Last April, after Adrian Rish bought a two-story, three unit apartment building on 58th Street in North Oakland, he issued eviction notices to all of the tenants in the complex. And Rish made the move even though he knew that one of the tenants in the building, Charles Oshinuga, is a defense lawyer with trial experience who is now an attorney with the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a nonprofit legal center in San Francisco that defends low-income renters.

Nonetheless, Rish forged ahead with the evictions. So Oshinuga and his roommate, Jamin Horn, who is also an attorney, fought back. The battle ended up in court, and Oshinuga and his roommates convinced a jury that Rish had violated Oakland’s tenant protection laws in his effort to force them out. They successfully stopped the eviction, but that wasn’t the end of their ordeal. Rish, a business consultant with a degree from the London School of Economics, served them with eviction notices again.

Oshinuga said his case exemplifies how rigged the system is against tenants. “A landlord can continue to serve you with sixty-day notices, even if they’re bogus, take you trial, bleed you of money, and there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “We need to fix this system.”

Rish declined to speak to the Express for this story. But according to court records, Rish said during the eviction trial that he planned to move into the three-unit apartment building on 58th Street and occupy one of the units himself. According to public records, when Rish bought the building in March, he was living in a condo in downtown Oakland that he also owned, and which he considered his primary residence. Rish said in court that his mother moved into his condo last year, and that by May, it was no longer his home.

Rish’s tenants suspected, however, that their new landlord had a different motive when he bought their building. “His motive was to capture the [high] rents in Oakland, and the easiest way to do that is to get rid of the tenants,” said Oshinuga. “So he faked an owner move-in.” What ensued was a complicated game of chess in which Rish and his attorneys tried various strategies to convince and eventually force Oshinuga and his friends to leave.

Oshinuga and Horn moved into 770 58th Street in 2011, and as of last year, were paying $1,429 in rent for their three-bedroom unit. By the time Rish had bought the building, rents in North Oakland had doubled, but the building’s rental prices were fixed below-market due to Oakland’s rent control law, which caps rent increases at the rate of inflation for most apartments — so long as the same tenants continue living there.

On April 14, Rish sent letters to Oshinuga, Horn, and their neighbors, Colin Hoefle and Brady Hemenway, informing them that he intended to move into both of the upstairs units after converting them into a single unit. Rish said he also planned to convert the single apartment on the first floor into two apartments and then rent them out. He told the tenants they would have to leave before the end of May, and he offered the leaseholders a small buyout of $1,000 if they would voluntarily move out before May 17. Rish requested that they reply in three days to his offer.

But the tenants had no intention of leaving. So a few days after receiving the tenants’ response, Rish sent an email asking about their roommates who weren’t named on their leases. “Were the tenants living in your unit whose names (e.g. John, Zane, etc.) aren’t listed on your current lease agreement ever approved by the previous owner[?],” Rish wrote in an email, according to court records. Rish then ordered the property management company that collected rent for him to send his tenants a letter warning that their roommates would need to leave immediately, or he would file an eviction lawsuit. The roommates moved out until Oshinuga and Hoefle were able to show that the previous landlord had allowed them to have roommates. Oshinuga believes this was the beginning of retaliatory moves by Rish to pressure them to move out.

Then on May 1, Rish sent letters to all of the tenants giving them sixty days to move out of their apartments. The letters stated that the basis for the eviction was that Rish “seeks in good faith, without ulterior reasons and with honest intent, to recover possession [of the apartments] for his own use and occupancy as his principal residence[.]”

Rish was relying on a portion of Oakland law that allows an owner of a building with three units or less to evict tenants if he or she plans to move into one of the units. An owner-move-in eviction requires the owner to live in the building for three years after the eviction, but it allows the owner to rent out the other units at whatever prices he or she wants.

Rish actually offered his tenants in both the upstairs apartments the option of moving into the building’s bottom unit, which was empty at the time, at a substantially increased amount of rent. But, according to court records, the bottom apartment was uninhabitable at the time Rish was seeking to push out his remaining tenants. After he bought the building, Rish had construction workers tear out the unit’s interior walls, gutting it down to the studs and cement floor. According to court records, Rish had construction workers show up at 8:30 a.m. for weeks on end. The tenants testified in court that the demolition activities shook the building and caused serious disruptions.

