“So when COVID happened and every single person in the household is losing their job, that really created a very dire situation,” she said.

Now the ripple effects are showing up as more people are becoming homeless. Despite measures meant to protect renters, homelessness among Latino residents has spiked around California.

In San Francisco, homelessness among Latino residents is up 55% since 2019, according to the latest point-in-time count, despite an overall drop in the homeless population. In Alameda County, Latino homelessness rose 73% during the same time period, according to the nonprofit EveryOneHome, which conducts the county’s tally. It jumped by 26% in Los Angeles County and by 19% in Kern County, since they did their last counts in 2020.

The recent counts also show that Black people continue to be overrepresented on California’s streets.

Surveying his RV neighborhood, Jose Diaz offers one explanation for why more Latinos are becoming homeless.

“Remember, Americans get unemployment,” he said. “Most people here, they might be immigrants, they might not have papers, so there’s no help.”

It’s not just undocumented Latinos, though. Diaz has a U visa (for victims of crime who work with law enforcement on investigations) that allows him to work legally. But he didn’t apply for rent relief or unemployment because he worried it could hurt his pending application for permanent residency.

Earlier this year, UCLA researchers found Latinos in California were about half as likely as whites to have applied for and received rent relief.

“Our community is not accessing the homelessness response system,” Valdez said, including rent relief and legal aid. She attributes that in part to fears like Diaz’s, to language and cultural barriers and to the silencing effect of xenophobic political rhetoric.

Diaz is now working as a truck driver. He plans to stay in the RV, save money and move away from the city, because he doesn’t see a future here.

Before the pandemic, with Diaz and his wife working, he says they’d be left with $150 at the end of the month.

“Who can survive on that? Nobody,” he said. “Everyone who ended up out here is just trying to survive.”

Latinos now make up 30% of the unhoused people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16% of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count.

As bad as those new numbers are, they don’t account for the homelessness that’s harder to see — the kind Miriam Mora is living.

The 32-year-old has been moving place to place for the past few weeks with her three kids, who are 14, 9 and 6 months old. After staying in her car for a stint, they moved into her sister’s living room. Now they’re living at her brother’s Tenderloin studio.

Miriam Mora walks to visit her sister with her daughters Miriam (then 5 months) and Julissa (9), in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022. Mora lost her job during the pandemic and has been struggling to find affordable housing. Right now she is staying with her brother, who already has several roommates in his studio apartment. Latinos now make up 30% of the unhoused people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16% of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count. Mora said she would prefer to live in a different neighborhood where there are fewer people on the street and less drug use. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

He already had five roommates, so it’s 10 of them in one room, sharing bunk beds. Mora says she left her last home, which she shared with roommates in the Excelsior, after her landlord raised the rent, intimidated her and threatened to evict her.

“We paid the rent, but the landlord still harassed us,” she said in Spanish.

These kinds of self-evictions aren’t officially tracked, but tenant advocates say they have been on the rise since the start of the pandemic, especially among Latino renters.

“We’ve got people who tell us their landlords tell them verbally to leave their units every day,” said Lucia Leal, a tenant counselor with Causa Justa/Just Cause. “They don’t want to deal with the harassment,” so they leave, even if they have the right to stay.

Latinos are also overrepresented in formal eviction data in San Francisco, even with eviction moratoriums in place during the pandemic. According to data collected by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, 20% of eviction filings between March of 2020 and March of 2022 were against Latino tenants.

When tenants don’t know their rights, don’t speak English, have an informal living arrangement without a lease or don’t have legal status, it gives landlords a lot of power, Leal says.

Mora lost her job doing hourly gig work at the start of the pandemic, but says her landlord demanded the rent no matter what. “He said, ‘Come rain or thunder, whatever happens, I want my rent on the first of the month,'” Mora said.

Miriam Mora walks down the stairs with her daughter, Miriam (then 5 months) at her brother’s apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

Mora applied for COVID rent relief, but got denied. She says her landlord wouldn’t cooperate with the application process. So she used her savings and borrowed money from a family member to cover her rent. She’s $21,000 in debt now.

After she moved out, Mora says, she tried to get into a family shelter, but was put on a waiting list. She went to Compass Family Services, one of the access points for the city’s coordinated entry system.

Under the coordinated entry system, which is required by the federal government, people who are unhoused must go to an access point, meet with a case manager and answer a series of questions about their experiences. They are then ranked according to their level of need, and may or may not get placed in a shelter or other housing.

But that system creates its own barriers for Latinos, says Valdez. “If you just look at coordinated entry systems anywhere, not just here in San Francisco, they create structural disparities,” she said.

A 2022 city-commissioned report on the coordinated entry system found that Latinos were less likely to be prioritized for housing than other groups and were underrepresented in the system.

Meanwhile, the Latino Task Force’s Street Needs Assessment Committee surveyed more than 100 unhoused residents in the Mission earlier this year and found that almost a quarter became homeless during the pandemic, and 83% were not in the coordinated entry system.

