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...

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...