After it became clear that his tenants had no intention of moving out, Rish hardened his stance and changed his strategy. On May 13, Oshinuga, Horn, Hoefle, and Hemenway received a letter from Rish’s attorney, Alana Conner, a lawyer with Fried & Williams, a San Francisco firm that specializes in representing landlords in eviction cases. The letter revoked Rish’s offer to rent out the bottom apartment. Instead, the letter stated “as you may already know, the owner has begun occupying the [bottom-floor apartment] while repairs are being completed.” Rish’s attorneys then sent sixty-day notices to move out, no concessions.

“Oakland’s Rent Ordinance says that if you’re a landlord and your building is three or less units, and if you live in one of those units, you’re exempt from the ordinance, and you can evict everyone in the building,” said Oshinuga. “His attorneys probably understood that he actually didn’t want to live in the building, and so they told him there’s an easier way to do this than an owner move-in into the tenants’ units: Just say you live downstairs.”

Still, the tenants refused to budge, so Rish, claiming he was living in the downstairs unit, sued them for eviction. The only problem was, Rish wasn’t actually living downstairs.

“We took pictures of the construction to show that no one could possibly be living down there,” Oshinuga said in an interview. “We knocked on the unit’s door every night, no answer.” Rish’s tenants presented video and photographic evidence in court showing that the downstairs apartment was not Rish’s primary residence, therefore he couldn’t avail himself of Oakland’s rule that allows landlords living in buildings with three or less units to evict their tenants.

Rish’s attorney, David Semel, insisted, however, that his client lived in the uninhabitable space. Semel told the jury, “[E]ven if it’s down to the studs and you’ve got a floor, as long as you’ve got running water,” it was possible to live in the apartment. “You don’t even need electricity necessarily. There are billions of people in this world who live without electricity. You have candles.”

The jury disagreed. They ruled in favor of Oshinuga, Horn, and their neighbors.

But just two weeks after the jury’s decision, Rish served his tenants again with a new sixty-day eviction notice.

At that point, Oshinuga and the other tenants decided to moved out. Even though they had won in court, they realized that the law allows for Rish to keep suing them for eviction over and over again — even if they prove in court that he is lying.

“A landlord can lie to try to evict a tenant, the lie can be proven in court, and a tenant still has no remedy,” said Oshinuga, noting that there is no penalty under the law for landlords who bring bogus eviction suits.

Early last year, four US Bureau of Reclamation officials came to Anita Lodge’s seven-acre property deep in the San Joaquin River gorge, 33 miles northeast of Fresno. They explained in careful detail the legal process by which the federal government forces people to abandon their homes to make way for new infrastructure. A childhood picture of Lodge’s mother, who is buried on the land, loomed over the kitchen table where Lodge served her guests freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

If the state and federal governments construct Temperance Flat Dam, a roughly $3.3 billion undertaking sought for several decades by San Joaquin Valley agribusinesses, real estate developers, and Central Valley politicians, Lodge’s property would drown under 300 feet of water. The 665-foot-high dam, which would be the fifth tallest in the nation, is one of several proposed water infrastructure projects that have gained popularity during the state’s epic four-year drought.

But Lodge, 59, has no interest in leaving, nor do other family members who reside just down the road. Seven generations of the Lodge and Woody families have lived on their riverfront spread, which is part of a much larger homestead that Lodge’s great- great-grandparents acquired in the mid 19th century — most of which now resides in a federal wildlife reserve. For several summers in the 1950s, while Lodge’s father was building the house where she now lives, she camped out under the branches of a sprawling fig tree, listening to the roar of the river as raccoons nibbled on figs at the foot of her bed.

Whenever the government uses eminent domain to remove someone from his or her home, it’s required to provide one of equal market value. But Lodge rejects the idea. “How do you put a pricetag on something like this?” she asked during a recent interview. “The family history is something you can’t replace.”

Temperance Flat is one of four potential new dams or dam expansions that I profiled in the October 21 Express feature story “Damning California’s Future.” Besides the Lodge and Woody families, those who would be uprooted by these new dam projects include indigenous people, like the Winnemem Wintu tribe members, who lost roughly 90 percent of their land base when Shasta Lake, near Redding, was completed in the 1940s.

