Affordable housing

Oakland didn't build much new housing from 2009 to 2016, but in the last two years the city has experienced a historic housing construction boom. According to the Oakland Mayor's Office, as of December, there were 8,641 units of housing under construction in The Town, with another 7,898 units in the pipeline (approved or proposed). When those apartment buildings and high-rises are completed, Oakland not only will have a new skyline, but the city will have easily surpassed it regional housing goals for the next five years.

Since the publication of his book Evicted in 2016, sociologist Matthew Desmond has become the best-known chronicler of a quiet epidemic sweeping the United States today: eviction. Drawing on the book’s fine-grained account of how eviction plays out in Milwaukee, the country’s most segregated city, he has since sought to assemble a more panoramic, national picture of this crisis as the founder of the Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University.

Despite the booming economy, homelessness in the United States rose slightly for the second year in a row, with spikes in high-rent cities like New York and Seattle, according to an annual report released on Monday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

When Amazon announced last month that it plans to open one of its two new corporate hubs in Crystal City, Virginia elected officials were exuberant. Gov. Ralph Northam called the company’s decision “a big win” for the state, and Arlington County Board Chair Katie Cristol said it affirmed the county’s commitment to various priorities: “sustainability, transit-oriented development, affordable housing, and diversity.” The swath of Northern Virginia where Amazon is set to move even got a new, unofficial name—“National Landing”— heralding its future.

When Congress enacted a powerful new tax incentive that encourages investors to funnel capital gains into economically distressed areas, community leaders immediately began sounding alarm bells fearing gentrification. The concerns are particularly acute in already fast-growing tech hubs like Seattle and San Francisco.

Cities where a lot of people spend more than one-third of their income on rent are more likely to experience homelessness crises, according to a new report by a team of researchers from the University of New Hampshire, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The report, which was released on December 11 and was sponsored by the real estate website Zillow, analyzed 386 real estate markets across the country and found that increases in rent prices in less affordable areas make the homelessness rate rise faster.

San Francisco loses more than one existing affordable housing unit for every two it creates.

That’s according to data from a biannual San Francisco Planning Department analysis of the city’s affordable housing stock over the last 10 years.

Presented to the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee earlier this week, the report underscores the rapid disappearance of existing affordable housing, even as the city scrambles to develop new below-market-rate units.

It was a stifling mid-August afternoon when Jennifer learned she had until the end of the year to move out of her cramped studio apartment in the East Village of downtown Long Beach. She suspected the eviction was coming. For the past year, she had been looking for a new place as her landlord slowly remodeled her modest building, the place she’s called home for more than 13 years. He knew she could not pay the increase in rent, so he told her it was time to go. Jennifer, who is in her 50s, qualified for Section 8 low-income housing and searched futilely for an opening in the area.

Families who receive housing aid in Baltimore and San Jose may soon have a better shot at finding an affordable place to live. That’s good, because right now, their odds are slim-to-none.

Sacramento’s relative affordability has attracted streams of people fleeing the high rents and housing prices in the Bay Area. Along the way, California’s capital city has become less affordable.