By Anna Daniels
Seventeen hundred dollars. Seventeen hundred dollars has become the standard monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment in City Heights. Over the past six months many residents who were paying around fourteen hundred dollars a month for a two bedroom apartment saw their monthly rents suddenly increase– by hundreds of dollars.
The increase in rents does not reflect a sudden investment by the property owners in additional amenities associated with gentrification. Property owners are raising the rent simply because they can. It’s the same housing stock, sometimes poorly maintained, at rental prices that are out of reach in a community with an average household income of thirty-three thousand dollars per year.
City Heights residents are being displaced, not by gentrification efforts in one of San Diego’s last remaining affordable neighborhoods, but by let’s call it for what it is–opportunism compounded by old fashioned greed. The human toll of our free market has been brutal. On the most extreme margin, some residents whose monthly social security checks, other public support or paychecks can’t be stretched any further, have ended up in the streets and canyons of City Heights.
Families stay crowded in less expensive one bedroom apartments, often with bunk beds for the kids in the living room. For those suddenly hit with an additional three thousand dollars a year increase in rent it has meant a white knuckle search for something more affordable.
For those lucky enough to find something comparable to their old rent, there is still the financial burden of coming up with a deposit and first month rent. That deposit of an additional five hundred or more dollars is a financial crisis for people simply struggling to make ends meet. It often requires borrowing money from payday lenders in the area, which is a descent into the pits of compound interest hell for the working poor.
One family on the block recently moved to the South Bay, even though the mother’s job is in Rancho Bernardo. She told me that it was the only place where she could quickly find something affordable for her family.
One of the most dismaying aspects of the rent increases is that it has allowed slumlords to continue to operate with impunity–at full market rate. The one slum apartment complex on 45th Street provides substandard housing to often desperate people. One apartment operated as a mini-dorm for a while, then as a possibly unlicensed group home for the frail elderly. It most recently served as the first housing for newly relocated non-English speaking refugees.
Tenants have told me of backed up toilets, broken windows and rats. These apartments have been the site of criminal activity. The good tenants leave within six months. My refugee neighbors were paying seventeen hundred dollars a month rent. They moved out this past weekend. They were good neighbors.
Let them move to El Cajon!
The anticipated response to what I have described is that we have not unleashed the power of the market, that this is a text book case of supply and demand. Regulations and uncertainty supposedly fetter the private sector from addressing the critical need for housing.
What the private sector wants to develop and build, of course, is market rate housing. Market rate housing, which is anticipated to keep increasing in terms of rental costs, does not address the need for affordable housing throughout the city and in those communities like City Heights which are currently home to the poorest households.
The private sector tells us in every way imaginable that they really really don’t want to build affordable housing. We shovel public dollars their way and continue to be told that it still doesn’t pencil out for them. The theory goes that by building more and more market rate housing more affordable housing will (eventually) occur when the supply side has been saturated and the demand has dropped.
It was jaw dropping to read the following quote about high end rents of $3,549 to $7,475 a month from our publicly subsidized San Diego Housing Commission whose mission is to “provide affordable, safe and quality homes for low- and moderate-income families and individuals in the City of San Diego.”
San Diego renters may be tempted to panic at the prices of high-end apartments but experts say it will take the pressure off the competitive rental market, which has seen rents increase nearly 3 percent year-over-year and vacancy plummet to 2.46 percent.
Debbie Ruane, senior vice president of the San Diego Housing Commission, said the more apartments that are available to rent, the better — even if they are the high-end downtown variety.
“We think that any type of supply contribution is good right now,” she said. “We’re happy to see cranes in the sky and it is important to add housing where the work is . . . downtown is where the services are and the transit is. It’s refreshing to see construction moving again.”
Although City Heights is a community of renters as opposed to home owners, a politically active and vocal segment of the population here opposes additional high density affordable housing, preferring market rate housing and attendant gentrification. A few people have told me that they support the displacement of current residents and that market rate housing will bring in a better class of people.
I ask people expressing those sentiments “Where are the people supposed to go who can no longer afford the rent here?” My question is always met with a shrug. Some respond “El Cajon”. The individual situation of a displaced person does not merit further thought.
Waiting for the white tea fragrance
While we wait in City Heights for affordable housing to trickle down upon us, we are refreshed, to use Debbie Ruane of the Housing Commission’s term, by imagining these places where we are told affordability begins:
A white tea fragrance fills the air in the lobby of Broadstone Balboa Park.
The low light from antique light bulbs illuminates a rolling “railroad” library, fine handmade furniture, various white flowers displayed throughout and elevators adorned by trestles built to resemble San Diego’s suspension bridges.
Four families in my immediate area have found themselves unable to afford their current rents in the past two months. Three of them have found less expensive housing in other parts of City Heights East. The vacant slum apartment on the corner has a for rent sign. It is unclear at this time whether Code Compliance will open a case.
A whiff of something foul lingers in the air.
Anna Daniels
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It’s obvious that the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) is doing little or nothing to provide affordable housing. There is total reliance on private developers instead of the Housing Commission using hoarded city money in the LIMAHAF (Low and Moderate Income Housing Asset Fund) to build their own units. The SDHC represents the interests of the private sector. How do people get on there? Are they appointed or what? They’re probably all rich Republicans bought off by lobbyists for private developers.
AMEN brother! Opening up a 72 unit hotel/apartment complex downtown.. they celebrate it like it’s a solution! It’s a drop in the bucket.. and that drop is evaporated before it can even touch the water or the bucket!!
they should indict the current head of teh SD Housing Commission for his failure to fulfill teh mission of the organization..
It’s interesting to hear public housing officials use language praising international East Pillage skyscrapers being craned into place, and on the subject of desperately needed affordable rentals “a politically active and vocal segment of the population here opposes additional high density affordable housing.” Are there enough wealthy buyers to fill up San Diego with supposedly free-market Trump Towers?
I know it’s only a matter of time before my rent goes up beyond what I can pay. I’m fine for the time being but I know it wont stay that way. Sadly, I’m looking into leaving SD at some point. Hopefully later than sooner but eventually. This is simply a situation that is not going to get better.
The developers and their apologists keep saying that the critical shortage of housing stock is to blame for high prices–as if somehow they weren’t integral to manufacturing that scarcity.
They had over 20 years of favorable allowances for height and density, but the *margins* were not enough to make it “worth” the effort to rebuild or improve, and so they just sucked at the teat of rising rents.
Now that the market is back to bubble proportions, owners are looking to cash out and working to ensure there’s no code or community standard in place to brake their getting the most for having done their worst.
The author of this story is right: market forces work against affordable housing. Until or unless there are mandatory requirements to incorporate it, there will be no projects that don’t seek to maximize profit at literally all costs.
Very well written and compelling. Too bad the story is a sad one for the renters who have to move.
There are mandatory requirements to incorporate affordable housing. And there are bonuses to including it in lieu of paying the fee to not have to. There are many facets and one does include the lack of supply. They can charge $1700 for a crappy two-bedroom in City Heights because people will pay it. If they couldn’t get anyone in at that price, they’d be forced to lower it. but there isn’t enough supply, so someone will pay it.
There’s a problem, though, with the definition of “affordable” housing included in new developments. A unit is considered “affordable” (and yes, I insist on using air quotes every time I say this word) if it can be paid for by one-third of the earnings of a household making 120% of the regional median. In San Diego, that’s about $73,000, so a unit renting for $2000 would fit the “affordable” housing definition.
I’ll have a deeper dive into the state of the regional housing market and its attendant affordability issues, in which Anna played a significant role, out next week…
Dave, you are quite right in using air quotes around “affordable.” When people talk about affordable housing in the proposed Mission Valley development, it is for people making @75k/yr. It will not be affordable for people in City Heights who commute to Mission Valley and work in the service industry there and make minimum wage or even $48k/yr.
Class and race are bound up in the discussion of affordability but never directly addressed. Segregated communities are the result of not doing so.
Amen!
Certainly it’s class. “Affordable” in San Diego is being defined for people whose incomes annually exceed the national median income by $25,000. Our elected officials have adopted a definition of San Diegans as a people who annually earn $75,000 per household and — therefore — are almost entirely white with Asian sprinkings. I do wish the Kevin Faulconers and Mayor Sanders and the squeeky cleans on our council could re-join America, where the rest of us have been for a long time now.
i think the real problems lies here, “a politically active and vocal segment of the population here opposes additional high density affordable housing, preferring market rate housing and attendant gentrification. A few people have told me that they support the displacement of current residents and that market rate housing will bring in a better class of people.”
The more affluent community members have no problem with the gentrification and eviction of the working poor in City Heights. We need to become more politically active and demand affordable ho using. if in fact there is money with the SDHC, then we need to push them to use it, here in City Heights. the old Central school site – that’s City property. Build there!
Julie, you are quite right to point out the latent power of the City Heights community to address affordable housing needs by virtue of the available public property around the 40th street transit plazas on University and El Cajon. The public property includes more than Central Elementary. There is the old Sally Wong building on the adjacent corner of University as well as small but not insignificant parcels associated with the freeway right of way.
The District 9 election will have far reaching consequences on City Heights. We should ask the candidates to talk about the opportunities that they think this public land offers for developing affordable housing.
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Unfortunately, this happening all over the country. People have been forced to move from homes they have been in for years, even generations. The national Will is not there to protest the lack of affordable housing. The developers pay the paltry fines rather than including fair-priced housing in their buildings. The fines against developers should increase to a level that they won’t shirk their responsibility. They MUST be required to include more affordable housing — much more.
Also, a law should be enacted that prevents a landlord from raising rents more than, say, $25-50/mo. once a year and only if they can show that improvements have been made to the property and that everything is in good working order. In this town, it is the black and brown communities and seniors who are feeling it most acutely.
Who appoints the members of the SDHC? If there were progressive minded members on there, maybe we could get actually affordable housing built? The free market is not going to do it. Let’s face it.
Good article. The city is throwing a symposium on homelessness on Oct 26 from 6-8 at the Town and Country Convention Center. did I ever hear of them throwing a rent control symposium? I know several elder people, priced out of units in PB, that they lived in for over 26 years, that have been demolished for aging facility, or STVR, they are in trouble, living in precarious situations… Is the planning department/ housing department corrupt or just negligent..?
There is no cheap place in all San Diego county, in favor of secondary homes and short term rentals and corporate buyers with more money, and bank loans than any regular person. This is the expanding trend in the city, not just the beach. Be aware.
Thank you for putting the truth out there Anna. I’ve been away so I’m a little late catching up. According to the SDHC, their mission is NOT to help the people of our city to be housed – they are simply the landlord for the city. And as with almost all landlords, their only interest is sucking the most money possible out of tenants for the least investment… and as a government entity they can manipulate the market to keep prices high. Poor families, seniors and workers be damned! And then they get invited to speak about homelessness at forums so they can perpetuate the myth that they are actually trying to help.
Great article! Send me an email if you’re interested in connecting for some grassroots tenant organizing in City Heights!