Has a Montgomery Street company arrived in Southern California to flip rent-controlled apartments into market rate units?
Frogtown, also known as Elysian Valley, is yet another Los Angeles neighborhood being transformed by gentrification.
Last month tenants in a large apartment complex were close to an agreement that would have kept their units affordable. Suddenly, they are facing eviction again.
Borrowing tactics from the Occupy and labor movements, a coalition of faculty and anti-gentrification activists has set up a tent city outside the University of Southern California. Their proclaimed target: USC’s culture of greed and opaqueness.
As affordable-housing agreements written 30 years ago begin to lapse, California is set to lose more than 34,000 affordable-rent units.
Taylor Equities’ purchase of a 36-unit building was followed by renter complaints of harassment and disruptive construction. Then came the eviction notices.
Co-published by Fast Company
While municipal-broadband initiatives and digital-friendly promotional campaigns project a narrative of progressive growth, the repercussions for disenfranchised communities often go overlooked.
Defend Boyle Heights’ Nancy Meza has brought her anti-gentrification workshops to Chicago and New York. Residents from South Los Angeles to Orange County have asked for similar training.
With the first tumultuous year of Donald Trump’s presidency winding down, Capital & Main looks back at the images and stories we presented over the last 12 months.
Christian and her neighbors who live on a gentrifying block near the University of Southern California have formed an association to fight their eviction, hoping there is power in numbers.
Rent control would not fix L.A.’s affordable housing crisis, but it would help long-time renters in neighborhoods that are suddenly desirable in the eyes of investors.
“Lil Bill” Flournoy’s bicycle-repair shop has a panoramic view of the community that he and his father have served for over 40 years — and of the new USC Village, which has pushed his business into the street.
One of the wryest moments in Karen Rizzo’s insightful one-act comes when Lee (Mark Carapezza), a sculptor attending a dinner party with his wife, blinks with bewilderment as he clutches a glass of $2,500-a-bottle Scotch in one hand and a goblet of chichi red wine in the other.
The way Esther Delahey sees it, her neighborhood in south Fresno, the Lowell district, has gotten a bad rap. Named in 1884 for the New England poet James Russell Lowell, the district is part of a larger area, hemmed in by three highways.
California leads the nation in having the most severely rent-burdened households, as well as having the largest shortage of affordable rental homes. (The U.S. Department Housing and Urban Development and other agencies consider families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent as rent-burdened.)
Isabelle Lopez, her husband and their dog live in a tiny room, perhaps 130 square feet, in the impoverished Lacy neighborhood in the Orange County city of Santa Ana.
Housing developers – whether they specialize in market-rate properties or affordable housing – face tremendous hurdles in getting projects off the ground in California.
“There’s probably a hundred challenges,” says Cynthia Parker, the president and chief executive officer of BRIDGE Housing, a nonprofit housing developer based in San Francisco.
See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Affordable Housing Series
Material prices keep going up, with the costs of steel and glass not expected to come down any time soon. Labor expenses also keep rising. Even with the lowest interest rates in our lifetime, it still can be very difficult to make economic sense for starting a new construction project without some sort of guarantee that it will not be a bust. Developers say that perhaps the toughest impediment to new housing construction is local opposition, especially if the proposed construction site is in a safe neighborhood with good schools.
» Read more about: The Developer’s Story: Why Affordable Housing Doesn’t Get Built »
Grade-school art teacher Melissa Jones is attending the opening of an exhibit called Roofless: Art Against Displacement at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa. It is a cold, rainy night in early January. Jones is a single mother; she and her 12-year-old son live in a one-bedroom basement flat in the nearby rural community of Forestville, for which she pays $825 per month plus utilities. She is desperate to move into a bigger place, but for many the rents in Sonoma County have become unaffordable.
See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Affordable Housing Series
Among other problems, too few apartment buildings have been built in recent years. Developers say they have been hampered by huge impact fees that can run as high as $100,000 a unit, that cash-strapped localities in California, operating in a tax-raising environment straitjacketed by Proposition 13, have imposed on builders. The collapse of redevelopment funding has further reduced local governments’ ability to build enough subsidized housing.
It’s no secret that California residents pay more for housing than residents in most other states, especially in the metropolitan coastal areas and Silicon Valley cities. Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto and other highly attractive, jobs- and amenities-rich cities are widely documented as being the least-affordable housing markets in California.
See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Affordable Housing Series
Obtaining decent affordable rental housing and earning enough income to sustain a family are increasingly more difficult goals to achieve. The American Dream of homeownership, and of building and maintaining stable communities, is fading in the face of this new socio-economic reality.
Red flags abound: The state’s poorest families pay up to two-thirds of their income on housing, firmly placing them in the severely “rent burdened” category of households. (Families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent are considered rent-burdened by the U.S.
» Read more about: Trouble on the Dream Coast: Housing Policy Challenges »
One block north of fabled Hollywood Boulevard, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Capitol Records Building, sit three rent-stabilized, two-story apartment buildings, known to residents as the Yucca-Argyle complex. One building is peach-colored, one green and the third yellow. Each is organized around a small courtyard and in back is a parking lot for tenants’ cars. Together they are home to roughly 50 families, the residents ranging in age from young children to old-timers who have lived in the complex for more than half a century.
See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Affordable Housing Series
By most measures the complex’s residents have it good. Living in one of L.A.’s more walkable and vibrant neighborhoods — where cafes, bookstores, night clubs, restaurants and clothing boutiques vie for consumers’ attention — they pay varying amounts above $1,000 for a one-bedroom apartment, beneficiaries of Los Angeles’s 1978 Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RSO).
» Read more about: Renting in Los Angeles — Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation »
