The acclaimed op-ed contributing writer to the N.Y. Times and L.A. Times examines the past, present and future of racialized housing policy.
Critics say the Oakland A’s waterfront development would cost port jobs and increase pollution and traffic.
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.