Larisa Pedroncelli, co-chair of the committee, attributes this to a number of factors: distrust, especially among undocumented immigrants, the lack of access points in the mission, and a dearth of linguistically and culturally competent service providers.

“You are being assessed by somebody you’ve never met and you’re asked to share some of your deepest traumas,” she said, noting that many people feel uncomfortable sharing those experiences, and that’s why they don’t get connected with the housing and services they need.

The committee’s report calls for empowering mission-based organizations to facilitate coordinated entry access. “Because the relationships are there, they know the folks on the street, so it’s much easier for them to share their traumas and to be able to be properly assessed,” Pedroncelli said.

Emily Cohen, spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, says the department is ramping up work in the Mission, in part by increasing partnerships with nonprofits that serve the Latino community and opening a new coordinated entry access point in the neighborhood.

Mora is also looking for more permanent housing. Every week, she goes to the Mission Economic Development Agency to apply for one of the city’s few open affordable apartments, but her chances of landing a spot are slim. On a visit in September, she’s one of 814 people who’ve applied for a single apartment.

Miriam Mora leaves her brother’s apartment building with her daughters Miriam (then 5 months) and Julissa (9) as two men who were sitting on the steps move aside in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

Ultimately, the Latino Task Force says the city needs to focus more on building affordable housing,

They are calling for policy changes, like curbing market rate housing development in neighborhoods where residents are most vulnerable to displacement.

Valdez, who works with the task force, wants to see more efforts to prevent evictions and greater investments in affordable housing. Without them, she says, as the Latino population in the city continues to grow, “We’re just going to see larger and larger numbers of unhoused community members.”

Mora has worked service industry jobs since she came to this country alone as a teenager. She was doing gig work when the pandemic started, and when that dried up the state denied her unemployment claim. She says she feels exploited because she’s worked hard and paid taxes and she can’t afford to live here.

“If we can contribute to the economy but we can’t have a safe place to live, it’s not a fair trade,” she said.

Now, after 15 years in San Francisco, she’s considering going back to her hometown of Puebla in Mexico.

The post What’s Driving the Spike in Homelessness for Latinos in San Francisco? appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

“So when COVID happened and every single person in the household is losing their job, that really created a very dire situation.”

Now the ripple effects are showing up as more people are becoming homeless. Despite measures meant to protect renters, homelessness among Latino residents has spiked around California.

In San Francisco, homelessness among Latino residents is up 55% since 2019, according to the latest point in time count, despite an overall drop in the homeless population. In Alameda County, Latino homelessness rose 73% during the same time period, according to the nonprofit EveryoneHome, which conducts the county’s tally. It jumped by 26% in Los Angeles County and by 19% in Kern County, since they did their last counts in 2020.

The recent counts also show Black people continue to be overrepresented on California’s streets.

Surveying his RV neighborhood, Jose Diaz offers one explanation for why more Latinos are becoming homeless.

“Remember, Americans get unemployment,” he said. “Most people here, they might be immigrants, they might not have papers, so there’s no help.”

It’s not just undocumented Latinos, though. Diaz has a U Visa (for victims of crime who work with law enforcement on investigations) that allows him to work legally. But he didn’t apply for rent relief or unemployment because he worried it could hurt his pending application for permanent residency.

Earlier this year, UCLA researchers found Latinos in California were about half as likely as whites to have applied for and received rent relief.

“Our community is not accessing the homelessness response system,” Valdez says, including rent relief and legal aid. She attributes that in part to fears like Diaz’s, to language and cultural barriers and to the silencing effect of xenophobic political rhetoric.

Diaz is now working as a truck driver. He plans to stay in the RV, save money and move away from the city, because he doesn’t see a future here.

Before the pandemic, with Diaz and his wife working, he says they’d be left with $150 at the end of the month.

“Who can survive on that? Nobody,” he says. “Everyone who ended up out here is just trying to survive.”

Latinos now make up 30% of homeless people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16% of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count.

As bad as those new numbers are, they don’t account for the homelessness that’s harder to see – the kind Miriam Mora is living.

The 32-year-old has been moving place to place for the past few weeks with her three kids, who are 14, 9 and 6-months-old. After staying in her car for a stint, they moved into her sister’s living room. Now they’re living at her brother’s Tenderloin studio.

Miriam Mora walks to visit her sister with her daughters, Miriam, 5 months, and Julissa, 9, in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. Mora lost her job during the pandemic and has been struggling to find affordable housing. Right now she is staying with her brother who already has several roommates in his studio apartment. Latinos now make up 30 percent of homeless people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16 percent of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count. Mora said would prefer to live in a different neighborhood where there are fewer people on the street and less drug use. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

He already had five roommates, so it’s 10 of them in one room, sharing bunk beds. Mora says she left her last home, which she shared with roommates in the Excelsior, after her landlord raised the rent, intimidated her and threatened to evict her.

“We paid the rent, but the landlord still harassed us,” she says in Spanish.

These kinds of self evictions aren’t officially tracked, but tenant advocates say they have been on the rise since the start of the pandemic, especially among Latino renters.

