In Silicon Valley, Cooks and Housekeepers Face Eviction

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-07/silicon-valley-cooks-to-housekeepers-facing-home-eviction.html


Virginia Valencia earns $12 an hour in the cafeteria at Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where she serves breakfast to the staff and billionaire co-founder Elon Musk. He prefers juice to coffee, she said.

After work, the single mother of three goes home to the one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment she’s struggling to keep in East Palo Alto’s Woodland Park, an 1,811-unit complex bought in 2011 by Equity Residential, the largest publicly-traded U.S. landlord. The company, founded by real estate magnate Sam Zell, owns more than 70 percent of the regulated apartments in the only city between San Francisco and San Jose with a rent control law.

Valencia has been fighting eviction since she fell behind on her $1,064 rent payment in November. And she’s not the only one. Each month, as many as 300 Woodland Park residents receive notices from Equity Residential giving them three days to pay or vacate their homes, according to an employee’s sworn testimony in a lawsuit.

“I’m alone and I don’t have a family to fall back on,” said Valencia, 32, who works for a contractor that operates Tesla’s food services. “It seems like they just don’t want us here.”

[NYC_SKP]

1. Even with rent control, families need to double up to make ends meet.

$12/hour means $1,064 rent is more than half her GROSS pay, so you need at least two earners, and probably four, to pay utilities and car insurance and the rest.

Just to break even.

Fuck that shit.

[jwirr]

3. And that is not just in a large city. My grandson, his wife and three children live together just

for that reason. And even then we are having trouble.

[el_bryanto]

2. That's pretty awful

I don't know how working class people make it in cities like that. I guess the answer is they don't.

Bryant

[KamaAina]

4. East Palo Alto is almost the only place around there where they can even give it a go

it is surrounded by places like Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos, etc. that simply ooze $$$.

[joeybee12]

5. A while back I think it was 60 minutes that did a story like this...

Of people who take the bus over an hour each day to get to their jobs because they can only afford rents far, far from work in Silicon Valley...God forbid any CEO's of this company should try and help thier workers.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

6. It seems as though Equity Residential's business strategy is to press the eviction piece really hard

They should pass a law that leaves the rent controlled for the next tenant in the event of eviction of the prior tenant.

That will shake out the frivolous evictions.