More than 200 people took to the streets of Redwood City to urge the passage of a rent control ordinance with claims that escalating housing costs are hurting the working poor.
“Rent control is what we’re talking about ... but what it’s really about is protection. Housing, food and safety are the core needs of a community,” Diana Reddy, with the Housing Leadership Council, said at Saturday’s march in downtown Redwood City.
The march was a lead-up to a Planning Commission meeting Tuesday night where an item on rent control in Redwood City is on the agenda.
The latest effort to pass a rent control ordinance is a joint effort between the Housing Leadership Council and San Francisco Organizing Project/Peninsula Interfaith Action.
The march included many Redwood City business owners who contend the region has become too expensive for the wages they can afford to pay.
“I myself have to drive 35 miles to my restaurant and I cannot find any workers because nobody can afford to live here for what I can pay,” said a restaurateur who preferred to remain anonymous.
Many at the march also work for nonprofit agencies that cannot afford to pay high wages.
“Rent keeps going up, but salaries are not,” said Paige Scott, a Redwood City resident for seven years. Scott works at a nonprofit making $30,000 a year and says she has not been able to find affordable housing in the area. “It’s impossible to find housing unless you are a top earner. I work here. I can’t live here.”
“The situation leads people to stay in dangerous or unfortunate conditions because they feel like if they speak up, their landlord might retaliate by raising rent,” Scott said, but Reddy said that renting in Redwood City is not all bad.
“We have a lot of really good landlords, and rent stabilization will not affect them at all,” Reddy said.
Lorena Milgarejo, who attended the march with her daughter, saw her late husband fight the rent control battle in San Francisco and feels it can have an positive effect on the community.
“What happens to a family, to little kids, when mom and dad have to live in another city to work?” Milgarejo asked. “The cost of rent is tearing families apart.”
Redwood City is in the process of adding large numbers of rental units, with new developments leasing on Main Street, Veterans Boulevard and El Camino Real among them. Developments in the harbor and marina areas are also in the works. The Housing Leadership Council has been integral in the inclusion of low-income units in those developments.
The Lane on the Boulevard apartments on El Camino, one of the city’s newer residential developments, has 141 apartments. Only five of those units are low-income, however, and those are categorized as median-income housing, meaning a single renter cannot earn more than $63,350 per year. As of January, the Lane on the Boulevard, which charges $2,600 for a one-bedroom unit, reported a 53.5 percent vacancy rate.
“It’s important to look deeper when you see that something is labeled as affordable housing,” Reddy said. “You have to dig and find out what category it is, and what that means. Someone near that upper level of income certainly doesn’t have as much to worry about as someone at the bottom.”
“We’re going to do this,” Milgarejo said. “It’s tipping. It’s going to take time, but it’s going to happen.”
Amid the familiar protest chants of “sí, se puede,” Reddy declared, “this is what it looks like when we stand up.”
The Planning Commission will discuss the rent control issue at 7 p.m., Tuesday night, City Hall, 1017 Middlefield Road, Redwood City.
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