“We’ve got people who tell us their landlords tell them verbally to leave their units every day,” says Lucia Leal, a tenant counselor with Causa Justa/Just Cause. “They don’t want to deal with the harassment,” so they leave, even if they have the right to stay.

Latinos are also overrepresented in formal eviction data in San Francisco, even with eviction moratoriums in place during the pandemic. According to data collected by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, 20% of eviction filings between March of 2020 and March of 2022 were against Latino tenants.

When tenants don’t know their rights, don’t speak English, have an informal living arrangement without a lease or don’t have legal status, it gives landlords a lot of power, Leal says.

Mora lost her job doing hourly gig work at the start of the pandemic, but says her landlord demanded the rent no matter what. “He said ‘Come rain or thunder, whatever happens, I want my rent on the first of the month,’” Mora says.

Miriam Mora walks down the stairs with her daughter, Miriam, 5 months, at her brother’s apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. Mora lost her job during the pandemic and has been struggling to find affordable housing. Right now she is staying with her brother who already has several roommates in his studio apartment. Latinos now make up 30 percent of homeless people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16 percent of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

She applied for COVID rent relief, but got denied. She says her landlord wouldn’t cooperate with the application process. So she used her savings and borrowed money from a family member to cover her rent. She’s $21,000 in debt now.

After she moved out, Mora says she tried to get into a family shelter, but was put on a waiting list. She went to Compass Family Services, one of the access points for the city’s coordinated entry system.

Under the coordinated entry system, which is required by the federal government, people who are unhoused must go to an access point, meet with a case manager and answer a series of questions about their experiences. They are then ranked according to their level of need, and may or may not get placed in a shelter or other housing.

But that system creates its own barriers for Latinos, says Valdez. “If you just look at coordinated entry systems anywhere, not just here in San Francisco, they create structural disparities.”

A 2022 city-commissioned report on the coordinated entry system found Latinos were less likely to be prioritized for housing than other groups and were underrepresented in the system.

Meanwhile, the Latino Task Force’s Street Needs Assessment Committee surveyed more than 100 unhoused residents in the Mission earlier this year and found almost a quarter became homeless during the pandemic, and 83% were not in the coordinated entry system.

Larisa Pedroncelli, co-chair of the committee, attributes this to a number of factors: distrust, especially among undocumented immigrants, the lack of access points in the mission, and a dearth of linguistically and culturally competent service providers.

“You are being assessed by someone you’ve never met and you’re asked to share some of your deepest traumas,” she says, noting that many people feel uncomfortable sharing those experiences, and that’s why they don’t get connected with the housing and services they need.

The committee’s report calls for empowering mission-based organizations to facilitate coordinated entry access. “Because the relationships are there, they know the folks on the street, so it’s much easier for them to share their traumas and to be able to be properly assessed,” Pedroncelli says.

Emily Cohen, a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, says the department is ramping up work in the Mission, in part by increasing partnerships with nonprofits that serve the Latino community and opening a new coordinated entry access point in the neighborhood.

Mora is also looking for more permanent housing. Every week, she goes to the Mission Economic Development Agency to apply for one of the city’s few open affordable apartments, but her chances of landing a spot are slim. On a visit in September, she’s one of 814 people who’ve applied for a single apartment.

Miriam Mora leaves her brother’s apartment building with her daughters, Miriam, 5 months, and Julissa, 9, as two men who were sitting on the steps move aside in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. Mora lost her job during the pandemic and has been struggling to find affordable housing. Right now she is staying with her brother who already has several roommates in his studio apartment. Latinos now make up 30 percent of homeless people in San Francisco, though they’re only 16 percent of the overall population, according to the city’s most recent count. Mora said would prefer to live in a different neighborhood where there are fewer people on the street and less drug use. (Marlena Sloss/KQED)

Ultimately, the Latino Task Force says the city needs to focus more on building affordable housing,

They are calling for policy changes, like curbing market rate housing development in neighborhoods where residents are most vulnerable to displacement.

Valdez, who works with the task force, wants to see more efforts to prevent evictions and greater investments in affordable housing. Without them, she says, as the Latino population in the city continues to grow “We’re just going to see larger and larger numbers of unhoused community members.”

Mora has worked service industry jobs since she came to this country alone as a teenager. She was doing gig work when the pandemic started and when that dried up the state denied her unemployment claim. She says she feels exploited because she’s worked hard and paid taxes and she can’t afford to live here.

“If we can contribute to the economy but we can’t have a safe place to live, it’s not a fair trade,” she says.

Now, after 15 years in San Francisco, she’s considering going back to her hometown of Puebla in Mexico.

The post What’s Driving The Spike In Homelessness For Latinos In San Francisco? appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

San Francisco is facing a worrying rise in family violence and growing disagreement over how to respond.

During the course of 2020, the number of jury trials in San Francisco fell sharply and was completely suspended for several months. Domestic violence incidents also fell as victims had fewer opportunities to seek help due to pandemic-related closures, according to a recent San Francisco Department report on the status of women.

