Editor:
In your Oct. 24 issue, you had a story headlined “Why California Housing Costs Are So High” that covered everything except the two main reasons: unfettered greed and thousands upon thousands of vacant places. There are plenty of buildings for people to live in and have businesses in, they are just too expensive or kept off the market.
When I first moved here in the ’70s you could rent a three bedroom house for $150 to $200 a month. Of course, there was no homelessness then. Now the same house owned by the same family in worse condition is $1,500 to $2,000 a month. Of course, wages have gone up since then, but nowhere near 10-fold! To buy a house, it has gone up 10-fold since then, too. The American dream is now to rent from a hedge fund or a local oligarch.
Hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial places are kept vacant to keep the inventory down and prices higher. I read a while ago that in the Bay Area there are six vacant homes for every homeless person there. In regards to commercial and office space, it is even more so. The same is true here, but on a smaller scale.
Property managers and the oligarchs who own everything have spread this policy of greed nationwide with RealTime and hedge funds buying up millions of places to rent them out. Places are not cheap back east anymore either. In Seattle, which is now more expensive than the Bay Area, only 10 property management companies control 70 percent of the units and their rents of course. The kicker is that in California people have voted down giving cities the option to enact rent control, again.
Elliott Linn, Eureka
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Agreed! I lived on Janes road next to a house that had been empty for over 3 years. Arcata landlords greed has gotten completely out of control. Raising rent the maximum allowable amount every year is common practice, despite their personal financial needs not having changed much or at all. Not to mention the rentals not being updated or maintained. Most landlords do bare minimum, cheap fixes, if you can get them to help at all. Even our local super landlords seem unable to acknowledge when they have enough. At what point is someone stealing from their tenants? $1300 for a badly maintained studio in Arcata?! Calm down, please.