Affordable housing is a serious issue in the Bay Area because the long term residents are being forced out. In 18 months, the average rent for an Oakland apartment increased by 40%. Bay Area residents are forced to leave because they can no longer afford the rising cost of housing. Homelessness has increased at an alarming rate over the past few years. A solution for this problem is the CASA compact. It has laws that can help with affordable housing in the Bay Area.

We want our California assembly members to support the CASA compact. The CASA compact has laws that will help the affordable housing crisis in four main ways: less evictions, more affordable housing, zoning laws that allow for more apartments, and increased rent control. 

Right now you need to earn nearly $50 an hour to afford rent in the Bay Area. This problem affects long time Bay Area residents and low income families by forcing them to move to other cities or neighborhoods. An example of this is a Bay Area resident and her daughter. They used to live in a tiny bungalow in North Berkeley but then the rent doubled and they were forced to move out. Now, in the few years since they left, that neighborhood has become gentrified. All the upper middle class families that used to live there were forced to move out. Techies moved in to where they were living. The wooden fences have now been replaced with gentrification fences. 

Gentrification and the displacement of long term residents mostly happens in poor neighborhoods that are near mass transit. The root causes of this issue are the tech boom and redlining. The tech boom has lead to the problem of gentrification and lack of affordable housing because there is a sudden influx of newly rich people who want to buy houses. The tech boom brought jobs to the Bay Area, but it also raised housing costs. The average cost of a house has risen from $670,000 to $1.6 million in just a few years. We are in a strange situation where a large part of our homeless population has jobs but no where to stay. When tech people come in trying to gentrify the area and make the neighborhoods nicer, they raise the rents and kick long time residents out. Gentrification is based on institutionalized racism. The places that are currently affected by gentrification were affected by redlining in the past. In the 1930’s people of color weren’t allowed to obtain home loans. The cheaper places where they chose to live were referred to by the Federal home Owners’ Loan Corporation as “hazardous” and “declining”. Places affected by redlining aren’t allowed to get loans. This mostly affects people living in certain “undesirable” locations. Redlining mostly targets immigrants and people of color.

The first law CASA is trying to pass says that after a person has lived in a building for one year, they cannot be evicted for arbitrary reasons. Another important law they are trying to pass is an emergency rent cap, which says that you can't raise rent 5% more than inflation. Third, they want any tenant facing eviction to have access to a lawyer, unless the landlord is living in the same unit as the evicted tenant. Forth, they want to have more tiny houses. Tiny houses are small so you can build more of them, which would house more families. There are more laws mentioned in the compact, and if you want to learn more about them visit the CASA  website. 

By signing this petition, you are showing our assembly members that you think affordable housing is an issue that we need to deal with.