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If you can afford it. The condos cost about $700 a square foot, meaning a nice two-bedroom condo -- with windows on two sides and great views -- runs about $1 million.
A few evenings later, I found myself in the cramped living room of a single-family home in a suburb of Ventura, one of about 180 houses built a decade ago for buyers with annual incomes of about $50,000. Because the original development was federally subsidized, the homeowners can sell their house only at a restricted sales price of $300,000 to $400,000, which is 20% to 40% below the market price.
The cap on the selling price, the homeowners told me, has brought some changes to their neighborhood. It allows the working poor to afford these houses by teaming up to buy them. Realtors say four, five, even six people are listed on mortgage titles to qualify for financing. Seven, eight, nine cars are parked in the driveways and on the streets in front of the houses.
What's going on here? For a century, people in Southern California moved to the suburbs as they got richer, leaving the more "urban" parts of town to poor people. Now that pattern has reversed itself. Affluent people are leaving the suburbs to live in the city, while the working poor -- people who have jobs but don't earn enough to exceed the poverty line -- are doubling and tripling up in the suburbs to buy houses.
The migration of the affluent to the inner city has gradually increased in the last three years. According to a study by the Downtown Center Business Improvement District, the household median income of downtown residents with a least one earner was about $99,600 a year in 2006, roughly $28,000 higher than that of Beverly Hills. Nearly half of those surveyed reported annual income of $100,000 to above $250,000.
TIMES SPECIAL REPORT
A not-so-welcome mat
Antelope Valley neighbors are behind a crackdown on subsidized housing
By Jessica Garrison and Ted Rohrlich
Times Staff Writers
June 17, 2007
THE anonymous tip came in over a special hotline: Someone was smoking marijuana on the balcony of Rachel Baker's government-subsidized apartment.
On a recent morning, Lee D'Errico, a Los Angeles County Housing Authority investigator, bounded up the stairs of the sprawling two-story complex in Lancaster, half a dozen armed sheriff's deputies on his heels.
D'Errico rapped on the door of Baker, a 28-year-old single mother of three. She took one look at the group on her stairs, ordered her children into a bedroom and moved aside.
Then the officers, who had no warrant, searched the home. Within minutes, they discovered a half-smoked marijuana cigarette under a couch cushion - enough, D'Errico told Baker, to terminate her subsidy under the federal Section 8 program.
"What?" Baker said, sobbing. "I didn't know it was there. Otherwise, I wouldn't have let you in."
It was another fruitful investigation for the housing authority in the Antelope Valley, where officials have launched one of the most aggressive campaigns in the nation to stamp out unauthorized or illegal behavior in federally subsidized housing.
In the Coachella Valley, hundreds of trailer parks house desperately poor Latino workers amid burning trash, mud, contaminated water.
By David Kelly, Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2007
THERMAL, CALIF. - Like most of their neighbors in the sprawling, ramshackle Oasis Mobile Home Park, the Aguilars have no heat, no hot water. On cold nights, the family of eight stays warm by bundling up in layers of sweaters and sleeps packed together in two tiny rooms.
Bathing is a luxury that requires using valuable propane to boil gallons of water. So the farmworker clan spends a lot of time dirty.