New Report Details Housing Woes
Latino Tenants Disproportionately Feel Burden of South Coast’s Unforgiving Housing Market
Santa Barbarans are forever talking about the high cost of housing. On Tuesday morning, organizers with CAUSE (Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy) — a tenants’ rights advocacy group that’s been bird-dogging the South Coast’s rental market for years — gathered in front of Santa Barbara’s City Hall and reported that 43 percent of the tenants they’d surveyed had experienced rent increases of $100 or more in the past five years. Likewise, the CAUSE report found that 15 percent of the tenants surveyed had been evicted in the same time period.
The report is based on 20-question interviews conducted with 590 tenants — mostly low-income Latino families — living in the five cities from Oxnard to Santa Maria. The punch line of the report was not merely how unforgiving the South Coast rental market is; it was the extent to which that burden is disproportionately felt by Latino families.
Santa Barbara renters, the report noted, are significantly more “cost-burdened” than homeowners. In Santa Barbara, 67 percent of homeowners are white, while 24 percent are Latino. Only 29 percent of homeowners, the report found, qualify as cost-burdened — meaning more than 30 percent of household income goes to housing — while 55 percent of Santa Barbara tenants fall into that category. In fact, CAUSE organizer Maricela Morales exclaimed, Santa Barbara County tenants have the dubious distinction of being the sixth most cost-burdened out of California’s 58 counties. “That’s something we don’t want to strive for,” Morales said in front of City Hall.
