It’s been a year since the Fall River Catholic Diocese took over the homeless shelter on Winter Street, but shelter coordinator Karen Ready can’t get over the number of older people who are ending up on the mattresses at St. Joseph’s House.
“I’m a little bit alarmed at how many elders are coming to shelter and what we can do,” Ready said. “It’s a very bitter pill for me to swallow.”
The Los Angeles City Council has shown only lukewarm support for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed “linkage fees,” which would be funded by developers and earmarked for low-income housing. But even as the policy has stalled on a citywide level (it was finally green-lit by a key committee in August), a coalition of advocates has been steadily working on other ways to create developer incentives and get more affordable homes built in South Central L.A.
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.
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.
In any given week, the housing crisis in New York City reveals itself through new but familiar anecdotes of deprivation, in fresh sets of grim statistics, in staggering contradictions. Several days ago, residents of the notoriously beleaguered Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York section of Brooklyn rallied to protest a lack of heat and hot water in the buildings, a recurring condition, they said, that left children sleeping in parkas and hats and getting sick.
A little-noticed provision in the Republican tax reform bill that passed the House on Thursday could have a big impact on affordable housing construction.
The House bill maintains a tax subsidy for low-income housing construction, but ends the tax-free status of certain bonds that builders rely on to arrange financing.
Developers say the mere threat of the policy change already has them scrambling to close deals for upcoming projects before the end of the year, when funding could disappear.
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.”
Another proposed solution is for the city to seek grant opportunities for new housing development. But the City Council is not running a small local nonprofit organization reliant on grant funding. The City Council is responsible for the sixth largest city in the U.S., with the fourth largest homeless population. The fact that the City Council proposes grants as a solution to the affordable housing crisis is concerning, given the severity of our housing and homelessness crisis.
Nearly half the renters in the Bay Area struggle to meet high housing costs, despite an influx of wealthier workers into the market, a new survey found.
A study by Apartment List, a rental website, found nearly 1 in 4 renters in San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and surrounding areas were severely cost burdened, spending more than half of their income on rent. About half of Bay Area renters are considered economically burdened, spending over 30 percent of their paychecks on shelter.
Some renters of homes owned by the “billion-dollar landlords” highlighted in an ABC News investigation might be surprised to learn that they, as taxpayers, have a stake in their corporate landlord’s business.
That’s because of a new initiative by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), in which Fannie Mae guarantees mortgage-backed securities on rental homes. (Fannie Mae, along with Freddie Mac, is a government-sponsored enterprise that securitizes mortgages, allowing private lenders to put more of their money back into lending.)