Rent increases

Erin Blackwolf is a veterinary technician with two kids, two cats and a dog living in a 280-square-foot rental in Felton that costs $1,400 a month.

Since November, Blackwolf, 41, who is divorced, has been looking for a two-bedroom rental for $1,800 but landlords are wary of pets.

“I’m not willing to let my best friends go,” she said.

She looked on Craigslist, where she found scams. She posted on Facebook, trying to team up with another family, but found landlords uninterested.

“I’m paying $950 [for rent per month] there, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed [that it doesn’t go up],” said Cat Mendoza on August 26. She lives off of 44th Street in City Heights, just a couple blocks away from the “Know Your Tenants Rights/Conozca sus Derechos de Inquilino” meeting that she attended with three others.

“It’s increased from $700 [per month],” said Mendoza, 32, “and it’s comparatively lower than certain areas — but we still have a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed.”

Modesto resident Christine Thompson said it took her three or four months of searching to find her current home, a two-bedroom apartment that rents for $825 a month, is clean, in good repair and in a decent neighborhood. She and her two children have been living there since January.

Sacramento’s downtown apartment-building boom stepped up its already speedy pace this week with a notable new project – a densely packed midtown apartment aimed squarely at millennials with modest pocketbooks.

The 19J apartments at 19th and J streets will include a couple dozen “micro-units” with rents under $1,000, a rarity in a city that has made headlines for the fastest-rising rents in the country.

As Bay Area residents continue to face high housing costs, tenants and community activists are calling on corporate landlords to stop rent increases and for support in broadening rent control legislation.

Merika Reagan, an East Oakland resident who owns a pet care and dog walking business, is part of Housing Now! — a statewide coalition of more than 50 tenants rights groups, labor unions, community organizations, housing advocates and small landlords — who are fighting to make housing more affordable.

Some people are being forced to leave Sacramento as rent prices soar.

A newly-released study shows the gap is closing between Sacramento and San Francisco when it comes to affording rent.

For some, rent has been raised at a breathtaking rate.

One woman said her rent went from $695 to more than $1000, forcing her to move out of her south Sacramento apartment.

That kind of decision, suffer a raised rent or move, has Jovana Fajardo pushing for rent control across Sacramento.

Tenants who rent homes from one of America’s largest corporate landlords are asking the company to stop increasing their rent and address what they say is endemic neglect of the properties.

Los Angeles ranked among the top cities for "cost-burdened" renters in the latest "State of the Nation's Housing" report from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Greater L.A., including Orange County, was grouped with Miami, New York, Daytona Beach, Riverside and Honolulu when it comes to metros with the biggest rent problems.

It was a brutally hot and humid day in the nation’s capital and Margie Mathers needed a cane to get up to the podium, but the Florida senior had a story she was determined to tell.

“When I moved into our manufactured housing community in North Fort Myers, it was a beautiful, peaceful place,” Mathers told the crowd of around 1,000 activists who’d converged on the city for a July 13 Tenant March on Washington. “Now I have neighbors who are really struggling. They’re taking their medications every other day instead of every day and not eating the food they need to be healthy.”