News and Views
November 10, 2017
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.
November 10, 2017
People didn’t really believe it. It was just so outrageously racist,” says Keith Paschall II, an Indianapolis-based community organizer and artist.
“We were all just taken aback,” says Derek Hyra, a researcher on neighborhood change.
They’re talking about an ad on the back of last month’s Urban Times, a local Indianapolis publication.
November 9, 2017
Federal Cuts Undermine Local Efforts
It’s only been two months since California passed fifteen housing bills to address its affordable housing crisis, and the federal government is again up to its old tricks. The GOP tax bill reduces investment in affordable housing by $22 billion, while the massive cuts in HUD funding remain part of the budget proposal.
We have seen this scenario before.
The tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans will likely decimate production of new affordable rental housing, even as housing shortages across the country are driving rents higher and taking ever-larger shares of Americans’ incomes.
The plan released last week by the House Ways and Means Committee preserves a well-regarded program called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit — but effectively guts it. That’s because about half of all low-income housing credit development is done in conjunction with private activity bonds, a financing method that the plan scraps.
November 9, 2017
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.
November 9, 2017
Last January, a woman in Lakewood, Ohio, ran to her neighbor’s house, bleeding from her face with a broken nose and concussion from a vicious attack by her boyfriend. With her neighbor’s help, she called the police, who took her to the hospital. Three days later, the city wrote the woman’s landlord: “Your tenant had a visitor over to the residence where he assaulted her. He was charged with felonious assault. This activity qualifies the property as a nuisance.”
November 9, 2017
Alice Norton, a 73-year old resident of Seaside Mobile Estates, stands on her patio with a handful of her neighbors. A look of grave concern is drawn on her face.
Seated nearby is attorney David Brown – also a Marina city councilman – who has come to hear her out.
Norton is facing eviction from a home she inherited from her mother and the park’s owners have been refusing to accept her rent check since spring. She owns the home itself, but not the land it sits on.
November 8, 2017
A new study suggests lower-income renters in Vallejo are being replaced by higher-income ones.
The Apartment List study finds that more than half of Vallejo renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. This is significantly fewer than just a few years ago, indicating that the area’s economic demographics may be changing.
“As the U.S. renter population nears 44 million households — or 37 percent of U.S. households — and rents increase nationwide, rental affordability remains an important concern,” according to the latest Apartment List report.
November 8, 2017
For the next six months, Oakland landlords won’t be able to raise rents on properties under rent control after making repairs to them.
Oakland and San Francisco are the only two cities in the state that have “substantial rehabilitation exemptions” to rent stabilization ordinances, according to a report supporting the moratorium proposed by City Council members Dan Kalb and Rebecca Kaplan. Council members voted Tuesday to impose the moratorium on granting the exemptions.
November 8, 2017
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which controls both houses of Congress, are pushing their agenda of massive tax cuts for the wealthy. This comes at a time when most Americans are living in or near poverty and housing is increasingly expensive. One regressive policy that is being revisited is the mortgage interest deduction (MID). The MID is a tax benefit that benefits rich, predominantly white, households and does not benefit lower-income, rent-burdened households.
November 8, 2017
Housing advocates are seeking to take the issue of rent control directly to voters after they say repeated calls on local leaders to enact basic renter protections in Long Beach have gone unanswered.
Housing Long Beach Executive Director Josh Butler, along with other community activists, walked into City Hall Wednesday morning to start the process to qualify a ballot measure for the November 2018 election.
“Sixty percent of Long Beach residents currently rent their homes, and they deserve stability,” Butler said in a statement.
November 8, 2017
The third-largest city in the United States, Chicago, is home to more than 2.7 million people, 22 percent of whom were living in poverty as of 2016. In some communities on the South Side and West Side of the city, the poverty problem affects between 40 to 60 percent of residents. Among the many issues facing these 1.3 million Chicagoans with incomes at or below the poverty line, finding and keeping an affordable place to live is one of the most pressing—and increasingly difficult as the city transforms.
Portland voters decided overwhelmingly Tuesday not to adopt a form of rent control.
With all precincts reporting Tuesday evening, Question 1 on the city ballot was defeated by a nearly two-to-one margin. According to unofficial results, the vote was 13,466 to 7,595, or 64 percent to 36 percent, against the rent stabilization ordinance. Thirty-seven percent of the city’s 56,205 registered voters turned out to cast ballots.
November 7, 2017
With property values steadily rising throughout Los Angeles, it isn't too surprising that building owners and landlords are looking for ways to charge 2017 market-rate rents on some of the approximately 624,000 rent-controlled units in the city — that estimate coming from the rent control division of the city's housing agency.
Another proposed solution is for the city to seek grant opportunities for new housing development. But the City Council is not running a small local nonprofit organization reliant on grant funding. The City Council is responsible for the sixth largest city in the U.S., with the fourth largest homeless population. The fact that the City Council proposes grants as a solution to the affordable housing crisis is concerning, given the severity of our housing and homelessness crisis.
November 6, 2017
Chris Raudenbusch lost his rental home and just about everything he owned when a wildfire swept through his Santa Rosa neighborhood in October.
"My girlfriend was renting the house. I had just recently moved in to help her with the rent because her roommate had left," Raudenbusch said. "We grabbed, grabbed the animals and took off. We had no warning -- no nothing."
November 6, 2017
As the main breadwinner, Martha Simmons has always worked hard to support her family. But when her landlord raised the rent of the home she rents with her adult daughter, Charitie Bolling, who is disabled, Bolling’s husband and their three small children at 1140 Ingerson Ave., the 60-year-old was forced to take on three security jobs just to stay afloat. “Right now, I’m working seven days a week, 16 hours a day to keep roof over our head,” said Simmons, whose $3,300 rent was raised to $4,700 last year.
November 6, 2017
After rent stabilization measures received mixed results around the Bay Area in the last election, voters in Pacifica will have their turn on Tuesday.
Volunteers who have been campaigning since the summer hope to convince homeowners, a group that makes up the majority of the city’s population, to vote for Measure C, which would limit how much landlords could raise rents.
Gloria Stofan, a resident since 1966, volunteers with Fair Rents 4 Pacifica. She said that, after speaking to four people, two said they’d vote no on Measure C, one said yes and one was undecided.
November 5, 2017
State officials are taking action against a Queens landlord who threatened tenants with eviction unless they could show they were in the country legally, the Daily News has learned.
The State Division of Human Rights plans to file a formal complaint Monday against Dr. Jaideep Reddy, the owner of a Corona building where residents received notices telling them to provide, among other things, proof of their immigration status.