However, the decline in coverage has been accompanied by myriad research showing that incidents of domestic violence increased during the pandemic. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that intimate partner violence has increased by 20% worldwide due to quarantines and lockdowns.

The trend was a living reality for Lennette who managed to escape a violent and abusive relationship that began in 2015. (She declined to give her last name for privacy reasons.)

Last November, her abuser was convicted of incidents involving burning his girlfriend’s face and neck with a lighted cigarette, stabbing her thigh and abdomen with scissors, and handcuffing and gagging her last November when he gave her one electric drill held to his temple.

“There is too much in life to remain in a relationship that no longer serves any of you. Happiness means realizing that you’ve broken a toxic cycle. I know a traumatic bond is real, but once you break your bond with an abuser, you begin to see all of these possibilities and you can be successful, ”Lennette told about 30 prosecutors, law enforcement officers and community members at one of them The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office held an event honoring domestic violence survivors.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Evanthia Pappas, senior attorney for the Domestic Violence Division of the San Francisco District Attorney, lead a march in honor of domestic violence survivors on October 27. (Sydney Johnson / The Examiner)

Lennette’s story is one of hope and bravery, but it’s also rare, especially in the wake of the San Francisco pandemic.

“In San Francisco we have an amazing number of vendors offering services,” said Catherine Stefani, District 2 supervisor, who previously served as a district attorney in Contra Costa County. “But in my opinion we fail to hold the perpetrators accountable and provide them with the services they need to take responsibility and leave the cycle of violence so that they no longer abuse their partner.”

In 2020, around 24% of total domestic violence cases filed with prosecutors were prosecuted and prosecuted, a significant decrease from 2019 (32%), 2018 (35%) and even 2017 (27%). on the data provided by the office.

Earlier this year, Stefani requested data on domestic violence-related arrests and charges, which revealed that 131 aggravated domestic violence arrests were made and 113 of them were released in the last three months of 2020.

“When I got those numbers back, I have to tell you that I was absolutely shocked,” said Stefani.

In 2021, the percentage of indictable cases has already risen back to 31%. But at a San Francisco Public Safety Committee hearing Thursday held to investigate the city’s response to domestic violence, it was clear that some have no confidence in the system designed to hold perpetrators accountable.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin told The Examiner that during the pandemic it would be more difficult to gather evidence to prove domestic violence cases. Other DA officials described the numbers as “selected”.

“If you see any differences in fee rates, it reflects the quality of the research we are receiving,” said Boudin. “Often times survivors are unwilling to attend law enforcement, and that means we have witnesses or other evidence to use in court. And unfortunately we didn’t have that much of it during the pandemic. “

Stefani and other lawyers for domestic violence victims do not accept the argument. Instead, they fear prosecutors will drop cases and let repeat offenders off the hook, citing examples like in April 2021 when a 7-month-old boy in San Francisco was murdered by his carer arrested twice earlier on suspicion of the crime at home Violence. Both times he was released without charge.

“Domestic violence cases are difficult, but any good prosecutor knows how to prosecute a DV case and you don’t have to rely on a victim’s testimony,” Stefani said. “These cases can be prosecuted. End of the story.”

Still, domestic violence cases are among the most difficult crimes to prosecute. Victims can be afraid to testify because retaliation is possible. And because of the intimate nature of the crimes, it is often difficult to confirm stories or find witnesses.

“We recognize that not every survivor wants to continue criminal proceedings. But we certainly hear from survivors facing severe domestic violence that their cases are not moving forward. We have to find a balance, ”said Beverly Upton, executive director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium. “I don’t see prosecutors as an enemy, but the criminal justice system is there to protect the survivors and to protect the public.”

Evanthia Pappas, Senior Attorney for the Domestic Violence Division of the Prosecutor’s Office, understands the challenge she faces.

“The pandemic has undoubtedly impacted domestic violence law enforcement,” Pappas told The Examiner. “Anecdotally, I can tell you that once the restrictions were lifted in June 2021 and more vaccines became available in the spring, we had an immediate spike in coverage and there were more cases of SFPD and we are indicting more cases.”

Pappas, a national expert on prosecuting domestic violence cases, said the likelihood of a case being prosecuted often depends on what happens when law enforcement officers arrive on the ground. She is currently focused on providing new training and recommendations to the San Francisco Police Department on how to safely assist victims and gather vital information that can later be used in court, even if the witness later decides not to testify.

Even if the charges appear to be rising back to pre-pandemic levels, attorneys at the hearing on Thursday said there was room for improvement, including investing in alternative approaches to assisting victims and offenders outside of law enforcement.

The San Francisco District Attorney has launched a handful of emergency shelters and transportation for victims of domestic violence, including partnering with Lyft to offer free rides and another with Airbnb, which opened 20 furnished apartments for survivors for 90-day stays. It also introduced a text service so that victims can discreetly try to get help.

“At the start of the pandemic, we were immediately concerned about what local shelter would mean for domestic violence survivors. It is one thing to have shelter on the spot, it is another thing to have shelter with a perpetrator, ”said Boudin.

However, looking back over the past two years, some proponents say it wasn’t enough.

In 2020, 79% of clients seeking shelter because of domestic violence were turned away, according to the report by the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women. 70% of domestic violence victims were women, to whom the police responded, and black and Latin American communities were over-represented among the victims, the report shows.

Stefani is now introducing a law requiring quarterly reporting on incidents, arrests and domestic violence charges on the ground. Without such data, Upton and groups like the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee say it is difficult to understand the full extent of the problem.

Some proponents say an increased focus on law enforcement isn’t the answer either. Instead, they promote approaches that focus on improving access to basic needs such as housing and food, and promote community-based violence prevention and recreation programs such as Men In Progress, a peer-counseling program run by the Glide Foundation.

“The most common reason patients didn’t seek help in our emergency department because of medical emergencies was fear of the police,” said Leigh Kimberg, San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Interpersonal Violence Prevention Coordinator and professor of medicine at UC San Francisco. “We invest heavily in police work and not in structural security measures such as housing, food and income.”

The different approaches, protracted debates and calls for political change underline the complexity surrounding the issue of domestic violence.

For survivors like Lennette, however, the personal rather than the political is more in the foreground.

“It is brave to walk away from something unhealthy, even if you stumble on the way out. Not everyone will understand what it’s like to walk in your shoes, but you do, ”she said. “Take care.”

sjohnson@sfexaminer.com

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, Lennette’s name was misspelled. It has been updated.

The post San Francisco struggles to deal with pandemic spike in home violence appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) – As COVID cases increase, more people are realizing they need to get tested. In fact, every Bay Area County health department is seeing significantly higher demand for testing, and officials don’t want community testing sites to be overwhelmed.

“We have already decided not to reduce some of the test sites that we were considering. As demand changes, we will consider opening additional test sites, ”said Dr. Chris Farnitano from Contra Costa Health Services.

CONTINUE READING: North Bay Counties are banding together to distribute water-saving tools and promote conservation

Sam Levin has been trying to get tested for days after being exposed to a close family member who tested positive.

“It’s hard to get tested now that it was at the real peak,” said Levin.

He finally got an appointment online but spent an hour one way just to get to this test site and isn’t sure how long it would have taken if he tried a walk-in.

“It’s not an easy process. For me, I’ve never tried to stop by so I don’t really know, ”said Levin.

CONTINUE READING: Afghan community in the Bay Area rallies support for refugees fleeing the Taliban

Gone are the mass test sites and many of the walk-ins. The majority of the remaining listed by the San Francisco Department of Health are by appointment only.

“We continue to test at full speed before we see an increase in test demand,” said Dr. Naveena Bobba of the San Francisco Department of Health.

“We are also seeing increasing demand for testing in Marin County,” said Dr. Lisa Santora of the Marin County Department of Health.

Almost every Bay Area County Health Department is currently looking into expanding their opening hours and possibly opening additional locations.

“The city of Berkeley is also seeing an increasing demand for tests and we are working with our test partners,” said Dr. Lisa Hernandez of Berkeley Public Health.

MORE NEWS: San Francisco man dies of suspected heat stroke while hiking in Death Valley

Public health officials encourage people to check with their health care providers first, as they don’t want city or municipal websites to be cluttered with requests for testing.

The post Spike In Instances Triggers Extra Demand For Testing, Longer Wait Instances – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

150 years ago today – May 10, 1869 – “The Last Spike” was run on America’s first transcontinental railroad. That last spike was made of gold so anyone could tell it was important, but there was a lot more to be excited about.

What railways can do for you

Before the transcontinental railroad, the journey from the east to the west coast took many moons and cost at least $ 1,000 (this is almost $ 20,000 today). If you’ve traveled overland, bandits, bad weather, or unexpected hazards can land you in the mountains, and for various reasons – including Divine Anger – your group could fall over from thirst, hunger, or plague, leaving bones for strange rodents to gnaw on and to disperse. If you are on the water the trip would be long and you might get bored which is a burden.

After the nationwide railroad was completed in 1869, a trip from New York to San Francisco could be completed in a week for less than $ 100. You are free to spend the entire journey comfortably eating and sleeping, writing and reading love letters to your loved one instead of living harrowing stories of hardship and danger. Commerce benefited as well as passengers. (Think of all the freight!) Even fresh groceries could be transported on the railway line. At last the coasts were tied together.

If the transcontinental railroad was such a great idea, why didn’t they build one sooner?

First of all, the railway and steam locomotive had to be invented, which only happened in the 19th century. Then, when such a project was technically and logistically feasible, the states began their Great Schism that would lead to civil war; and various North-South debates about the fate of the West, the future of slavery and the railways paralyzed negotiations.

The great railroad race

The Civil War actually pushed the transcontinental railroad project forward, as it gave the Union the freedom to build whatever it wanted without worrying about the thoughts of the southern whiners. In 1862, Congress succeeded in forging the Pacific Railroad Act, which granted money and land for every mile of railroad that was built with the aim of an east-west link.

The two companies involved were Union Pacific and Central Pacific, which sped as many subsidized miles from Omaha and Sacramento respectively as they could build before the rails met. (It was a “race” because the total mileage is limited between two points, so an extra mile from Union meant one less to Central and vice versa.) The Union Pacific crews were comprised of Irish and German immigrants, civil war veterans, free black citizens and some Native Americans. The Central Pacific employed more than 10,000 Chinese employees willing to work for less money and in dangerous conditions – which was important to Central as they had to climb and storm their way through the sierras almost immediately after leaving Sacramento.

The tracks meet in Promontory, Utah

Congress made the stupid mistake of adopting a motivating rationality of the railroad companies, rather than just establishing greed, so that they did not dictate how, when, or where the rails had to meet. When the crews from Central and Union met in northern Utah, instead of immediately merging the lines, they began building miles of parallel classes, with each company hoping to get more miles and, with it, more reward money. With a kind of fatherly desperation, the Congress had to set a node; and they chose Promontory, Utah – a small tent town with railroad workers and prostitutes north of the Great Salt Lake.

Precious metals and fat railroad cats are good news

Since the rail meeting was such a significant (and publicized) national event, everyone felt it appropriate to celebrate with extravagant ceremonies. Of course, whenever possible, extravagance should involve precious metals, so four precious spikes were donated to adorn the final tie. There was an iron, silver, and gold tip from Arizona; a silver tip from Nevada; a gold tip from the San Francisco News Letter; and the crowning gold tip of David Hewes, a friend of Central Pacific magnate Leland Stanford (founder of Stanford University).

The Hewes Spike was the first to be made and it inspired the rest. When Hewes heard about the big event, he was initially disappointed with the lack of symbolic (and precious metal) items donated for the ceremony, so he got the ball rolling himself. In the end, Hewes had his own $ 400 worth of gold from his own treasure, which was poured into a point with each side engraved: two with names, one with dates, one with the motto “May God the unity of our land continue as the railroad unites the world’s two great oceans, “and the head with a simple statement:” The Last Spike. “

It wasn’t the last tip, in fact. The precious ceremonial spikes were carefully tapped into a ceremonial tie with a ceremonial silver hammer.

When the dignitaries (Central Pacific’s Stanford and Union Pacific’s Thomas Durant) tried real hammer blows to seal the deal, they both failed.

A spike was tied with telegraph wires so the whole nation could hear the hammer blows – something like a “live” broadcast, but with telegraph instead of television and no advertising – and the publicists made sure these were some good things. In addition to these taps, a one-word telegram was sent through the states: “Done”. And the nation rejoiced, coast to coast. But after all the pomp was done, the special spikes and sleeper were torn and some unknown railroaders drove normal iron spikes into a regular sleeper to complete the transcontinental railroad.

The judgment

“Never before in our history as a nation has there been an event that celebrated so warmly and with so little mental reticence,” reported the San Francisco News Letter. Most speakers shared this view. The problem was that the Chinese workers were rioting, other workers held Durant hostage in his palatial car while demanding unpaid wages, and of course that last telegraph only meant “Doom” to Native Americans, further compressed by the US were new belts and certainly had one or the other reservation.

All in all, it was a strange and powerful spectacle with the golden tip in the middle – a scene that could symbolize much more about eclectic America than these simple and straightforward ideals of industry and progress.

This post was originally published in 2009.

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Amid a record spike in luxury home sales.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The San Francisco market is dominated by condominiums. In the past few decades, almost all of the residential construction for apartment buildings – apartments and condominiums – and almost no single-family homes has been built, which makes sense for a city enclosed on three sides by the water.

For condominiums, sales have been around 450 units per month for the past four months, excluding new condominium sales that are handled directly by the developers’ sales offices and not reported to the MLS. Home sales were in the range of 300 units per month. So that’s the size of the market, with condominium sales generally being higher than home sales. And this market has totally split in two.

For the past four months, which peaked in June, there has been a historic surge in luxury home sales in San Francisco. Luxury in San Francisco starts at $ 3 million. In June, Compass closed 70 luxury home sales, nearly double the previous highs.

A good part of this surge in luxury home sales has to do with the fact that the wealthy bought luxury homes in this pandemic thanks to the Fed’s asset price inflation strategy – for the infamous “wealth effect” – and some of them.

Median prices are sensitive to changes in the mix. And that record number of luxury home sales, completed in the past four months, changed the mix of total home sales and skewed the median price upward (a sharp drop in the number of luxury home sales in the coming months would cushion some of that price hike).

According to MLS data from Thomas Stone, a retired real estate agent in Sonoma County, the average price for single-family homes rose to $ 2.1 million in June, after having tripled since 2012, for a lovely WTF moment:

But condos are different.

While the median price of condos has been volatile and like the median prices fluctuated up and down, it hasn’t gone anywhere in over three years.

In June, the average condominium price was $ 1.28 million, roughly what it was in March 2018. While the average home price has tripled since 2012, the average condominium price has only doubled since then. OK, that sounds kind of weird, something that “only doubled” in nine years, I mean, what kind of rinky dink market is San Francisco?

