The Holocaust Survivor, 87, Facing Eviction in California: 'Will They Throw Me to the Ground?'

By Sam Levin, Guardian UK

19 August 19

Exclusive: Musiy Rishin speaks out about landlord who wants wealthier tenants and has fought to evict him and his dying son

usiy Rishin knows how to survive.

He narrowly escaped the Nazis’ massacre of Jews in the Ukraine in 1941. His family lived through wartime famine, and an earthquake in Uzbekistan, before they fled political turmoil in 1998. He persevered after the recent deaths of his wife and son.

But now, the 87-year-old is faced with a threat that he is afraid he won’t survive: his California landlord is evicting him to bring in wealthier tenants, and he has nowhere else to go.

“Will they start literally throwing me to the ground?” the disabled Holocaust survivor said on a recent afternoon, seated inside his living room of 17 years in Alameda. His family found refuge in this northern California city after they were forced to leave Uzbekistan. “I am an elderly man. Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you believe in fairness? They have no soul and no heart.”

The eviction of Rishin provides a grim illustration of the severe housing crisis in the Bay Area, the lack of protections for some of the most vulnerable people, and the harassment and abuse that sick and elderly tenants can face in the final years of their lives, advocates said.

The landlords, who have been fighting to evict Rishin for a year, also targeted his terminally ill son, Yaroslav, who lived with him in the apartment until his death in April. The owners, whose formal reason for the eviction is “desire to lease the unit at a higher rental rate”, sent multiple termination notices and threats to the family while Yaroslav was fighting cancer and while he was in hospice care.

The owners’ lawyers also filed a formal eviction lawsuit that named Yaroslav as a defendant – after he was already dead.

“It’s like evicting somebody to his grave,” said Svetlana Rishina, Musiy’s daughter. Her brother was distraught about the eviction in his final weeks, which he spent bedridden in the apartment, she said: “He would say, ‘Is the sheriff going to come in and put me out on the curb in my hospital bed?’ I will be very cold, and I will die a horrible death.’ That consumed his last days.”

‘We left everything behind’

Musiy Rishin’s modest second-story, two-bedroom apartment is located on a quiet street near the shore on the island of Alameda, a city in the bay between San Francisco and Oakland. The area feels like the suburbs but is in the center of an urban region with some of the most unaffordable rents in the country, a homelessness emergency and exorbitant Silicon Valley wealth.

“As Englishmen say, ‘my home is my castle,’” Musiy said, speaking in Russian, as his daughter translated. He pointed to bookshelves he built, his favorite literature, photos of his late wife and all the mementos in his apartment that he had gathered throughout his life. “To me, stability of a home was the goal.”

Musiy is deeply familiar with unstable living conditions, starting with his childhood in Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine during the second world war.

“It is so hard for me to talk about,” he said, recalling the day when he was nine years old and Nazi bombers closed in on his city. He broke down as he remembered the rush to escape, and the crowd that was so dense that they could hardly move. He and his family managed to board a train: “We dropped everything and fled.” Relatives who didn’t make it out were killed.

They settled in Uzbekistan, where he met his wife when they were both 19 years old and wound up at the same table at the university: “We fell in love, and we never parted even for one day.”

He recalled the overcrowded housing in Uzbekistan, with multiple generations of a family forced to share a single room. He also had to rebuild his family’s home after a 1966 earthquake. In 1998, political uprisings and civil wars forced them to flee to the US: “We left everything behind for the second time.”

In Alameda, they received a voucher from the US government’s Section 8 housing program, which subsidizes rent for low-income tenants.

“What beautiful people have greeted us,” he said of the move to California. “We’ve been treated very warmly in this country.”

But problems with his landlord escalated over time, and then last year, the notices started coming.

An eviction on his deathbed: ‘He was suffering’

The first letter on 14 August 2018 said the landlords, Margaret Tam and her son Spencer Tam, would be increasing their rent by nearly $700 (from $2,520 to $3200).

“It was outrageous and so unexpected,” he said. “All I have left is money for food and some minimum things to take care of myself.”

Before he could even dispute the increase, the landlords came back with a much more terrifying letter two weeks later: they had decided to evict him and his son, and they had 90 days to leave.

“We would never have imagined that someone would kick us out,” he said, choking up as he noted that the home holds the “memories of the people so dear to me”.

Yaroslav’s health was deteriorating at the time of the first notices, and at one point, he had to be taken away in an ambulance. The property management in the building was aware that Yaroslav was gravely ill, the family said. But the landlords continued the eviction battle.

“Doctors were telling us on a daily basis he was dying,” said Svetlana, adding that the landlords handed her father another termination notice in December when he was on his way to the hospital to see his son. The landlords also falsely accused him of paying rent late, demanding a $75 late fee and then later saying it was a “mistake”, records show.

Musiy’s health also began to suffer due to stress. “I got severely depressed,” he said. “My doctors were trying to calm me down.”

By February, doctors for Yaroslav, who had colon cancer, told the family there was nothing left they could do, saying, “‘You just have to make his life as comfortable as possible – provide him the best life you can,’” Svetlana recalled.

The landlords made that impossible. The final eviction notice was sent on 3 April, and the family tried to conceal it from Yaroslav, but he knew what was happening and could not stop talking about his fears of dying on the street, his sister said. “It was very cruel.”

He died two weeks later at age 57.

“He knew and he was really suffering about this,” Musiy said. “I hate thinking about it.”

“It completely robbed my brother of a peaceful ending to his life,” Svetlana added.

After the death, the landlords escalated their eviction efforts, filing a formal lawsuit to have Musiy removed – and naming his late son on the legal complaint.

The case is moving through the courts. Section 8 tenants have minimal protections in Alameda, where there are also few landlords who accept the vouchers. That means Musiy is running out of time and options.

In a lengthy phone interview, Margaret Tam defended the eviction and process, saying she wanted to charge market rate for the apartment, and that Musiy was the only Section 8 tenant remaining in the building,

“I’m not a monster,” said Tam, who is based in Arizona. “I’m not a greedy landlord, but I do want to make money when I’m legally able to.”

Asked why she pursued the eviction while Yaroslav was dying, she responded, “Because somebody’s sick, do you get free rent? We have to do what we have to do.”

She said she could renovate and make significantly more money from his unit, argued that she has no obligation to keep him there, and that Musiy should go live with his daughter: “It’s a sad story. I cannot help him.”

“I have a lot of elderly clients, but I have never seen anything this outrageous,” said Sarah McCracken, a tenants’ rights lawyer with Centro Legal de La Raza, who is representing Musiy. “It’s disturbing and senseless. This man is an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor … who has experienced all kinds of trauma.”

The family has also filed a formal discrimination complaint with the state, alleging the landlords targeted a “low-income disabled immigrant family”, and have told the family “they do not belong in a fancy place and can go live somewhere else”. Tam denied the discrimination allegations, saying she has other disabled tenants and that the purpose of her eviction is to “get rid of Section 8” and increase the rents.

The idea that he may ultimately be forced out of his home is unfathomable to Musiy. “It is everything to me. I have nothing else.”