Rising rents causing divisions
Communities of color displaced by high costs, study finds, leading to renewed segregation
Rising Bay Area rents have taken the heaviest toll on minority communities, displacing more low-income black, Latino and Asian residents than poor white residents, according to a new study.
The study from the California Housing Partnership of the nine-county Bay Area found that a 30 percent increase in rents from 2000 to 2015 was tied to a 28 percent loss in the number of poor households of color but no changes in white households.
Researchers and advocates say the trend is related to greater wealth inequality and less social mobility in the Bay Area: Residents priced out of neighborhoods near employment centers are often forced into more affordable communities with fewer jobs, lower-quality schools and fewer opportunities for children.
“Communities of color over many decades have faced the daunting challenges of unstable housing,” said Jennifer Martinez of the faithbased PICO California, which works with local affordable housing groups. “This is turning the heat up on a problem that is long overdue for discussions and solutions.”
Median rent in the Bay Area has risen regularly during the past five years. The typical rent for a two-bedroom apartment in San Jose is $2,620, and in Oakland it’s $2,200, according to Apartment List. That’s far above the U.S. median rent for a two-bedroom of $1,170.
Dan Rinzler, co-author of the report, said that a long-standing pattern of segregation has been reshuffled within the Bay Area, but that the lines between white communities and communities of color remain.
“Race seems to be a much larger determinant than income” on where people rent, he said.
The study found significant displacement of low-income black residents from flatland neighborhoods in Oakland and Berkeley, as well as in East Palo Alto, Richmond and
Vallejo. Low-income Asian and Latino communities in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco also have shrunk.
Just over half of low-income black households in 2015 were in segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods, a “substantial increase” from the previous decade, the study found. Much of the resegregation came as black residents were priced out of historically African-American neighborhoods and moved to the outer edges of the Bay Area.
At the same time, low-income white families were seven times more likely to live in wealthier neighborhoods than were moderateand higher-income black families, the study found.
The study suggests rising apartment rents in the region are pushing black and Latino residents farther from job centers and into outer suburbs and the Central Valley. Low-income Latino communities in Sonoma and Marin counties roughly doubled during the period of the study.
“This is a phenomenon that’s touching all parts of the Bay Area and state,” said Sam Tepperman-Gelfant,
an attorney for Public Advocates, a nonprofit working with social welfare groups across the region.
Government policies favoring suburban development and highways over high-density homes and transit have been tools for segregating society, Tepperman-Gelfant said. Housing for low-income communities is more often located near environmental risks, including freeways and industrial parks, he said.
East Palo Alto, founded about 30 years ago as a haven for working-class black families, is now hemmed in between a growing Facebook
campus and an expanding Google in Mountain View. The rapid gentrification by tech workers has pushed median home values to just under $1 million, even as many former residents have been forced out of the region, or to living in vehicles and RVs.
Tameeka Bennett, an East Palo Alto native, said newcomers vigorously complain on Nextdoor about graffiti but don’t rally to improve the struggling school district.
Gentrification has moved even more swiftly in the past few years, she said.
“It’s happening at an alarming rate,” Bennett
said. “Our families have no place to go.”
Bennett, former executive director of East Palo Alto’s Youth United for Community Action, said many working-class families have moved to Stockton and Tracy, where rents are cheaper, and make long commutes back into the Bay Area where they work.
“It’s really affecting their quality of life,” she said.
The study also found rising rents pushing poor residents beyond the breaking point — about one-third of low-income residents of color moving in 2015 left the region completely.
Other researchers have found that the punishing Bay Area housing market has made it increasingly difficult for working families. The population of renters in San Jose rose 24 percent from 2000 to 2015, according to a study by Working Partnerships USA.
The share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing also has risen, particularly among women of color, according to Working Partnerships. San Jose has no neighborhoods affordable to a couple working two full-time minimum wage jobs.