Wealthy investors are buying Long Beach's old low-rent buildings and evicting everyone, making them homeless

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/01/eviction-epidemic.html

…

[gracchus]

Long Beach is a latecomer to the property bubble, and has been a haven for people who struggle to pay “market rent” in the region – people with disabilities, single parents, retired people, and others.

I recall a lesbian friend moving there about a decade ago from West Hollywood explaining to me that for a long time there’s been a particularly large and open and welcoming LGBTQ community in Long Beach. If creative class people and businesses also moved into Long Beach in the interim it might have been following the gentrification path that usually culminates in situations like this one.

[Papasan]

The Worker Bees did all the ground work brining LB back from the brink of Shitsville USA, like so many other places, then 1% to take advantage of them.

Real change has to come, or we all lose.

[AnthonyC]

@doctorow

In my neighborhood in Burbank, there’s a community effort to block high-rises from being built that makes me shake my head – my neighbors are capable of complaining that the housing prices are going crazy on their block and simultaneously objecting to more housing being built to offset it.

Most people really, really don’t understand where prices come from.

[joed]

You don’t even need rent increases. All it takes is property values going up. That makes property taxes go up.

Suddenly, you can’t afford the taxes on a place that you own and have lived in for 20+ years.

California has Proposition 13 to blunt this, but most other places don’t. And that comes with its own set of issues.

[bferrell]

Actually prop 13 IS the driver for this crap.

It’s starved cities of badly needed revenue and created an incentive for property values to sky rocket unabated… Driving the incentive for one percent investors in residential properties.

And it’s so full of loop holes for commercial properties they nearly never see ANY tax increases

[bferrell]

No, they don’t and they don’t care.

This isn’t just NIMBYs… In Oakland ANY change if fought vigorously.

I call it “future shocked”… People in communities can’t tolerate ANY change while at the same time celebrating “disruption”.

[anon55609254]

Feudalism just keeps getting closer and closer.

[Pensketch]

[JonS]

( and @papasan )

Sounds like this, in a different part of town?

[gracchus]

Yes. Both are municipalities in the greater Los Angeles area where housing was still somewhat affordable until recently.

[d_r]

my neighbors are capable of complaining that the housing prices are going crazy on their block and simultaneously objecting to more housing being built to offset it.

I can’t imagine complaining if the value of my house were to skyrocket. However, I would absolutely object to a proposal for a high-rise in my neighborhood; infrastructure (such as available on-street parking) is already stretched to the limit.

What we need are fewer people, and to spread out employment opportunities so they are not concentrated in a handful of places. There’s really no reason for Burbank to be more populous than it is.