By Bay City News Service Aug 13, 2019
This past May, residents of the 64-unit Strawberry Hill complex in Vallejo came home to find a troubling notice on their doors. Beginning in June, their rent was going to nearly double. The new owners of the apartment complex, San Francisco-based The Reliant Group, had plans to renovate the building.
Tenants, panicked over losing their homes, and the Vallejo Housing Justice Coalition went to Mayor Bob Sampayan and the City Council, which passed an emergency ordinance July 16 to provide eviction protection, a rent rollback and a ban on rent increases above 10 percent a year.
The ordinance was meant to give the tenants and Reliant more time to negotiate upcoming changes and renovations. It also sent a powerful message to property owners about how cities can and should respond to the current housing crisis in the Bay Area, according to Melissa Jones, executive director of the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII).
“You can’t come in here and destabilize a hundred families at a time,” said Jones, whose group, a coalition of 11 public health departments in the Bay Area, studies new ways to advance health equity in the region.
The shifting housing market in Vallejo is one example among many showing how families in the Bay Area struggle to cover housing costs. The Bay Area as a region is not building fast enough to meet the growing need for affordable housing and even the existing stock of available units are becoming out of reach for families, she said.
Between 2000 and 2015, the percent of renters burdened by the cost of housing increased from 41 percent to 50 percent in the nine counties that make up the Bay Area, according to data collected by the Bay Area Equity Atlas, a partnership between PolicyLink, the San Francisco Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity.
The indicator measuring the housing burden is based on a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definition, which is a household that is spending more than 30 percent of its total income on housing needs such as rent, utilities or mortgage payments.
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