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 & […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Photojournalist Ted Soqui shot these images for today’s story by Sasha Abramsky, Renting in Los Angeles — Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation. See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Affordable Housing Series
California’s housing crisis is a complex one, as befits a state with a population of close to 40 million people, spread out over 163,696 square miles, and with some of the country’s largest cities and fastest growing population hubs, as well as some of its most rugged rural areas. See More Stories in Capital & […]
“No Direction Home” reaches many troubling conclusions about California’s housing market
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when San Francisco was considered a working-class town. It had always been home to a generous share of bohemians, dilettantes and tycoons, of course – but it had also been the city of unchallenged union power, the general strike and rough-hewn but familial neighborhoods spilling […]
History may record the August 2014 sale of the Villa Carlotta in Hollywood’s Franklin Village neighborhood as the moment in time when the legendary ‘Grande Dame’ became a statistic. The 1926 apartment building was famously a stop along the path through Hollywood for numerous actors, musicians and other artists, but it has also been a […]
“The Lord has always taken care of me,” says Catherine Green, as she emerges from a moment of reflection and peers intently around her living room. On a plaque by the kitchen are words from Isaiah: “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.” She says the quote has always given her strength in difficult times. […]
On the last stop on their road trip through California, Maria Bustillos and Elizabeth Fladung discuss inequality and gentrification in San Francisco, heart of the tech industry and one of the most unequal cities in the country. This podcast is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series. Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living […]
For Catherine Green, home for the last three decades has been a comfortable apartment in the sprawling 43-unit Boulevard Villa near Crenshaw and Venice boulevards in Mid-City Los Angeles. Her alert gaze, energetic demeanor and perfect posture give no hint of a life that’s spanned 90 years. “I was one of the first people to […]