Rent increases

Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker said Tuesday that she and Centro Legal de la Raza have filed suit against a landlord who they allege attempted to illegally increase his tenant's rent by pretending he had moved into the downstairs unit of a duplex.

Parker said such schemes have become common as Oakland's housing crisis persists, with some landlords using sham "owner move-ins" as a tactic to evade Oakland's just cause for eviction and rent control laws.

A real estate analytics firm has some good news for Bay Area landlords — and bad news for tenants: Rents began rising again last year after a brief “cooling off period” in late 2016.

“The Bay Area region should register one of its best rent performances since at least mid-2016,” the Texas real estate analytics firm RealPage wrote in a new report for the real estate industry.

The battle over rent control in the state and in Sacramento is heating up.
A local housing coalition is pushing for rent control and just cause in the city, while five industry groups have announced opposition to the measure. There's also a campaign across the state to repeal a decades-old law that limits where local governments can enact rent control.

Volunteers are already collecting signatures to get a rent control related initiative on the California ballot in November.

Residents at an East Bay apartment complex complain they are living in filthy conditions infested with roaches, bed bugs and mold.

The tenants living at the Parkhaven Apartments on Clayton Road in Concord are demanding that city officials take action.

A group of tenants went to Concord City Hall to make themselves heard on Tuesday, but it turned out the city is already working on the problem.

It’s not just one cockroach or bed bug. They are all over.

Residents in an apartment complex in Concord claim they are being pushed out by poor living conditions and high rent increases.

On Monday, KRON4 spoke with the affected families who took their concerns to City Hall.

They are families who say they're living in poor conditions, facing no-cause evictions and unfair rent increases.

Stopping by City Hall in Concord, they dropped off papers to have city inspectors tour their apartments and force their landlord to make repairs to problems that the tenants say have long been ignored.

The average rent for tenants living in rent-stabilized buildings in New York City grew by 3.1 percent in 2016, the lowest increase in six years, according to a new study released by the board that regulates rents in the city.

The smaller uptick suggests that the historic freezes imposed on some rents in 2015 and 2016 had a noticeable impact on tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments — though there were still modest increases for some apartments.

Chaos erupts after a measure that would have strengthened rent control failed to pass the State Assembly Housing Committee three weeks ago -- a major setback for tenants in the midst of the housing crisis.

Dozens of those protesters live in buildings owned by the largest landlord in San Francisco, Veritas Investments. I-Team Reporter Dan Noyes has been investigating complaints about the company.

Los Angeles rental prices went nowhere in January, remaining exactly where they were a month before, according to a new report from Apartment List.

Citywide, the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment is $1,340 per month, while two-bedroom rentals fetch $1,730.

Rents have shot up four percent since this time last year, says the report, but prices have actually dropped off a bit since August, when they hit $1,350 for a one-bedroom and $1,740 for two-bedroom units.