News and Views

On his way to a doctor’s appointment, Steve Schneider sits at a bus stop in North Park on Tuesday afternoon surrounded by trendy coffee shops, tattoo parlors and mustachioed hipsters sipping craft beer. The 68-year-old has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years, but in just the last four, he’s seen his rent jumped from $850 to $1,275. As an epileptic on a fixed income, he cannot drive and has recently started to fear he may have to move and lose access to transit.
  • Affordable housing
  • San Diego
When Lisa Ginter and her husband, Paul, moved their family into a rental home in the MuraBella neighborhood in the spring of 2013, they thought they had found a dwelling where they could be comfortable. The landlord, after all, was a large corporation called Invitation Homes that had been buying up homes in the wake of the recession and turning the properties into rentals.
  • Beyond California
  • Housing conditions/habitability
Prospective tenants in Novato who are turned away by landlords solely because they have Section 8 vouchers won’t have legal protection from the city — at least not yet. Guidelines that county officials hope will be adopted by each of Marin’s cities and towns were struck down by the Novato City Council on Tuesday, citing concerns that the scope of those regulations may have been too broad.
  • Section 8 Discrimination
  • Marin
An array of bills aimed at easing California’s housing crisis, from banning fees on “granny flats” to pushing housing development on BART property, cleared a key hurdle on Friday, while others died quietly in fiscal committees. One such fatality was a proposal to help teachers and other middle-income tenants live closer to their jobs , one of many bills aiming to shore up the supply of badly needed affordable housing for low- and middle-income families. California housing officials estimate that shortfall has ballooned to a staggering 3.5 million homes.
  • Affordable housing
Crossing the Frederick Douglass–Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge on a brisk spring morning in Rochester, New York, the first thing one sees is a small tent city scattered about the banks of the Genesee River. It’s a sprawl of black tarps, folding chairs, and a charcoal grill, all set up on private land. The property’s owner, a cable company called Spectrum, has attempted for some time to tear it down, urging local officials to clear the encampment.
  • Affordable housing
When Rosalina Hernández and her husband moved into their studio apartment on Los Angeles Street in South Central LA 15 years ago, the place was just for the two of them and the baby they were expecting. Back then, it wasn’t too hard to find what they needed: an apartment they could afford with just a bit more space.
  • Affordable housing
In 2016, 3,255 renters in the city of Los Angeles were evicted from their homes, according to data released last week by the Eviction Lab, a research group at Princeton University. For a city of 4 million, that rate is fairly low. As the Eviction Lab data illustrates, the United States is in the midst of an eviction crisis of tremendous scale. Nationwide, nearly 1 million renters were forced to find new housing in 2016.
  • Eviction
  • Los Angeles
Four years ago, Chelsea Lutz moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland to pursue a career writing and directing films. "I needed a really cheap apartment," she said. She found one in Koreatown, where she didn't particularly want to live, but it was all she could afford. Today, Lutz, 28, shares a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in the Miracle Mile area with her fiance. "My rent's expensive, but it's not crazy expensive," Lutz said. "But eventually I want to get a house and that's worrisome because I want to be close to my job."
  • Affordable housing
  • Los Angeles
Though rent increases happen often enough, especially in the Bay Area, it’s illegal amid a state of emergency like the North Bay wildfires. But a real estate agent is accused of raising the monthly rent on a property in Novato amid the devastating blazes. On Tuesday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed three misdemeanor charges for alleged price gouging against Melissa Echeverria.
  • Rent increases
  • Marin
Two years ago, City Limits wrote about an affordable housing preservation deal under Mayor Bloomberg that tenants and advocates say was disastrous and non-transparent, leading to skyrocketing rents and evictions for many tenants. Those tenants, with the support of Legal Services Corporation A and the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, have now filed a class-action federal lawsuit against the owner as well as the federal and city agencies who signed off on the deal.
  • Rent increases
  • Tenant organizing
  • Beyond California
  • Affordable housing
What happens when one’s home is taken away? That’s a question that far too many people have had to ask themselves when faced with eviction, and one that looms in “Evicted,” a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum.
  • Eviction
Predictably, a number of affluent Bay Area suburbs (and the anti-development neighborhood groups that have come to characterize them in national news reports) are up-in-arms over SB 827, the now (in)famous legislation to fast-track development near transit stations across the state, introduced by State Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) in January. But just as the bill’s many opponents can’t be stereotyped, the cities embracing its core tenets are often surprising.
  • Affordable housing
As the price of housing in California spirals out of reach, more than half of Los Angeles County residents fear being priced out of living in the region, and younger residents are even more apprehensive. Fifty-five percent of LA County residents said they, a close friend or family member have considered moving from their neighborhood in the last few years due to rising housing costs, according to the 2018 Quality of Life Index.
  • Rent increases
  • Eviction
  • Affordable housing
  • Los Angeles
Affordable Housing, Displacement, and Regional Housing Needs The elephant in the housing legislation room is S.B. 827, authored by Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). This bill, which has sparked furious debate among housing and economic justice advocates since it was introduced in February, will get its first committee hearing Tuesday when it goes before the State Senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee.
  • Affordable housing
Family photos, Bible verse decals and wedding mementos adorn Jimmy Mejia and Patty Garrido's living room walls in South Los Angeles. Despite their efforts, the decorations can't mask the unpatched holes in the ceiling and the roaches that crawl around their kitchen. In one corner, there's a hole where the drywall caved in after a recent storm. "The heater doesn't work, so in the winter it's really hard; it gets really cold here," Mejia said.
  • Eviction
  • Affordable housing
  • Los Angeles
For Fernando Nadal, the fight to bring rent control to Sacramento is personal. The retired nurse says he and his wife were evicted from their retirement community by a property manager who, among other things, claimed that a small gathering of acquaintances and journalists to discuss his son’s fatal drug overdose constituted having “a party” inside his rental unit. When Nadal received a 60-day eviction notice last year, he filed a complaint with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which sided with the property manager.
  • Rent control
  • Affordable housing
  • Sacramento
L.A. County is at risk of losing roughly $3 billion worth of affordable housing in the next five years, according to a draft report presented to county officials Thursday. On top of that, efforts to build new units for homeless and low-income people in the county are also hitting snags. Why? A combination of gentrification, federal tax reform, and the circuitous way affordable housing is funded in this country are mostly to blame. HOW AFFORDABLE HOUSING DISAPPEARS
  • Affordable housing
  • Los Angeles
April 5, 2018
Many American cities face a severe shortage of affordable housing — and not just for the poor, but well up into the upper-middle class. A recent report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded: “The rental market thus appears to be settling into a new normal where nearly half of renter households are cost burdened,” or paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent.
  • Affordable housing
The city of Half Moon Bay is in the early stages of considering some form of rent control that could ease a growing crisis felt by area residents who are forced to double up in homes or move out of the area just to make ends meet. At the March 20 City Council meeting, Half Moon Bay resident Joaquin Jimenez spoke about the issue and how it has hit the Latino community on the Coastside particularly hard. Jimenez said he had collected 300 signatures from residents interested in seeing a rent control ordinance appear an upcoming ballot.
  • Rent control
  • San Mateo

Help build power for renters' rights: