public policy nonprofit. Alameda doesn’t have rent control or rules preventing no-cause evictions, but in 2016 the city passed an ordinance requiring landlords to go to mediation sessions if they impose a rent increase of greater than 5 percent.

Frida has helped her mom with her tenant advocacy work before. She once wrote a song about being a renter and sang it at a fundraiser for families facing eviction.

Several months ago, while Frida was going door to door with her mother to raise awareness about two rent control ballot measures — one they supported, one they opposed — she told a stranger they met that high rents were forcing girls to leave her Girl Scout troop. Both ballot measures ended up failing, but impressed with the story about her troop, Cassidy asked her daughter to share it with the City Council. Frida agreed, wrote the speech herself, and presented it to City Council in January. Frida spoke on the issue again this month, this time with her sister.

“I hope they thought, ‘Oh wow. This is a kid’s point of view now, and I understand now that the rental crisis is not just important to adults,'” Frida said after her first speech.

Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft appreciated the middle-schooler’s speech.

“I think Frida’s remarks added urgency to what we already know,” Ashcraft said. “We aren’t done working on this rent stabilization ordinance.”