Apartment Look

As the housing crisis has grown across California, the state has seen a rise in the number of “super commuters,” residents who commute longer hours to cities starved of affordable housing, including those in the Bay Area. While the number of jobs brought into the Bay Area has grown in recent years, the availability of housing has not matched this increase, according to State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. People working in service-type jobs are not being paid wages that would allow them to afford housing in the cities where they are employed, forcing many to make long commutes to and from work each day, Skinner said. “Those are essential services, but then they’re driven out to living further and further away just to be able to afford somewhere to live,” Skinner said. Census data from 2015 reported San Francisco , Alameda and Contra Costa counties’ average commute times to be 31.7 minutes, 30.7 minutes and 35.3 minutes respectively — an increase from 2010, when the commute times for...

This article is the last of a series of articles based on new research into the place of lower-income and disadvantaged households in a compact city. More and more of us living in denser cities where apartments and high-rise developments are increasingly common. This creates specific health concerns for residents of these areas, and for lower-income households in particular. We already know socioeconomic status is closely related to health and wellbeing. The importance of equity was highlighted in the 2016 Boyer Lectures. Entitled Fair Australia : Social Justice and the Health Gap, the lectures were delivered by a world leader in health inequality research , Professor Sir Michael Marmot . Further reading: Social determinants – how class and wealth affect our health Marmot examined the challenges for poor communities in achieving good health from early life to old age. His message focused on the social determinants of health. And the built environment , including its environmental co...

The city of East Palo Alto , a wedge of modest houses and light industrial sites in the heart of Silicon Valley , has been passed by in the great tech boom . A historically black area , it has seen a big Hispanic influx in the past two decades, with more than three out of four residents now coming from one of those two groups. It is still living down its reputation, gained a quarter of a century ago, as the murder capital of the US: one out of every 571 of its residents was the victim of a homicide in a single year. Things have improved since then. But over the same period, it has become the poor neighbour to some of the world's richest companies. In one of the ultimate signs of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the western US, the municipal government of East Palo Alto didn 't own the rights to draw more from the state's water reserves, which it would need in order to grow. In June this year, it took a gift of cash, from the private foundation set up by Mar...