"When we hear stories about the
homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute
to the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead
of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage
them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from
this and future generations." JACK HELLNER
BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
THE PRICE WE PAY
HOUSE POOR:
How price hikes hurt the most vulnerable
An exclusive analysis shows the Bay Area’s poorest ZIP codes endured the largest percentage increases in rents and mortgages. Residents say there’s nowhere to go.
A
FFORDING the meager apartment he shares above a pool hall on International Boulevard already was a scramble for Ricardo Lopez. But when the landlord announced last summer that she was nearly doubling the rent, the 60-year-old janitor began a soul-crushing journey: scouting out the squalid homeless encampments proliferating around the city, looking for one he could bear to live in.
He considered the jumble of makeshift shelters that spilled onto E. 12th Street, but people there were sleeping in trees and fighting. He walked through the maze of lean-tos next to Home Depot and the tents pitched at Union Point Park, but mounds of trash swarmed with flies. Just about everywhere, he found dead dogs and live rats.
“It’s really sad,” Lopez said, choking up. “I work to live and there’s nowhere to live.”
Where can you afford?
From Richmond to Redwood City, West Oakland to East San Jose, the Bay Area’s poorest neighborhoods have paid the highest price as costs exploded during the region’s housing shortage, forcing people like Lopez to make the most desperate of choices.
Median rents surged 67 percent across the Bay Area’s 10 highest poverty ZIP codes since the tail end of the recession in 2012, our exclusive analysis of poverty and housing costs revealed. In wealthier neighborhoods? They rose just 30 percent.
The gulf can be extreme. In West Oakland, median rents have soared 80 percent, while in the Peninsula’s upscale 94024 ZIP code in Los Altos, they nudged up a mere 7 percent.
JANE TYSKA/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Big increases, small increases: A comparison of West Oakland and Los Altos
“Here you have people with incomes that are flat or barely moving trying to keep up with a housing market driven by unbelievable growth and enrichment at the top,” said Richard Walker, a retired UC Berkeley geography professor who recently published a book about the changing Bay Area. “It’s just pricing them out by droves. So you have this massive displacement: Either landlords evict them, or they raise the rents.”
Powerful forces have converged on those at the bottom: The wildly uneven damages of the foreclosure crisis, the cost run-ups that followed and the lopsided spoils of the tech boom have created ever-expanding extremes of wealth and poverty throughout the Bay Area.
In the second installment of our series examining the price we pay to live in the Bay Area, we took a deep dive into some of the Bay Area’s poorest neighborhoods and found widespread inequality, heightened tensions and deep fears among people who are losing their white-knuckle grip on the place they call home.
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
A homeless encampment near the West Oakland BART station sits in the shadow of new housing construction in October of 2019.
In West Oakland, the poor who lost many of their neighbors during the foreclosure crisis are frustrated that their community has changed too much, while newcomers who expected “the next Brooklyn” are disappointed it hasn’t changed enough.
In East Oakland, renters searching for affordable housing are placed on years-long waiting lists, while those in the market for luxury apartments with rooftop pools and pet spas are beckoned with $1,000 move-in bonuses and six weeks free rent.
In East San Jose, grown children are moving back home — not for a free place to stay, like their more affluent friends — but to help their parents pay their escalating rents.
“You see this grating, this sense of grinding change right smack on top of the people who are at widely different income levels with very different needs,” said Maeve Brown, executive director of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates in Oakland.
To explore the impact the housing crisis has had in poor neighborhoods, we looked at the percentage of people in each Bay Area ZIP code making 200 percent or less of the federal poverty level — about $50,000 a year for a family of four — a threshold experts recommend to account for the Bay Area’s high costs. We then analyzed affordability, neighborhood by neighborhood, using census data on income levels and annual mortgage and rent estimates from 2012 to today from real estate analytics firm Zillow.
- Hardest hit: Poor neighborhoods saw the biggest increases, and richer neighborhoods saw the smallest. As median rents soared in the highest poverty neighborhoods, so did the hurdles for potential buyers. During the dramatic run-up in housing costs that began in 2012, median mortgage payments in the poorest one-fifth of Bay Area neighborhoods increased, on average, nearly 80 percent — twice the rate in the Bay Area’s lowest poverty ZIP codes. Even though rents and housing prices have flattened this year, they have provided little relief to poor families trying to survive in one of the nation’s most expensive markets.
- Lagging incomes: Since the Great Recession, incomes among the top 5 percent of Bay Area households have shot up at nearly twice the rate of lower-wage households and are now 30 times higher, on average, than incomes for the bottom 20 percent. With those smaller wage gains and greater housing increases, poor residents are paying increasingly more of their income for shelter than everyone else.
- Ground Zero: High poverty and skyrocketing housing costs came together with devastating force in Oakland. No other city had more neighborhoods in the very poorest Bay Area ZIP codes — six out of 10 — or more neighborhoods where median mortgage payments doubled.
BAY AREA’S POOREST NEIGHBORHOODS HIT HARDEST
We analyzed more than 225 ZIP codes in the nine-county Bay Area and Santa Cruz, examining increases in median mortgage payments and rents since 2012. We then ranked the ZIP codes based on the share of the population living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty rate.
MORTGAGE INCREASE
Median mortgage payments in the poorest one-fifth of Bay Area neighborhoods increased, on average, nearly 80 percent — twice the rate in the lowest poverty ZIP codes.
Price change
2012 to 2019
24% or under
25% - 49%
50% - 74%
75% or greater
Highest poverty areas
Median mortgage
increase
2012-2019
increase
2012-2019
Lowest poverty areas
Median mortgage
increase
2012-2019
increase
2012-2019
RENT INCREASE
Median rent in the poorest one-fifth of Bay Area neighborhoods increased, on average, 50 percent compared to 30 percent in the lowest poverty ZIP codes.
Price change
2012 to 2019
Under 24%
25% - 49%
50% - 74%
75% or greater
Highest poverty areas
Median rent
increase
2012-2019
increase
2012-2019
Lowest poverty areas
Median rent
increase
2012-2019
increase
2012-2019
Source: Zillow.com and U.S. Census
PAI/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
How did this happen? The answer starts with supply and demand. Between 2010 and 2016, the nine-county region added just one housing unit for every 11 jobs created, according to the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
By then, many urban neighborhoods already had been roiled by the foreclosure crisis. High-interest, high-fee mortgages were wiping out long-time owners and overextended newcomers whose homes were auctioned on the courthouse steps.
Lured by rock-bottom prices — old Victorians in West Oakland could be scooped up for less than $150,000 — investors with a bucket of paint and a Home Depot kitchen remodel could easily double their money. In Oakland alone, cash-rich investors purchased 42 percent of the 10,508 homes that went into foreclosure between January 2007 and October 2011, according to the Urban Strategy Council.
Their timing was perfect: The recession was ending, and the tech economy was heating up again just as homes were put back on the market for sale or rent. A new generation of well-paid workers flocked to urban neighborhoods close to their jobs where housing costs, compared to San Francisco, were bargains.
For low-income workers who struggled to hold on, those prices were a fortune. While rent control laws protect tenants living in older apartment buildings, they don’t apply to scores of poor families living in single-family homes that dominate Oakland and San Jose.
And they don’t apply to Lopez’s apartment above the pool hall, where his landlord intended to raise the rent on his room from $450 to $800 a month. He’s lucky to bring home $1,200 a month, tops, he said, working as a restaurant janitor two days a week and hustling to find handyman jobs the others.
“I’m hard working and I’m not young anymore to be moving around,” Lopez said. “I feel incompetent. That’s what hurts.”
HOW MUCH DID THE MORTGAGE OR RENT IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE?
Browse through the database of the Bay Area and Santa Cruz County or enter a ZIP or city to see how much the median mortgage and rent for that area has changed from 2012 to 2019.
BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
94607, West Oakland
Population: 26,904
Percent in poverty: 50 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +80 percent
Median mortgage increase: +90 percent
Percent in poverty: 50 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +80 percent
Median mortgage increase: +90 percent
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Long-time community activist Marilyn Williams in her West Oakland neighborhood, where she has lost many friends to foreclosures and gentrification. “I can point house to house to house and tell you what happened,” she said.
Marilyn Williams was still wearing her white terry cloth bathrobe when she opened the front curtains of her West Oakland home and peeked out the window. It was about 2011, back when homes were foreclosing at a relentless pace, and the couple who owned the old barbershop across the street had just lost the business.
Williams isn’t sure what compelled her, but “something just said go look.” That’s when she spotted someone painting over the barbershop’s “Wall of Remembrance” with its half-dozen portraits of beloved neighbors. The contractor’s paint roller was just heading toward a large portrait of musician Sedric Gadson, whose parents commissioned the image, when Williams bolted.
“I literally ran out of the house in my bathrobe and said, ‘No, no, you can’t paint over that. Who told you to do that?’” she said. “I almost felt like it was the beginning of the end of our presence in that area. There was a symbolism to it, like we’re going to paint over these black faces and nobody will ever know they were there.”
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
A mural of Sedric Gadson, an aspiring rapper shot to death in 2009, was narrowly spared after neighbor Marilyn Williams ran outside to stop a worker painter who had been hired by the building’s new owner to paint over West Oakland’s “Wall of Remembrance.”
Williams rescued the rest of the mural. But now, eight years later, she’s still trying to save her neighborhood from the forces of gentrification and displacement changing the face of West Oakland.
Looking around, it’s hard to imagine her battle isn’t already lost.
Even Williams, who has lived here for 35 years, had trouble coming up with names of old-timers still struggling to pay market rent. “You missed them,” the 65-year-old retired preschool teacher said in her lilting voice. “They’re already gone.”
As the first BART stop across the bay from San Francisco, this community that was once the headquarters of the Black Panther Party and an epicenter of drugs and violence is on the front lines of urban transformation. Over the past decade, throngs of tech workers who could no longer afford apartments on Nob Hill began moving here — and driving up prices.
Since 2012, West Oakland has experienced some of the highest increases in housing prices in the Bay Area, with median rents rising from $1,583 in 2012 to $2,846 this year, and median mortgage payments spiking from $1,300 to $2,470, according to our analysis.
RON RIESTERER/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP ARCHIVE
William Brent raises his fist at a Black Panther 1968 rally at Lakeside Park in Oakland. The Black Panthers considered West Oakland their headquarters; it was also the place where one of their founders was killed.
RAY CHAVEZ/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Commuters exiting the West Oakland BART station, the first stop across the bay from San Francisco.
Get the latest on the housing crisis
The prices are unbelievable to Williams, a former Head Start teacher who remembers when lines on street corners were so long to buy heroin that her school wove wooden slates through chain link fences to block the children’s view.
“A million-dollar home in West Oakland was so unheard of not too long ago,” she said. “It was like a joke, on these ragged streets where there are drive-bys? Get lost! But that is the norm now. It is absolutely the norm.”
Still, half the residents here live in poverty — far more than the Bay Area’s overall average of 21 percent. Those who remain are often living in coveted subsidized housing, staying with relatives or, in the worst cases, ending up homeless, living in tents just blocks from their childhood homes.
Mostly, they’re being replaced by those who can afford to buy. According to Carolina Reid at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing, 90 percent of borrowers buying homes in Alameda County’s low-income census tracts in 2017 were middle or upper income. That was up from 65 percent in 2013.
The effect is stark: Newly remodeled Victorians butt up to decrepit ones, and homeless encampments spring up next to freshly turfed soccer fields. Tech workers wearing ear buds and backpacks ride electric scooters home from the BART station, passing fresh fences and gates so tall you can barely see the luxury SUVs parked behind them.
As West Oaklander Carolina Santos put it, “I’ve never seen so many white folks walking their dogs at night time.”
RAY CHAVEZ/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Old Victorians and modern homes share the block in West Oakland, where old-timers believe too much has changed over the past decade, but newcomers worry it hasn’t changed enough.
Black residents are still the largest group among the nearly 27,000 people in this ZIP code, making up 32 percent of the population, followed by Asian residents at 28 percent and white residents at 21 percent. But between 2012 and 2017 alone, the black population in West Oakland dropped nearly 9 percent, while the number of white residents grew 42 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
That’s a dynamic playing out citywide: Since 1990, some 66,000 black residents — more than the entire population of Santa Cruz — have left Oakland. Mount Zion Missionary Church in West Oakland, where five choirs once sang from the balconies, has lost at least a third of its congregation in the last two decades.
“I don’t have the answer. All I know is that if the housing doesn’t exist, there’s no place for people to go,” Williams said. “I don’t want to paint a negative picture of my home, but people are broken-hearted.”
From her front window, Williams has watched the whole sad cycle. “I’ve lost about 20 neighbors. I can point house to house to house and tell you what happened.”
Across the street, after years of the landlord “always hassling” an elderly woman with a Section 8 subsidized housing voucher, new tenants willing to pay $4,000 a month moved in. Next door, the duplex of a cab driver sold at auction for $658,000 and was flipped for $1.2 million last spring. Now, half the building is being rented as an AirBnB for $160 a night.
Not all the newcomers taking their place feel safe or welcome, however.
Morgan Solem, 38, who had lived in gentrifying Brooklyn, moved here in 2014 with her husband, who works in tech sales. They bought a newly-renovated three-bedroom home for $530,000 from an investor who nabbed it five months earlier for about half that. For years, it had been the family home of an elderly black couple who ran a popular restaurant out of the garage selling burgers and fried chicken. The house is now worth close to $800,000, according to Zillow.
But staying home with her 3-year-old son, Solem found a crack pipe and used toilet paper in her backyard. The house has been tagged with graffiti, and their license plate was stolen. She’s reluctant to go to the nearby park, where addicts discard needles.
“It feels new, and it doesn’t feel great,” Solem said. “I don’t want everyone here to be a tech bro, and I don’t want everyone to be old school with no newcomers. I want all backgrounds. All I ask is that everyone wants the neighborhood to be safe and clean.”
Gentrification has brought some improvements.
Neill Sullivan of REO Homes, the developer who purchased more than 100 West Oakland houses at fire sale prices during the foreclosure crisis, including the “Wall of Remembrance” building when it was painted, has partnered with community groups to catch and report illegal dumping and graffitti, donated to schools and churches, and turned an old building into the Sullivan Community Space. He commissioned the same artist whose mural was nearly destroyed to paint a new one on an 8th Street building.
While some view Sullivan as an unwelcome source of change, Williams appreciates his gestures. But he certainly hasn’t solved all the problems he and unrelenting market forces helped create. And his efforts won’t bring back her neighbors.
Williams has just to cruise past “the old men’s corner” at the intersection of Center and 16th streets to see how much has been lost. More than a dozen oddball chairs, from straight backs to recliners and rockers, wrapped around the sidewalk for years.
“You could pass that corner at any time, and there would be 10 older men there,” she said. Last summer, “there was just one.”
Last week, there were none. A construction fence surrounded the property.
Every chair, every man, was gone.
GOOGLE STREETVIEW AND DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
The changes at the “old men’s corner” at Center and 16th streets in West Oakland from 2011 to 2019.
94601, Fruitvale
Population: 50,763
Percent in poverty: 54 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +71 percent
Median mortgage increase: +138 percent
Percent in poverty: 54 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +71 percent
Median mortgage increase: +138 percent
RAY CHAVEZ/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Housing advocate Emmanuel Sanchez searches for leads on housing, hunting for flyers that advertise spaces his low-income clients might be able to afford.
Emmanuel Sanchez has an office job at The Unity Council on Fruitvale Avenue, where he’s in charge of finding housing for more than 100 low-income people. But in this hotly competitive market, the usual computer searches are coming up dry.
The Bay Area may be the cradle of tech innovation, but Sanchez is resorting to old-fashioned tactics to get the job done.
“I literally walk the streets,” he said. “It’s part of my morning routine.”
He drops into laundromats looking for home-made flyers listing spare rooms to rent and stops at lamp posts and tree trunks, searching for tacked-up notices advertising couches to sleep on for $300 a month. He tears off the phone numbers across the bottom and slips them into his pocket.
“It’s demoralizing. It’s exhausting,” Sanchez said. “The system has failed, so we’re trying to patch as much as we can. But it’s just overflowing.”
If West Oakland has given way to gentrification and displacement, Fruitvale, five miles to the southeast, is nearing the tipping point.
Here in the heavily Hispanic immigrant neighborhood where Ricardo Lopez scouted out homeless encampments, poor residents know all too well that one wrong move or a landlord’s whim could toss them to the streets.
RAY CHAVEZ/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
To make ends meet, people sort through used items at a mini flea market on the corner of 34th Avenue and E. 17th Street.
“
I stood on the corner of High Street and East 14th, and realized I had nowhere to go. All I could do was cry.
”
-Janice Tyler
Oakland native who was facing homelessness
Elvia Olvera lives that fear. She works as a property manager in Fruitvale and, with her husband, pays $2,150 a month for a two-bedroom cottage they share with their three daughters. The owner recently informed them he is considering selling.
“We always try to make him happy so he won’t sell the house. We always try to keep it clean,” Olvera said. “We don’t bother him at all for any repairs. We do it ourselves. We try to do everything so we can stay here.”
Finding a comparable two-bedroom house could cost well over $3,000. But with one daughter graduating from high school this spring, how can they send her to college, much less pay higher rent?
“Where else are we going to go?” she asked.
Since 2012, median rents for a two-bedroom apartment here surged from $1,418 to $2,429. That would require an annual income of $97,200 — more than double the median household income in Fruitvale — to be affordable if a family spends no more than 30 percent of their pretax income on housing, a commonly recommended threshold.
Seeking to push back the tide, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in October imposing annual rent caps at 5 percent plus inflation on most older apartment buildings. But that only helps when you have a stable place already, and that’s tough to find here: Last spring, more than 4,000 people signed up for 94 units at a subsidized housing complex in Fruitvale.
JANE TYSKA/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
A “Gntrified” billboard, erected by a nonprofit called Housing is a Human Right, looms over Fruitvale in November 2019, where housing costs have skyrocketed since the Great Recession.
Janice Tyler had no choice but to put her name on that waiting list — and countless others. In 2014, she was renting a well-tended duplex with a garage and backyard in the bustling Laurel District near Mills College for $1,000 a month. Then she moved to Stockton with her mother for 10 months to take care of her dying sister. When they returned, rents they encountered had doubled to $2,000, the same amount she had been taking home each month as a substitute school receptionist and clerk
The moment it hit her — the direness of her situation — still chokes her up.
“I stood on the corner of High Street and East 14th,” she said, “and realized I had nowhere to go. All I could do was cry.”
For the next five years, this woman in her 50s, this Oakland native who grew up with a fear of cramped spaces, lived in her younger brother’s old brown minivan. She shared it first with her mother, who was showing signs of dementia, then with her brother. Each night, they took turns sleeping on the bench seat in back, and each morning they took showers at a fitness center — the employees would let them in if they got there early.
She never told her coworkers she was homeless.
“It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I have pride.”
Tyler had plenty of company. Over the past two years, Oakland’s homeless population grew by 47 percent to 4,000.
In this neighborhood best known as the site of the fatal Ghost Ship warehouse fire where 36 young people died in 2016, gun violence and unemployment are dropping. At the nearby Fruitvale BART station, the subject of a Hollywood movie about the fatal police shooting of unarmed Oscar Grant, a new transit village has become a national model. But despite promises and plans to build more affordable housing, homelessness still plagues the area, as it does much of Oakland’s flatlands.
In desperation, both Tyler the receptionist and Lopez the janitor appealed for help to The Unity Council, the organization where Emmanuel Sanchez works.
But there was little the housing advocate could do for Lopez, who needed an immediate alternative to his apartment above the bar, which had been tagged by graffiti so many times that the wood siding had been repainted several shades of yellow.
Ultimately, Lopez got a reprieve after his roommate sought legal help and the landlord agreed to add a third tenant and charge each of them $600 a month. It was the best Lopez could hope for.
Tyler, meanwhile, suffered on the streets for years, making about $18 an hour at a new school job. She applied to nearly three dozen housing complexes on her own, adding her name to thousands of others on waiting lists. Sanchez helped her apply to a dozen more, but it all seemed futile.
And then something happened, a miracle, a fluke. In September — after five years of hauling a toothbrush and a change of clothes in bags with her everywhere she went — Tyler received a call from a woman at a subsidized senior living building off Bancroft Avenue.
“She was the first person in five years who didn’t tell me ‘No.’ ” Tyler said. The one-bedroom apartment had no furniture — no chair, no dresser, no table, no bed. But for Tyler, it was perfect. Sanchez, who had seen so little success lately, joined her when she received the key and opened the door.
“I just laid in the center of the floor and listened to the sounds around me, without anything, no cover or nothing,” Tyler said. “It was mine. It was somewhere I could call my own.”
Previous exclusives and special investigations
95116, East San Jose
Population: 56,243
Percent in poverty: 42 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +34 percent
Median mortgage increase: +74 percent
Percent in poverty: 42 percent
Average rent increase since 2012: +34 percent
Median mortgage increase: +74 percent
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Community organizer Olivia Ortiz speaks during a rally at San Jose City Hall to support tenants’ rights and affordable housing in her Mayfair neighborhood on Aug. 16, 2019, in San Jose, Calif. “Politicians have to think about us, who work in the restaurants and as janitors,” she said.
