Long Beach Gets Gentrified
Driving through downtown Long Beach, it’s impossible to miss the massive development projects every few blocks. The skyline is transforming from rows of apartment buildings and houses built mostly between 1900 and 1950, to the colossal condominium projects of today.
Long Beach is being rapidly gentrified and as the older buildings get torn down or renovated with luxury face lifts, the people that have lived in them for decades are getting pushed out or priced out.
According to Ben Novotny, of the KCET series City Rising, “Over the past six years, the average rent in Long Beach has risen by an alarming 55%, from $1,392 to $2,164. This can be attributed to gentrification since the city’s vacancy rate is a measly 2%.”
Due to the rapidly rising cost of housing and relatively flat wages, families, the elderly, the disabled, and students- many with nowhere to go, with little recourse, sometimes end up homeless.
Long Beach is prime pickings for speculators, with its combination of older buildings, majority renter population and lack of rent control. Money from outside the city has flooded in as investors buy up properties and raise rents to rates unaffordable to most of the area’s long-time residents.
Meanwhile, people across the city are being faced with hard choices like whether or not to move farther away from their workplaces and their children’s schools or whether to move in with family, if they are lucky enough to have the option.
According to Andrew Woo of Rentonomics, ‘To better understand how rents and affordability have changed over time, we analyzed Census data from 1960–2014 and found that inflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64%, but real household incomes only increased by 18%.”
This trend has only worsened as gentrification has taken hold of previously affordable cities like Denver, Sacramento and Atlanta. Anti-rent control arguments claim that rent control leads to less available housing, which drives up the cost of rent in the long run and causes urban blight as tenants fail to invest in their properties, but the evidence doesn’t bear that out.
According to Joshua Mason, economics professor at Roosevelt University, “rent regulations give tenants a greater stake in their community and incentivize them to put time, energy, and even money into their homes. Without that kind of security in their occupancy, there is little return for contributing to the neighborhood and building relationships in the surrounding blocks.”
He believes that, “If we think that income diverse, stable neighborhoods, where people are not forced to move every few years, [are worth preserving] then we collectively have an interest in stabilizing the neighborhood.”
Take the case of Luti Tercero, of Highland Park, Los Angeles. Tercero and her husband moved into their rent-controlled apartment building back in 1994 and have been managing it ever since.
A couple of years back she and her husband separated, leaving her to manage and maintain the building on her own.
She kept up with it for a while but ended up needing more help and finally, this past November, decided to resign from her position as manager.
Several days later she received a certified letter in the mail stating that she had 60 days to vacate her apartment. That’s when her daughter called the Housing Department.
As it turned out, under LA’s rent control ordinance, Tercero is considered a ‘protected class of renter,’ those who have lived in their units for 10 years or more. The Housing Department contacted the building’s owner and informed them that they were required to send Tercero an apology letter and to send a copy of that letter, via certified mail, back to the Housing Department.
Now, contrast that with Long Beach resident and breast cancer survivor, Della Ann Maciel, who finally qualified for a Section 8 housing voucher back in 2016 after being on the waiting list for 20 years. She has been in her current residence for just two years and was recently served a ‘Notice to Move’ due to the sale of the building.
Maciel said, “You’re not secure in your own Section 8 housing. It’s not as secure as everybody thinks it is because you’re on Section 8, no, a lot of times it’s going to affect us first rather than a regular person who is renting.” It’s no secret that it is difficult to find landlords who will even accept Section 8 in the first place.
It doesn’t take much for a renter without rent control to end up on the streets. A couple of years ago Long Beach resident, Amy Boyer Colgan, found this out the hard way, she said, “My health had been declining for a while, we were going to doctors, over and over again but couldn’t figure out what was happening. Finally, three years ago we were told by a doctor to test our environment, so we had me tested head to toe, as well as the apartment that we were living in, and both came up with mold, black mold.”
“At that point I had been hospitalized for 11 days and right after that happened our landlords put us into an Airbnb for three weeks to remodel and remediate the building, and at about three weeks they gave us a three day get out notice.” They also did the same thing to the seven other tenants in the nine-unit apartment building that requested mold testing.
Without real protections, millions of Americans are just one rent hike away from homelessness. If cities don’t take the initiative to protect their renters then they will soon be faced with an even greater homelessness crisis.
Gentrification compounds the problem by making it even less likely for the homeless to get back on their feet and rejoin society due to exorbitant rents that even people with decent paying jobs can no longer afford, homelessness is becoming everybody’s problem.
