Rents continued to rise across the Bay Area in September, with San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco all registering year-over-year increases, according to a new report. It offers little relief to hard-pressed renters.
The report points out that rent increases are more than a regional phenomenon; they’re happening across California. Still, a spot-check of 17 Bay Area cities — where rents already were sky-high — shows continued increases almost everywhere. That means tenants, who have watched rents climb almost continuously over the last few years, must dig even deeper to get an apartment here.
“Rent increases of this frequency and magnitude are difficult for most working families to absorb, but they’re an absolute disaster for low-income households,” said Jith Meganathan, a policy advocate in Sacramento for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.
Predicting that more people will be pushed out of the region — or into debt, while struggling to pay for food, medicine and other basic needs — he added, “It’s too easy to say that this is just ‘the market’ at work. Behind these numbers lies a lot of individual suffering.”
