When the Long Beach Media Collaborative officially convened in 2017, the four publications involved – the Press-Telegram, the Long Beach Post, the Grunion Gazettes and the Long Beach…
In March, shortly after new owners took control of the apartment complex where Quintanilla’s family lived, they and a dozen other families said they received 60-day notices to vacate.
You can talk about a national housing shortage, but in Southern California it can easily be called a housing crisis.
As they look out of their top-floor apartment toward the Long Beach skyline and the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, Hank and Kathy Elands can’t believe their good fortune.
In the first real home she’s been able to call her own in about a decade, Army veteran Melissa Degnan apologizes for the narrow entryway, blocked by a couple of cardboard boxes stacked there, noting that she’s still getting organized after moving in a few months ago.
This article is part of “The Housing Divide: Making it in Long Beach,” a series of stories from the Long Beach Media Collaborative examining the impacts of the…
The only consistent alone time Johnathan Perez gets to enjoy is in the shower. The Cal State Long Beach sophomore bunks with three others in a house often crammed with college students.
The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development provides about $9 million annually to the city of Long Beach in Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) to subsidize rents for low-income residents, including formerly homeless people.
For many, the dwellings can be affordable but inaccessible for wheelchair users – or they are accommodating but expensive.
Mary Zendejas needed to leave her home. She’d had a good run. For a decade she’d cultivated a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment into a place she could call home.
Amanda Paiz knows all too well the impact that Long Beach’s lack of affordable housing has on some of its most vulnerable residents.
A Long Beach housing-crisis solution could be spelled A-D-U … and it’s not just for ‘granny’
Accessory dwelling units, commonly called “granny flats,” are typically smaller structures built in someone’s backyard – attached or unattached to a single-family house – and can range from a converted garage to a free-standing pool house.
They aren’t served by efforts to create affordable homes for lower income families, and they cannot afford the elevated cost of living in California. Experts call them “missing middle.”
It’s been nearly seven years since the city passed a revision to the Downtown Plan, in which city leaders outlined the goal to bring 5,000 new units to the area. Since 2012, only 367 units have been completed, according to figures from the city’s planning bureau.
A three-story apartment development nested between Cesar E. Chavez Park and a sea of densely-packed aging apartment complexes isn’t much to look at, but its developer believes it can be a small part of a solution to Southern California’s housing shortage.
Where do we go from here?
Relocation assistance for renters: A necessity amid the housing crisis? Or a cumbersome business burden to Long Beach property owners?
Wedged between rows of variegated single-family homes, on Alamitos Avenue, sits a dual-property apartment complex. The exteriors of 900 and 904 Alamitos Ave. are beige, or maybe a cream-yellow – shaded, perhaps, by grime, and made illusory by patchwork touch-ups.