How much will you pay for your next apartment?
With Rentberry, that all depends — on how much you’re willing to bid. The new real estate website is shaking up the Bay Area’s housing market by encouraging potential renters to bid on homes the way they would on designer handbags or celebrity autographs on Ebay.
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.
California Gov. Jerry Brown’s extension on the price-gouging ban stimulated much debate and confusion at the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board meeting Tuesday night.
Political compromise, like beauty, lies very much in the eye of the beholder. That was made excruciatingly clear late last week, when a special task force made up of landlord and tenant representatives voted in favor of a handful of measures designed to provide greater protection to renters living in the City of Santa Barbara. Although the final vote was unanimous, there’s still deep disagreement among the factions about just how much the landlords gave up and how much the tenants stand to gain.
As Bay Area residents and others flock to Sacramento to escape the housing crisis, low-income renters in the capital find themselves on shaky ground.
In its first-ever analysis of gentrification in the city, UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project found that an astonishing 95,000 low-income households live in Sacramento neighborhoods that “are already undergoing or are at risk of becoming hotbeds of displacement.
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.
For Sharon Ditmore, the signs of the holidays showing up in this city devastated by fire are both comforting and depressing.
Ditmore lost her home in the working-class neighborhood of Coffey Park and has been living in a friend’s guesthouse. She can’t help but think back to the Thanksgiving gatherings she enjoyed with family members in the home she and her husband had rented for nearly 30 years.
Two years ago, tenants of the apartment building at 1038 Second St. reported large rent hikes, evictions and onerous lease conditions. With rent control on the table, the council convinced the former property owner to cap rent increases at 10 percent.
Tilden Properties, a Walnut Creek real estate investment and asset management company, bought the 117-unit building in December 2016. Residents told the council in August that the firm planned to raise rents by up to 20 percent and refused to make repairs for longtime tenants.
Bruce Nicholson and Lisa Daspit thought they had found the perfect house. They spotted it from the car -- a bright yellow bungalow with white trim, partially hidden from the street by an array of palm trees on the lawn -- while exploring a favorite neighborhood in Margate, Florida, outside Fort Lauderdale. The couple had dreams of owning their own home, and this single-family rental offered both the time to save and the space to grow.
They called the number for Waypoint Homes posted on the sign out front and moved in shortly thereafter, excited to make the house their own.