Evicted, with little time to find new place
Working mother, daughter held in grip of affordability crisis
Welcome to another episode of the top-rated game show, “Who Can Really Afford to Rent in the Bay Area?” I’m your host, It Beats the Heck Out of Me.
In the last episode, the audience got to play the role of a distressed renter attempting to survive in a city where a landlord would brazenly demolish your apartment before you can move out.
In today’s episode, the audience gets to play the role of a distressed renter who has 27 days to find another apartment.
Crystal Chandler doesn’t know where she’s going to live next month. That’s because all of the tenants in the
28-unit building on Parkside Drive in Concord where she lives were served 60-day eviction notices in August by new owners who want to renovate the place.
Chandler, a single mother of a 12-year-old daughter, works as a full-time dental assistant. Chandler told me she earns about $2,600 a month, maybe $2,800 if the dental office is busier than usual. She gets paid hourly, and sometimes she works extra jobs to keep food on the table.
“I don’t want to have to work a steady two or three jobs,” Chandler said. “I’d never see my child. I would never be home.”
She made enough to afford the $1,200, twobedroom apartment she’s lived in for seven years. Barely. “I don’t get any help from the state, because the state says I make too much money,” she said. “The housing is so high they don’t take into account what we pay for rent. This is something that’s a serious issue that’s been going on for such a long time.”
Chandler’s apartment complex and an adjacent single-family home were purchased in July by PTLA Real Estate, a Walnut Creek business that touts itself as a real estate investment and management company. According to the company’s website, the company acquires and manages multifamily real estate properties.
On Aug. 29, Chandler came home from work at 8 p.m. to find a letter taped to her door. She thought PTLA would raise the rent or make her sign a new lease. Instead, she was given the 60-day eviction notice.
She said she has to move by Oct. 28.
Concord doesn’t have rent control or just cause eviction protections for renters, which means renters in the city of about 122,000 can be evicted at any time and without reason.
The average rent in Concord, a city about 30 miles east of San Francisco, is $1,876, according to rentcafe.com, a real estate tracking website. A two-bedroom is $2,048.
According to a report by the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and Central County Regional Group of First 5 Contra Costa, rental prices in Concord have increased 61 percent since 2011.
Peter Wilson, PTLA’s president, told me residents were offered apartments at other properties owned by the company in addition to a $3,000 payment. Some residents have accepted the offer while others like Chandler are attempting to negotiate a better settlement with the company.
“We don’t want families with nowhere to go,” Wilson told me Friday afternoon.
Residents will have the opportunity to move back into the Parkside Drive complex once renovations are completed, but they will have to qualify financially and pay a higher rent. Wilson said a two-bedroom would cost $2,000.
When Chandler, who relocated to the Bay Area from Nebraska in 2010 in search of employment opportunities, first moved into the complex the rent was $925 per month. For the first five years she lived there, the rent wasn’t raised. In the past two years, she said she’s received three rent increases.
Chandler’s a distressed renter with a good full-time job, and she can’t afford to live in the Bay Area. And to move into another apartment — one that, say, costs the Concord average of $1,876, she’d need to come up with nearly $4,000 to cover the first and last month’s rent and security deposit. That’s money she doesn’t have.
Chandler doesn’t know where she’s going to move. She’s considering leaving California.
“I’ve spoken to a couple friends just to see what I could do and maybe stay with them and pay rent with them for a little while, but that’s not a long-term thing,” she said.
Rising rents have displaced many Bay Area residents, even pushing some into homelessness. For example, when Alameda County did its point-intime homeless count, homeless people were asked what might have prevented their homelessness. Forty-two percent of respondents said rent assistance.
A report on protecting the state’s renters released last month by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society argues that rent control is necessary to ensure people like Chandler continue to have access to affordable housing. The report was authored by Nicole Montojo, Stephen Barton and Eli Moore.
“The damage that gets done to people by displacement and by being forced into poverty by high rents taking so much of people’s income is much more severe than people normally seem to think,” Barton told me.
According to their analysis, they estimate that 54 percent of the state’s renters are overburdened by housing costs. What’s more, they found that 73 percent of all jobs in California pay too little to cover rent.
I’m a renter, and those numbers really scared the heck out of me.
“It sounds too light even to say that it’s scary,” Montojo said. “These are the numbers that when we actually realize the scope of the crisis makes it clear we need to respond right now.”
The researchers acknowledge that rent control won’t solve the housing affordability crisis on its own, but Montojo said, “The conversation that’s happening on rent control right now is really limited, and we need to expand it and think more broadly.”
Are landlords willing to listen?
C’mon, folks, you know my name: It Beats the Heck Out of Me. Have a good morning, and please join us next time on “Who Can Really Afford to Rent in the Bay Area?”