The entertainment industry, one of the city’s biggest and most capricious employers, counts a number of car dwellers like Noelle among its workforce. Though the precise figure is unknown, it’s a small but visible population. Of the 45 or so people hosted each night by Safe Parking L.A. — an organization that launched in 2016 […]
In the past bust, it was the fast-growing exurbs, aspirational home of the middle and working classes, that imploded, driving millions of people into foreclosure. Aided by dicey lending practices from the private sector, devastation was most precipitous in states such as California where public policy helped drive to unsustainable levels. This time the biggest […]
Investing billions of dollars in affordable housing and homeless programs in recent years has apparently put the brakes on what had been a surge in California’s homeless population, causing it to dip by 1 percent this year, a federal report released Monday showed. The decline was in sharp contrast to the 2017 statewide count, when […]
San Diego County again had the fourth-largest homeless population in the country and there has been little change in the nationwide number of people on the street and in shelters since last year, according to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The numbers come from an annual one-night […]
The most obvious and most important victims of California’s chronic and still-growing housing shortage are the countless thousands of families that struggle to put affordable roofs over their heads. The shortage has driven prices skyward in a classic example of a supply-demand mismatch and housing costs are the largest single factor in California’s shameful status […]
On Thursday, Mayor London Breed announced the appointment of the city’s first director of housing delivery, a new position created specifically to “ensure that new housing projects are not held up in San Francisco’s complicated approval and permitting system.” . . . While inexperienced builders might assume that once the Planning Commission approves a building, […]
The Central Valley is slowly becoming a society of renters. New numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show that many counties have seen double-digit growth in renter-occupied households and only modest gains in homeownership — if not single-digit declines since 2011. In the period between 2011 and 2017, the number of owner-occupied homes in the […]
The handwritten sign on the front window of the shuttered Blue Fig Cafe last month bade a sad farewell to the days when San Francisco could support an old-fashioned coffee house. The problem that led the eight-year-old Valencia Street cafe to shut down wasn’t a lack of coffee drinkers in the trendy Mission district. Nor […]
California officially became the first state in the nation on Wednesday, Dec. 5 to require homes built in 2020 and later be solar powered. . . . While nobody spoke Wednesday in opposition to the new provisions, the commission received more than 300 letters from around the state opposing the solar mandate because of the […]
Decades of evidence suggest this premise is correct: Asset ownership generally improves the well-being of families and provides an irreplaceable rung on the ladder to a stable place in the middle class. Even so, the share of households owning a home or other assets has fallen over the last decade, particularly among vulnerable groups like […]
A married military couple who had to pay thousands of dollars to boot their tenants in order to move back into their Oakland home say the city law requiring the fee violates their rights. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian property-rights firm based in Sacramento, said Wednesday in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of […]
This poor city is surrounded by the temples of the new American economy that has, in nearly every way imaginable, passed it by. Just outside the northern city limit, Facebook is expanding the blocks-long headquarters it built seven years ago. Google’s offices sit just outside the southern edge, and just a few miles to the […]
San Francisco already has built or conserved over 20,000 units of affordable housing of various types, which is about 5% of all units in the city. Also, about 40% of housing units citywide are rent controlled, making them more affordable than market rate units. With its high land acquisition costs, expensive labor and complex regulation, […]
The homeownership rate in California equaled the national rate from 1950 well into the 1960s. Yet, by 2005, California’s homeownership rate was 13.3 percent below the national average and the 49th lowest in the nation. In the second quarter of 2018, the homeownership rate in California was 54.3 percent, the third lowest in the nation, […]
Piketty (2017) argues in favor of a multidimensional and relational approach to the analysis of wealth inequality. Speci cally, he suggests that social classes should be ana- lyzed in terms of the power and production relations between social groups, not just the percentiles in statistical distributions into which various groups fall. We propose such a […]
