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.
Marc-André Giasson is joining a growing number of Toronto tenants who say they've been burned by a landlord claiming to need to their apartment for personal use, then putting it back on the market.
Giasson's apartment was sold to new owners several months ago, and his former landlord told him that they needed it for their own use.
So he signed a document agreeing to move out at the end of his one-year lease and began the onerous process of looking for a new place in a city where rental housing availability is at a 16-year low.
Under the brim of a cowboy hat, Curtis Pearl glances down 17th Street from the doorway of the Pensione K Apartments in downtown Sacramento. It’s Monday, February 5: This is the day the former oil rig worker is scheduled to be evicted. Ironically, Pearl has the money to pay his rent. He insists his predicament is one of principle—and geography.
The building located at 800 Traction Avenue in Los Angeles’ Arts District is five stories, made of brick and concrete. Built in 1918 and designed by the same architect who created LA's City Hall, it was a warehouse for coffee and spices for decades.
Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, artists looking for big work spaces and cheap rents discovered the building and started moving in. One of them was photographer Jamie Itigaki, who moved to 800 Traction in 1996 when the surrounding neighborhood was still considered too sketchy for many Angelenos.
One snowy winter day, after standing at his restaurant job washing dishes, Jinlong Chen came home to the apartment that he and his wife shared with several other families on Beach Street in Boston’s Chinatown. He opened the door to their room to find water and debris everywhere. Part of the ceiling had collapsed.
You could say the people living at Del Rio Mobile Home Park are living here on borrowed time -- but it's not borrowed. They paid for it.
"We're getting treated like squatters, basically," one resident said.
Each one of them got an eviction notice at the beginning of January. It gave them five days to get out -- just five days.
"This came as a major shock to them -- residents who have been paying rent to this person who has pretended to be the owner. When, in fact, it's actually a sister," said Javier Castro with California Rural Legal Assistance.
Life is somewhere between hard and heartbreak for the majority-Latino tenants remaining in The Melrose apartments, where residents of 40 of its 72 units are facing an eviction deadline of Feb. 1.
This is the latest, and probably the final, wave of no-cause evictions at the apartment complex, where tenant rights have gone head-to-head against its ownership for the past year.
Tenant advocacy groups are expected to submit 20,000 signatures to the San Francisco Department of Elections today to put a measure on the June ballot to give legal counsel to all renters in the city facing eviction, organizers said.
If the measure passes in the June 5 election, San Francisco would be the first city in California to provide such representation.
"This is history," Jon Golinger, campaign advisor for the No Eviction Without Representation Initiative, said. "This will be a model for other cities."
When all of my belongings were in storage and I was living out of the second-bedroom of my best friend’s apartment while her son was off at college –unless you knew my situation you had no idea that I was homeless–but I was. That’s why I can tell you now, that although the 2018 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count just got underway, the count is going to be woefully inaccurate and the full magnitude of the crisis underreported if we just focus on the homeless that we can see.
My trip from the middle class into the ranks of the homeless began with a ticket of sorts. I came home one afternoon in 2013 from another fruitless job search to find a summons taped to the front door of my $2,000-a-month apartment in suburban Washington, D.C.
Show up in housing court on the assigned date with the back rent, it read. Or be prepared to find another place to live.