Condos had their share of insane price hikes, but before March 2018. Since then, the median price has bounced up and down but has essentially gone nowhere. And there have been a variety of condos on the market for years, with new ones arriving all the time.

During the real estate crisis, the average house price and the average house price were not that far apart; but since 2015 the spread has started to widen, and now the average home price is $ 900,000 above the average condo price:

“All markets are fear-driven and none of them are rational,” said Thomas Stone, the retired real estate agent, of the situation (he is happy to send readers an MLS report on housing trends for all of the Northern California counties, free of charge; Mail can be found here).

Similar situation in the wider Bay Area.

Similar trends are playing out in the Bay Area, which has five counties covered by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index – San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin. But the Case-Shiller methodology avoids the problem of a change in the mix that skews the median price because it does not use the median price; It uses the “Sales Pairs” method, which compares the selling price of a house in the current month to the selling price of the same house when it was previously sold. That’s a big advantage.

The downside is that it is about four months behind the time the actual deals were closed compared to the median price index, which is about a month behind the actual deals.

This graphic shows the house price indices by price level and the condominium price index (red) in the Bay Area with five counties. San Francisco is the most expensive housing market among the five counties, but it also has the largest proportion of condominiums.

Property prices in all price ranges began to rise last year, while condominium prices continued to go nowhere. The last reading of the price index for condominiums (“April”) was the first status in mid-2018:

The San Francisco Bay Area entered the pandemic with a flat housing market. According to the Case-Shiller indices, house prices were down or up slightly year-on-year for all of 2019, depending on the month. The median prices showed similar trends. The prices for condominiums fell slightly in 2019 compared to the previous year.

What changed everything in terms of house prices was the pandemic – the wealth effect – and house prices suddenly exploded. But the pandemic hasn’t significantly changed condominium prices.

Stuff for empty thoughts: Condominium prices also flattened in the years before the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the Case-Shiller chart above.

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The post Housing Market Splits: San Francisco Home Costs do Holy-Moly Spike, Condominium Costs Flat for three Years appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

San Franciscans were more likely to migrate from the city during the pandemic than in 2019, causing the number of new arrivals from San Francisco to skyrocket in affordable, less crowded cities across the region. Many areas saw more than twice the number of new arrivals from San Francisco in 2020 than the previous year.

The Chronicle received data from the U.S. Postal Service about the number of households who changed their address from one San Francisco zip code to all other U.S. zip codes. The data shows that of the 20 zip codes that saw the largest increase in moving companies in San Francisco in August 2020, 19 were 19 year-over-year in California. We chose to analyze data from August as it was the height of the pandemic migration from San Francisco.

Truckee, a mountain town near Lake Tahoe in Nevada County, had the largest percentage increase in households in San Francisco. The city’s primary zip code gained nearly 130 new households in San Francisco in August 2020, compared to 11 new households in August 2019, an increase almost twelve times.

The finding confirms real estate agent reports that home sales in the Truckee-Lake Tahoe area rose sharply last summer, likely due to the desire of many Bay Area residents to get closer to nature and find new opportunities to work from home.

Other places that gained popularity during the pandemic were the cities of Danville, Union City, and Fremont in the East Bay. In Southern California, San Diego and Palm Springs zip codes were high on the list.

The results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the “CalExodus” – the narrative advanced by wealthy tech executives like Elon Musk, is moving Californians to tax havens with fewer public health restrictions during the pandemic fleeing the state – is largely a myth. Previous research by the California Policy Lab found that most Bay Area residents who moved in the first three quarters of 2020 were moving to other parts of the state at higher rates during the San Francisco pandemic.

In addition, a recent Chronicle analysis found that the majority of Bay Area residents who moved from March to November 2020 went to other locations in the Bay Area or elsewhere in California.

In contrast, many urban areas in other states have seen dramatic decreases in the number of moving companies in San Francisco. Chelsea, an affluent neighborhood in New York’s Manhattan borough, received 70% fewer requests for address changes from San Francisco in August 2020 than in the previous year. The Boston, Seattle, and Denver neighborhoods saw fewer new arrivals from San Francisco last August than in 2019.

Houston was the only city outside of California with a zip code that made it into the top 20. The zip code 77043 west of downtown Houston was the 15th most frequent travel destination, seeing a 300% increase in address change requests from San Francisco households in August 2020 year over year.

Methodological note: The data analyzed by The Chronicle compared movements from San Francisco to the destination’s zip codes from March to November 2019 and 2020 month on month. USPS only provided change of address counts for county to zip code groupings with more than 10 movements. As a result, data was missing for many postcodes in months with fewer moves. Because of this limitation, we decided to only analyze address change data from August 2019 and 2020 when the movement peaked. The following table lists all of the postcodes that had 11 or more San Francisco migrants in August 2019 and 2020:

Susie Neilson is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: susan.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

The post These ZIP codes noticed a spike in residents from San Francisco in the course of the pandemic appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The US rental market is in turmoil. But there is no major city in which rents have fallen as quickly from as high as in San Francisco.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

San Francisco, which still has the most ridiculous rents of any major city in the US, is getting less and less ridiculous given painfully low occupancy and massive tenant churn looking for upgrades and savings – recent rumors of a “rebound in rents” on the contrary.