But Temperance Flat Dam is now also the subject of an interdepartmental battle within the US Department of Interior. The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which administers a 1,000-acre reserve surrounding Lodge’s property, proposed last year to make a six-mile stretch of the San Joaquin River part of the US Wild and Scenic Rivers system, which would make it off-limits to dam development.

Lodge is now one of the most vocal champions of the BLM proposal. “You’re not going to find a foothill watershed area that’s as pristine and unspoiled anywhere else in the state of California,” she said. “It’s just not there.”

The BLM’s proposal, and the possible fate of Temperance Flat Dam, is now in the hands of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. Ronald Stork, river policy advocate for the environmental group, Friends of the River, is urging dam opponents to contact Jewell and ask her to support the Wild and Scenic Rivers designation, but he cautions that “the Bureau of Reclamation is accustomed to winning these kinds of battles.”

Over the years, environmentalists and other advocates have challenged the logic behind the dams proposed in California. Temperance Flat, in particular, has been “long regarded as one of the most crazy dam ideas in California,” Stork noted. That’s because the 1.26-million-acre-foot reservoir that would fill behind the dam would only expand the federal government’s capacity to deliver water by roughly 70,000 acre-feet in an average year, equivalent to 1 percent of its existing annual deliveries.

The reason is straightforward: Temperance Flat would be constructed just 6.8 miles upstream of Friant Dam, partially inside the back-end of 520,000 acre-foot Millerton Lake, which already impounds much of the Upper San Joaquin River’s available water supply. As a result, even though Temperance Flat would store lots of water, it would not add much to the state’s overall ability to ship water and would only be used to fulfill existing water rights contracts.

Dam proponents argue that Temperance Flat’s water would nonetheless be valuable in the driest parts of the year and in drought years, when California’s existing reservoirs have sported “bathtub rings” where water once was. But Stork notes that, in exchange for a relative pittance of water, the cost of Temperance Flat would single-handedly double the debt of California’s largest water system, the Central Valley Project, even as water recycling projects would yield far more water at the same price.

Moreover, the San Joaquin River has already sustained considerable harm from existing dams. Historically, the river was home to the southernmost salmon runs on the Pacific Coast of North America, with an annual Chinook salmon migration estimated at 200,000 to 500,000. But the bureau blocked the fish’s migration with the construction of Friant Dam in 1949. At the same time, a 60-mile stretch of the river running from Madera to Merced dried up except in high water years — a consequence of so many dams and diversions.

And many opponents of Temperance Flat assert that the project’s main function would be to provide an exorbitant taxpayer subsidy to San Joaquin Valley agribusinesses and developers, who continually advocate for a greater share of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River drainage — the source of about two-thirds of California’s developed water supply.

In late October, a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Reclamation wrote to the Express requesting a correction of my article’s characterization that the bureau’s lawyers had threatened Anita Lodge with eminent domain. But in a subsequent interview, bureau spokesperson Shane Hunt acknowledged that his agency does acquire property through eminent domain if landowners refuse to leave. “We have a general process where if a project moves forward, we will try to negotiate with a landowner over several phases,” he said. “After following those several steps, it’s possible you could end up in eminent domain proceedings.”

Lodge and the other San Joaquin gorge property owners are only some of the most recent state residents to have the federal government’s property acquisition specialists approach them as California readies for new dams. “Within the last decade, we’ve looked into undertaking a property acquisition process related to a dam project in Northern California,” Hunt acknowledged, although he declined to say what that dam project was or where these properties are located. Roughly ten years ago, the bureau relocated several property owners in the area that would have been flooded by the Auburn Dam on the Feather River, a project that was scuttled after it proved to be too geologically unstable to support a dam.

When I visited Lodge’s home in early December, she was in the midst of planting daffodils on her mom’s gravesite. Ironically, her 97-year-old uncle is a retired engineer who had a managerial role in several Army Corps of Engineers dam projects in the Pacific Northwest. “My mom never believed Temperance Flat could happen, because her brother always assured her it made absolutely no sense,” she said.