Affordable housing

Nancy Buttanda, 68, has watched in horror as her rent check eats up more and more of her fixed income. The rent on her apartment in Federal Way, Wash., has increased annually at least $100 a month for three or four years, she says, and her landlord rarely makes repairs. She now pays $1,245 a month for rent, water and trash, while living on pension, Social Security and disability payments that amount to around $3,300.

Santa Barbara, California, a coastal enclave boasting beautiful beachfront Spanish missions and a nearly $2 billion tourism industry, offers a postcard view of the state’s many natural advantages.

Residents of the Green Lantern Village in Westminster are fighting back against plans by the property owner to close the 130-space mobile home park, which they say would displace more than one hundred families in a county where affordable housing is increasingly scarce.

Park residents—most of whom are seniors and low-income—have been up in arms since Walsh Properties LLC, owner of Green Lantern Village, requested a land use permit from the city last year to convert the property from a mobile home park to other types of housing.

Last year, a New Jersey Superior Court judge told the state’s cities in no uncertain terms that they’d failed in to build enough affordable housing. Now, a county judge has begun handing out some long-anticipated numbers — and two wealthy towns will be forced to build more units than they’d like.

For many low-income Americans, a safe and affordable home is becoming increasingly hard to find. According to The Gap, a new report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) released earlier today, at a time when more and more Americans are burdened with above-average housing costs, the Trump administration seeks to cut federal programs that provide housing assistance and support and strengthen public housing infrastructure.

California’s newest housing law is about to be tested.

Last week, developer West Berkeley Investments (a subsidiary of Blake Griggs) cited SB 35 when filing its application for a controversial project that’s been tied up in zoning and environmental review for the last half-decade. The law allows the developer to bypass local oversight in exchange for making 50 percent of the units affordable, Berkeleyside reports. It’s the first to cite the law since it was enacted in January, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

(This piece first appeared in Capital and Main)

New research reveals that 11 percent of 5,000 Disneyland workers surveyed—custodians, food workers, musicians, cashiers, concierges—have been homeless at least once in the past year.

After a series of impassioned calls from landlords and renters representing two sides of a debate over tenant protections, Petaluma’s city council Monday opted not to pursue additional protections, instead investigating other measures to combat a housing crisis made worse by last year’s fires.

Homes were already scarce and rents were skyrocketing in the county’s second largest city before deadly fires destroyed more than 5,000 homes in surrounding municipalities.

Housing advocates, exasperated at what they views as a lack of city leadership on the issue, have attended several city council meetings since the October firestorm to plead with elected officials for more action on the housing crisis. The city will hold its first public forum about housing solutions Feb. 12, more than four months after the disaster.