Rent increases

San Diego is the 10th most expensive city in the United States for renters, with a one-bedroom apartment renting for an average of $1,710 per month in February, according to a new report.

The report by Zumper, a national online apartment and home rental marketplace, also ranked San Diego as the fifth most expensive city for renters in California. San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Oakland all had higher rental rates as February began.

The one-bedroom rental rate in San Diego in February was 6.9 percent higher than a year ago.

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.

Bay Area renters hit with high prices and few choices last year may be in for more of the same in 2018.

Rates for one- and two-bedroom apartments in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose last year stayed among the highest in the nation, according to new market reports. Scarce rentals and a robust local economy marked by steady tech hiring drove up Santa Clara County prices 3.2 percent from a year ago, according to real estate data firm Yardi Matrix.

The national average U.S. multifamily rent rose by $1 in January 2018, to $1,368, matching the national average rent recorded in July 2017 by Yardi Matrix’s Matrix Monthly report. Rents rose 2.8% year over year (YOY) at the national level through January, a 20-basis-point jump from December 2018.

Not only are the roads getting crowded but so is the demand for housing.

Cheap apartments are getting harder to find, as more and more people are looking to rent instead of buy.

We’re becoming a nation of renters. The national rental search company RentCafe says in the decade after 2006, the number of renters increased by more than 23 million.

That’s while fewer than 700,000 Americans became new homeowners.

Almost a quarter of America’s cities changed from homeowner-majority to renter-majority. And some of the most dramatic changes were here in the Bay Area.

A family in the East Bay just learned their rent is about to go up by 133 percent: from $1,500 dollars a month to $3,500.

Surprisingly, the tenant says he’s willing to pay the $2,000 rent increase, he just wants the owner to spread out that increase over three years.

The owner is saying no.

The city of Alameda is siding with the tenant, but there’s not a whole lot the city can do.

It’s a modest three bedroom condo on Bay Farm Island in Alameda.

Two East Harlem residents filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the city’s recent rezoning of the neighborhood, claiming the move was preceded by analyses that failed to account for pressures facing them and other rent-stabilized tenants.

The suit claims the city did not consider rent-stabilized housing tenants when estimating how many East Harlem residents could be vulnerable to displacement after a rezoning, and what the city could do to protect them.

Ramon Rios-Parada has lived in Hayward his whole life and can see that things are slowly changing.

When the time came for the 32-year-old social worker at La Familia Neighborhood Resource Center to look for his own place to rent, he heard stories from friends about rents in Hayward being high. What he found were studio and one-bedroom apartment rents looming around $1,200 a month and homeowners charging around $950 a month to rent individual rooms.

Some survivors of the wine country wildfires are being evicted from their homes after sharp rent increases. Evictions in burn-affected areas are up – and up dramatically.

The wine country wildfires killed 24 and displaced thousands more.

But three months later, there is now a second wave of victims: losing their homes not to flames, but to evictions.