Rent increases

One of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants took advantage of the Great Recession to build an unprecedented real estate business that makes him tantamount to a modern-day slumlord – buying up homes, bumping up rents and allowing the properties to fall into disrepair.

Southern California billionaire Thomas J. Barrack is the mastermind behind the scheme, founding a company five years ago that has taken 31,000 single-family homes off the housing market and calling it “the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”

Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch has heard plenty of complaints about sky-high rents and hotel prices in the aftermath of the region’s devastating fires.

But a report of a big dollar amount alone doesn’t necessarily constitute a violation of the state’s price-gouging law.

“As of this moment we have received over 60 reports of potential rental price gouging,” Ravitch wrote Thursday in an email.

Ben Hernandez and his family have spent the past five weeks in hotels, unable to find a place to rent after wildfires destroyed more than 5,000 homes in Sonoma County, including their three-bedroom tract house in northwest Santa Rosa.

“It’s looking more and more like we might have to stay with relatives,” said Hernandez, who works in maintenance and construction. His homeowners insurance is paying for the hotels, he said, but the company “is only going to give you so much housing money” toward a future when the family can rebuild in Coffey Park.

Palo Alto’s city council voted against further discussion of new measures that would address the housing affordability crisis in the city even as soaring rents have displaced community members like teachers, first responders and service industry workers.

While cities around the peninsula have passed rent control or approved new affordable housing projects to address the problem, the Palo Alto City Council voted 6-3 on Oct. 16 against studying stabilization measures after hearing passionate testimony from 60 members of the public.

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."

he petition filed at the beginning of this month to introduce a form of rent stabilization in the city of Glendale hit an administrative setback last week as the city clerk’s office deemed the filing of more than 11,000 signatures invalid due to compliance issues with state election codes.

The race is on for the chance to become the home of Amazon's second headquarters.

The Greater Sacramento Economic Council announced the region's bid for Amazon's second headquarters Wednesday morning outside Golden 1 Center. Sacramento is among a number of cities -- San Diego, Houston and Minneapolis to name a few -- competing for the headquarters. Amazon says they'll hire as many as 50,000 employees with an average annual salary of more than $100,000.

Proposals are due midnight Thursday.

Steve Kalmbach was in a meeting in the conference room at his Pleasanton office when he looked through the glass windows to find a crowd of unwelcome visitors in the reception area. Some were his tenants from a Deep East Oakland neighborhood — there to protest his doubling of their rents.

“He got really angry and didn’t want to talk to us so we put fliers all around his office,” said Jorge Rojas who rents a two-bedroom house on 76th Avenue with his wife, two children and two dogs. The cops showed up and told the tenants to leave.

Stacey Falls, a science teacher at Santa Cruz High School, has been keeping a nervous eye on rents in recent years, as she’s watched friends and colleagues move away.

Falls, who sat on the high school’s hiring panel, says Santa Cruz High won’t even consider candidates who would have to relocate to Santa Cruz “because it would be too challenging.”