Olivia Ortiz pulls up to the small ranch-style house that once belonged to civil rights leader Cesar Chavez and takes in the historical marker — a brick pillar and plaque neatly planted on the front lawn.
It’s a touchstone for Ortiz, a community organizer in East San Jose’s Mayfair district who lives nearby. Once a barrio with unpaved streets and open sewers, the neighborhood became known as “Sal Si Puedes,” or “Get out if you can.” But now, with rents rising and home prices out of reach, she and her “Vecinos Activos,” or neighborhood activists, are drawing on Chavez’s legacy and fighting to stay here if they can.
“I can’t see myself somewhere else,” Ortiz, 41, said. Here at the base of the eastern foothills, she and her fellow Latinos and immigrants often celebrate cultural events at the Mexican Heritage Plaza on Alum Rock Avenue and spend Sundays at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church nearby. “I feel like I can be me here. That’s how most people feel. They’re holding on to home.”
If Fruitvale in East Oakland is the tipping point of the housing crisis, Mayfair is the working poor’s last stand.
From triple bunking with extended family members to raising their voices at San Jose City Hall for tenants rights and affordable housing, they are doing everything they can to keep rooted here.
“Politicians have to think about us, who work in the restaurants and as janitors,” said Ortiz, who took a second job as an overnight server at IHOP last summer to help pay the mortgage on the duplex she shares with family. “We count too, not just who works in high tech. We’re part of San Jose.”
Mayfair and Little Portugal, which surrounds the twin-towered Five Wounds Catholic Church on the west side of Highway 101, make up one of the poorest ZIP codes in San Jose. The median family income here is $56,299, but you would need to make $106,500 to afford the market-rate rent of $2,662.
Ortiz and others worry it could get worse.
Google’s plan to build a colossal campus on the edge of downtown has many working-poor families fearing that an onslaught of highly-paid employees looking for housing will finally push them out.
Determined to prove that political power is not reserved for wealthy neighborhoods, numerous grassroots groups, including Somos Mayfair where Ortiz works, have mobilized. They are demanding that locals get preference for affordable housing units in their neighborhoods. In a cherished victory — and a first — residents of East San Jose gained not one but two seats on the city Planning Commission that gives first approval on housing projects.
A year ago, eight activists chained themselves to seats in the City Council chambers to protest secrecy surrounding Google’s purchase of city-owned land.
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
“Vecinos Activos,” or neighborhood activists, in Mayfair make calls about a petition urging the City of San Jose to add more affordable housing and protect low-income residents in East San Jose.
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Community organizer Olivia Ortiz took a second job last summer to help pay the mortgage on the duplex she shares with family.
“
I can’t see myself somewhere else. I feel like I can be me here. That’s how most people feel. They’re holding on to home.
”
-Olivia Ortiz
Community organizer in East San Jose's Mayfair district
Community organizers didn’t come close to stopping Google’s project, but they’re working to have a bigger say in how it unfolds — with some success. Google announced last summer it was pledging $1 billion to help ease the Bay Area’s housing problem, including building affordable housing as part of its San Jose project.
“I know they’re coming. It’s inevitable,” said Jacqueline Franco, who is one of 10 relatives renting one side of a duplex. “But we want a way to make sure people from our community can get into those Google jobs so we can afford the rent.”
To get a sense of what it takes to stay here, just drive through the neighborhoods of tightly packed houses on small lots branching off Alum Rock Avenue. Swarms of parked cars crowd four and six deep in driveways, on front lawns, in side yards and bumper to bumper along the street. As residents come and go for their round-the-clock work shifts, the cars rotate like Rubik’s Cubes in front of each house.
In this ZIP code, single-family homes are rarely for single families anymore. Extended family members share homes with a rotating cast of renters, often converting living rooms, garages and even laundry rooms into sleeping spaces.
And young adults who would rather be making their own way in the world are moving back to help their struggling parents pay the escalating rent or mortgage on houses they can no longer afford without help from their children.
