Apartment Look

A Cedar Ridge Apartments tenant shows a respirator she claims she sometimes needs due to alleged mold issues at the south Sacramento apartment complex . Code Enforcement is continuing to inspect the complex to determine if there are violations. PHOTO BY MICHAEL MOTT Nancy Avalos watched as her 5- and 8-year-old daughters danced and chased each other. Their laughter filled the living room. “My daughters don’t want to move out,” Avalos said in Spanish. Her voice broke. “I feel like I’ve let them down.” Avalos moved to Cedar Ridge Apartments six years ago. After sharing a living room of an apartment together, the single mother wanted to give her three daughters room to play and moved to a place they could call their own. But now the family is moving out of its two- bedroom apartment , after Avalos’ monthly rent rose from $802 to $1,086. For Avalos and her neighbors, sharp rent and utility bill increases hit the past two months as the property owner, Torrance- based Cedar Ridge Apa...

For more than two years, city inspectors have documented unsafe and squalid conditions at a weekly hotel near uptown that houses low-income families with children, the disabled and others with nowhere else to go. Inspectors found rooms with no heat or air conditioning , piles of garbage, bedbugs and broken windows among other problems at the Airport Parkway Inn and Suites. Former tenants and a neighboring business complain the building on Wilkinson Boulevard is a magnet for drugs and crime. Now, Charlotte officials are taking steps that could lead to the demolition of the hotel, a rare move the city has not taken in at least seven years against a lodging establishment. The building is part of a virtually unnoticed housing sector in Charlotte, where hundreds of people suffering from addiction and mental illness or simply with few other options depend on weekly hotel rooms for permanent shelter. While tenants avoid sleeping on the streets, they often stay in decrepit and vermin-in...

SACRAMENTO -- Would you pay hundreds more a month to live in conditions like this? That's just what dozens of renters at the Cedar Ridge Apartments say they're being asked to do. "Her name is Maria Godinez. They're raising her rent over $300, and she's struggling to pay the rent now," Godinez said in Spanish with the help of a translator. Now the one bedroom, one bathroom apartment she's lived in with her three girls for six years is in the $700s but on June 1, the pocketbook punch for the same unit will be $1,050, plus utilities. The change comes at an especially bad time for the five members of the Luna family who share a two-bedroom unit. "Right now, yeah, because my brother and I, we got let go from our jobs because our work permits expired , so we're not working right now," said Cedar Ridge tenant Claudia Luna . "It's too much, we don't have all the things that we need for the rent to be increased," said tenant Deana J...