News and Views
November 25, 2017
How much will you pay for your next apartment?
With Rentberry, that all depends — on how much you’re willing to bid. The new real estate website is shaking up the Bay Area’s housing market by encouraging potential renters to bid on homes the way they would on designer handbags or celebrity autographs on Ebay.
Flanked by cameras, the activists marched into the glossy lobby of the downtown building and demanded to speak to the general manager.
The Olive Street building, they argued, had been approved by the city as condominiums and then turned into an “illegal hotel.” The website for Level Furnished Living advertises luxury suites that rent for hundreds of dollars a night. After a string of people recounted their housing woes, they handed over a letter for company executives.
November 24, 2017
Organizers with San Diego Tenants United say the time for rent control in San Diego is now and that too many people are being displaced by rising rent costs.
They've gathered over 8,000 signatures on a change.org petition to implement rent control in the city.
"People are getting priced out of their homes, they're getting displaced, to the degree where you're seeing mass displacement," said organizer Rafael Bautista. "We're making homeless people by not creating rent control in San Diego."
As Senate leaders move closer to taking a floor vote next week on their version of the Republican tax reform measure, Los Angeles County leaders have directed their lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to oppose provisions of their proposal.
November 23, 2017
Adrian Bonilla lived in a shared house in this Silicon Valley town with his wife and two grandchildren until earlier this year, when the rent for their bedroom jumped to $1,200 from $900 a month. Mr. Bonilla attributed that rise to Facebook, which is based nearby and was growing.
So Mr. Bonilla, a 43-year-old mechanic and Uber driver, bought a 1991 recreational vehicle and joined a family-oriented R.V. community on a quiet cul-de-sac. They lived there until last week, when Mr. Bonilla received an eviction notice.
November 22, 2017
Following steps taken by tenant advocacy groups in Long Beach and Glendale, a Pasadena group has filed preliminary paperwork to place a rent control initiative on an upcoming ballot.
The Pasadena ballot measure would limit rent increases, force the city to adopt just-cause eviction policies — which limit the reasons a landlord can evict a tenant — and establish an independent rental housing board.
November 22, 2017
As Bay Area residents and others flock to Sacramento to escape the housing crisis, low-income renters in the capital find themselves on shaky ground.
In its first-ever analysis of gentrification in the city, UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project found that an astonishing 95,000 low-income households live in Sacramento neighborhoods that “are already undergoing or are at risk of becoming hotbeds of displacement.
November 22, 2017
The 2018 ballot is shaping up to be a voter referendum on rent control in Los Angeles County. Affordable-housing advocates already have filed a proposed ballot initiative that would allow for the creation of new rent-controlled units in California for the first time in 20 years. And local activists in four cities in Los Angeles County — Inglewood, Long Beach, Glendale and Pasadena — have filed or are preparing to file rent-control ballot initiatives they hope to put before voters in November 2018.
November 22, 2017
The main adversaries over the Measure V rent control law -- the Mountain View Tenants Coalition and the California Apartment Association -- are both facing investigations by the California Fair Political Practices Commission.
November 22, 2017
Political compromise, like beauty, lies very much in the eye of the beholder. That was made excruciatingly clear late last week, when a special task force made up of landlord and tenant representatives voted in favor of a handful of measures designed to provide greater protection to renters living in the City of Santa Barbara. Although the final vote was unanimous, there’s still deep disagreement among the factions about just how much the landlords gave up and how much the tenants stand to gain.
November 21, 2017
emperatures in the Central Valley are dropping at fall gives way to winter. But for many families that also means enduring another winter in substandard housing, a problem that the City of Fresno says it has been working to fix since the passage of a new rental inspection ordinance in February.
That ordinance was supposed to set up a process for city inspectors to check most rental housing units in town to build a database and make sure living conditions are healthy and safe.
November 21, 2017
For everyone who has ever passed one of this city’s sprawling homeless encampments and wondered how to help, Mayor Libby Schaaf has an answer — open your door to someone in need of shelter.
California Gov. Jerry Brown’s extension on the price-gouging ban stimulated much debate and confusion at the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meeting Tuesday night.
November 21, 2017
The Pasadena Tenants Union will soon begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to cap rent increases at 4.5 percent per year and require landlords to pay moving costs if a tenant is evicted without adequate cause.
Union members started the process last week, and they’ll need more than 12,000 signatures to get the charter amendment before voters in Nov. 2018.
The group is pushing for an initiative because they found little support from city leaders, according to Nicole Hodgson, a member of the union and one of the filing parties.
November 20, 2017
In the world of New York housing, where landlord-tenant battles are both routine and brutal, Joel Wiener has plenty of scars.
One of the city’s top 10 rental apartment owners, Wiener’s been sued for overcharges and shoddy repairs, and denounced by politicians for making housing too expensive for the working class.
The Pasadena Tenants Union said on social media that it is behind the filing of papers last Wednesday notifying City officials of the intended public circulation of a petition supporting a new City Charter Amendment which would create rent control in Pasadena.
The “notice of intent to circulate” the petition was signed by three people who did not state their affiliation with any group. On Friday, on Facebook, the Pasadena Tenants Union acknowledged it had “filed for Rent Control and Just Cause in the City of Pasadena for the November 6th, 2018 election.”
Roaches, mold and crumbling ceilings - complaints from some tenants who say it's not what they expected when they signed leases on their rental homes.
Another tenant didn't expect to be jolted by an electric shock during a dip in her swimming pool either.
"I jumped in the pool, the pool was literally electrified," Cathy Cole told Eyewitness News of the shocking experience on Memorial Day weekend.
"It scared me," she said. "I thought I was being electrocuted."
November 17, 2017
A state senator and tenants rights group are working to overturn a decades-old law that prohibits rent control on homes.
In the wake of a KCRA 3 investigation into the corporate ownership of single-family homes, advocates want the state to change the Costa-Hawkins law, which passed in the 1990s and prevents rent control for single-family homes. Over the past year, rents for single-family homes have increased by more than 10 percent.
Tenants rights groups said one company owning too many homes in a region can have a significant impact on the rental market.
November 17, 2017
In late September, activists staged actions in 45 cities to draw attention to predatory rent practices and vast cuts to Housing and Urban Development funding. “Renters Week of Action” was partially inspired by a report put out by the Right to the City Alliance (RTC) highlighting solutions to the problems tenants now face after the foreclosure crisis.
“The majority of all renters pay an unaffordable rent,” Darnell Johnson of RTC told In These Times. “Eviction, rising rents and gentrification are racial, gender and economic violence harming our people.”
November 17, 2017
Housing activists in Inglewood and Pasadena on Friday announced plans to put rent control initiatives before their cities' voters next year as part of a regional groundswell of interest in rental caps.
These campaigns come after a spate of Bay Area cities put rent control on the ballot last year. Rent control supporters in two cities — Mountain View and Richmond — were successful, and those outcomes fueled hopes that Southern California communities could also limit rent increases.
The efforts come as California faces a housing crisis that shows no signs of abating.