Delma Hernandez, 26, and her family pay $3,800 a month for the four-bedroom home the family of six has lived in for 15 years. Her parents rented out rooms to strangers for a while, but that brought its own set of difficulties, she said. So the kids are all home again.
“My older sister, younger sister and brother — all of us are contributing,” said Hernandez, who until recently was living with friends. Her dad works as an elementary school teacher and her mom as a housekeeper. “Before, I had to pay my rent plus help my parents, but that’s too difficult.”
Franco’s parents couldn’t afford the rent on their duplex alone, either. It has jumped from $2,300 to $3,000 over the past five years — and that’s in a place with a breakfast nook that only seats four, no yard and one bathroom for 10 people. “It’s chaotic,” she said. “You can imagine. The line gets long.”
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Mayfair neighborhood resident Jacqueline Franco and her three daughters (from left) Angela, 8, Alaina, 1, and Amely, 6, spend time together before bedtime. They are four of 10 extended relatives who share the small home with one-bathroom to help make ends meet.
She doubts the family will be able to afford further increases — no matter how hard they are working. Her mother has the most reliable income of $50,000 a year working at a nut factory. Her husband is lucky to make $40,000 doing construction work, and he was laid off for a time recently. Her father’s job as a security guard pays $25 an hour, but he couldn’t work for an extended period last year after he was shot in the leg trying to stop a fight. The $1,000 she brings home a month in her community work doesn’t go far.
“We all make good money,” she said, “but it’s not enough.”
Something always comes up — car repairs, emergency room visits, a broken refrigerator. When her husband’s great-grandmother died last summer and they needed to help with funeral expenses, they dipped into the piggy bank of their two older daughters, Angela and Amely, just 8 and 6.
It’s a blue tin box covered in super heroes that the girls keep hidden under the twin bed they share in a sitting room, their space separated from the living area by a black curtain for privacy. They had saved more than $100 in dollar bills, quarters, pennies and Chuck E. Cheese coins — and now they’re starting over. So far, by finding quarters under the cushions and earning $1 for massaging their father’s back, they’re up to $15.
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Jacqueline Franco's two daughters keep the money they’re saving to buy a new home in a tin can, along with their Chuck E. Cheese coins.
Their mother has suggested they use it to buy Christmas presents. But the sisters have a singular goal.
“I really hope we have enough money to buy a house at the end of the year,” Angela said. She and her sister would love a backyard to play with their dog — not just the asphalt driveway packed with cars — and a bedroom with a door. An extra bathroom “just for kids” would be a bonus, she said.
As they continue collecting coins, Angela and Amely remain dutiful students at Cesar Chavez Elementary, where they have learned the rallying cry of its famous namesake: si se puede.
You don’t have to ask them twice what it means.
“It means ‘yes you can,’” Angela said. “It means you can do anything if you believe it.”
Their mother knows that buying a house — or even renting a place of their own — is no more than a fantasy. But she can’t bring herself to discourage them. The struggles of real life will come soon enough for this next generation — wherever they may end up.
— Katy Murphy contributed to this report
DAI SUGANO/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Amely Aguirre, 6, left, and Angela Aguirre, 8, share a twin bed in a nook separated by a curtain from the rest of the living room.
End of PART II. Part III coming soon.
Part III:
Coming soon
Coming soon
Julia Prodis Sulek has been a general assignment reporter for the Bay Area News Group, based in San Jose, her hometown, since the late 1990s. She has covered everything from plane crashes to presidential campaigns, murder trials to immigration debates. Her specialty is narrative storytelling. Follow Julia Prodis Sulek at @juliasulek.
Kaitlyn Bartley is a data reporter for the Bay Area News Group. Previously, she covered the venture capital industry for Venture Capital Journal and local news for the Half Moon Bay Review. She is a Bay Area native and graduated from Stanford University's data journalism M.A. program. Follow Kaitlyn Bartley on Twitter at @KaitlynLandgraf.
Assistant Managing Editor Housing/Living: Rebecca SalnerManaging Editor of Visuals: Sarah DussaultPicture Editors: Laura Oda and Dai Sugano
Photo and Video: Ray Chavez, Dai Sugano, Jane Tyska and Randy VazquezGraphics Director and Online Designer: PaiGraphic artist: Jeff Durham
Photo and Video: Ray Chavez, Dai Sugano, Jane Tyska and Randy VazquezGraphics Director and Online Designer: PaiGraphic artist: Jeff Durham
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