The median asking rents for one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco fell to a new multi-year low of $ 2,600 in April, a 30% decrease from the June 2019 high. This is evident from data from Zumper:

The five-county San Francisco Bay Area is also the only real estate market in the Case-Shiller Index notorious given the nationwide collapse in house prices for condominium prices that have fallen year over year and are at where they are in March 2018 levels.

In San Jose, the largest city in the Bay Area and part of Silicon Valley, the median asking rent for 1-BR apartments fell to a multi-year low of $ 2,050, a 19% decrease from the most recent high in July 2019. and then again in March and April 2020:

These “advertised rents” are compiled by Zumper from rental entries in the Multiple Listings Service (MLS) and other listing services. However, they do not contain any concessions like the very common “two months free” which further reduce the effective rents.

“Median” asking rent means that half of the asking rents are higher and half are lower. The rental units are located in apartment buildings, including new builds, but do not include single-family homes for rent or condominiums for rent.

Rents for 2-BR apartments in San Francisco have been stable in recent months after a month-long slump. The median asking rents were USD 3,500, 30% less than in October 2015 and 27% less than in July 2019.

There is now a brisk exodus in San Francisco as many of the renters who rent month to month shop and rummage through the large number of vacant units.

How bad is it? According to Trepp, who analyzes CMBS, 16% of large San Francisco homes with CMBS mortgages have less than 80% occupancy. For comparison: In numerous cities like Phoenix there are no such buildings with an occupancy rate of less than 80%. None!

So people take advantage of the numerous vacancies and offers they receive from landlords, such as: B. “two months free” to upgrade to bigger and nicer units. Landlords who offer the right offers can have their units filled. Other landlords sit on vacant units and wait for better times.

And some of these upgrades move from one bedroom apartments to two bedroom apartments. This classic flight to quality at the same or lower price changes the mix a bit. And such changes in the mix can push the average rent data up with data providers who offer a combined average rent figure for all types of housing.

These data providers, who place 1-BR and 2-BR apartments in the same area, may have an increase in the average rent in their total number, which is distorted by this shift in the mix to larger, nicer units without the asking rents per Housing has risen kind of. And of course that has played out on the front pages of the local media.

In San Jose, the median rent for 2-BR homes has been around $ 2,660 for several months, after falling 13% since early 2019. Again, the brisk churn and flight to quality has resulted in some stability of larger, nicer units at a lower price.

Affordability crisis is moving inland.

There are now all sorts of accounts of the work of Homers who have left San Francisco and Silicon Valley to go to cheaper pastures. Many of them found these cheaper pastures within a two to three hour drive of San Francisco, and rents in these markets have exploded amid the influx of people who suddenly had plenty of extra money to burn.

In Sacramento, about 100 miles east of San Francisco, the median 1-BR asking rent in April rose 15% to $ 1,450 from June 2019:

In Fresno, about 150 miles southeast of San Jose, the median 1-BR asking rent in April rose nearly 30% from its most recent low in September 2019. Some of these shifts clearly occurred before the pandemic, and the pandemic accelerated them:

And the difference diminishes.

With rents dwindling in San Francisco and rents rising in Sacramento and Fresno, the difference has collapsed. In San Francisco, rent dropped from $ 3,720 in the summer of 2019 to $ 2,600 in April. In Sacramento, rent rose from $ 1,260 to $ 1,450 over the same period. The rent differential between the two cities collapsed 53% from $ 2,460 in July 2019 to just $ 1,150.

In other words, renters who moved in July 2019 saved $ 2,460 monthly in rent. Renters who moved in April 2021 saved just $ 1,150. At some point, when the difference continues to narrow, the savings are not worth the move, and the motivation to move to these cheaper pastures disappears.

And the rental range between San Francisco and Fresno is down 49%, from $ 2,720 in July 2019 to $ 1,380 in April:

Similarly, the gap between 1-BR rentals in San Jose and Sacramento has decreased by 53%; and the difference between San Jose and Fresno has collapsed by 47%:

It doesn’t take much for the exodus from a large market like the Bay Area to result in major rental turbulence in smaller surrounding markets like Sacramento or Fresno, and this could put further pressure on rents in these inland cities. But the narrow distribution of rents makes the move less money-saving and less motivating than it was a year ago.

A similar scenario has played out in the US, with shifts from the most expensive rental markets to cheaper pastures, triggering the corresponding rental slumps and peaks. That the US rental market has been in turmoil is an understatement. And this is just one example – although in no major city have rents dropped from such high pedestals as quickly as in San Francisco.

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The post It’s Not Over: Rents in San Francisco Down 30%, in Silicon Valley Down 19%, each at Multi-12 months Lows. However Inland Rents Spike appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.