The fight to protect the culture, character and condition of South Los Angeles is escalating just as quickly as the community's home values.
The median cost of a house in the Crenshaw District rose 47.3 percent from 2014 to 2017, from $444,000 to $655,000, according to online real estate hub Trulia.
Housing-rights activists and organizers say they are disturbed about what's happening right in their own backyard, and they refuse to sit by idly.
Thousands of San Francisco hosts on Airbnb and rival home-stay sites have stopped renting their homes and rooms to tourists. Many others are scrambling to register their vacation rentals with the city as a Tuesday deadline looms for Airbnb and HomeAway to kick off unregistered hosts.
“If you look at the sites, you’ll notice a substantial reduction in the number of listings,” said Kevin Guy, director of the San Francisco Office of Short-Term Rental Administration and Enforcement.
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.
The cost of rent continues to rise in the Central Valley and many renters are struggling to cope with the ever-changing prices.
Many Modesto renters say if the rent prices continue to climb like they have the past several years they may be forced to move out. One local property management firm says the end of the rise might be several years away.
"In one way I’m very angry about having to stay here, but on the other hand I’m blessed to have a roof over my head," said Tina Gilstrap, a renter of eight years.
RENITA BARBEE, 52, was still grieving the death of her mother last fall when she received another shock. Her landlord, the Wall Street rental behemoth Invitation Homes, was raising her rent to $3,000 a month, an increase of more than $800 all at once. Barbee had shared the three-bedroom Los Angeles rental home with her mother, husband, and daughter. But her husband wasn’t working after a recent stroke, and without her mother’s Social Security payments to help cover the bills, there was no way that Barbee’s family could afford to stay put on just her salary as a city dispatcher.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Oakland Housing Authority officials today announced new financial incentives for property owners to accept low-income families as renters and help ease the city's affordable housing crisis.
Speaking at a news conference at the OHA's headquarters in downtown Oakland, Schaaf said the incentives, which haven't previously been offered anywhere in the U.S., are "a win-win solution" for property owners and low-income tenants who participate in the federal Section 8 housing choice voucher program.
San Francisco has succeeded in purging thousands of illegal short-term rental listings from Airbnb’s website, a long sought-after crackdown by those who blame the company for exacerbating the housing crisis.
The purge was the result of a 2016 law adopted by the Board of Supervisors to require websites to only allow short-term rentals from those registered to do so with The City, or face penalties.
According to Mike Rosenberg, the Seattle Times business reporter, rents in King and Snohomish counties are finally falling "significantly" for the first time in a decade. By significant, he means a 2.9 percent drop "as compared to the prior quarter." Rosenberg suggests that the market is removing some power from landlords and transferring it to renters because the number of empty apartments is growing. All of this sounds like supply and demand have not been de-linked and deformed by unknown forces.
Beginning just after midnight Tuesday, as many as 50,000 people who cannot afford to pay the going rate for a rental home or apartment in Sacramento County will start rolling the dice in a lottery for subsidized housing.
The odds are long: Only 7,000 spots on the housing authority’s waiting list are available. And those who manage to land a spot on the list likely will have to wait more than a year before suitable housing becomes available.
We’ve all heard about rising rents in Boston. According to Zillow, the average two-bedroom apartment in the city goes for $2,300. Imagine someone helped you to rent an apartment, but they said you can only rent a place that costs what an apartment did in 2005.
“With no rent control, it is extremely hard,” said 35-year-old Ashesha Rockette.