Clearing "the Jungle"

Silicon Valley is one of the wealthiest regions in the US, home to tech giants like Apple and Google. But it also has some of the highest homelessness rates in the country, with an estimated 5,000 sleeping on the streets each night in San Jose. The booming tech industry has pushed up housing costs, pricing people out of the market. According to Zillow Real Estate Research, the median rent in San Jose as of October was $2,934 a month. For the wider San Jose metropolitan area, it was $3,163 a month — up 16 percent in one year. A city memo estimates a shortage of 16,000 affordable housing units. But resources to deal with that shortage have dwindled as well. In California, redevelopment funds from the state had been a reliable means of developing affordable housing, but when California was facing its severe budget deficits in the midst of the recession, its governor and Legislature did away with redevelopment programs. The city’s housing director, said that in 2010 the city received $40.6 million in redevelopment funds that could be used for low- and moderate-income housing. Now that money is spent. From all sources, federal, state and local, the city’s funds for affordable housing have dropped by a third since then, to $61 million.

US police have just finished clearing what is thought to be America’s largest homeless encampment, in Silicon Valley. The 68-acre network of tents, make-shift shelters and even a tree-house, known as "the Jungle", was once home to 200-300 people. More than a few of the encampment residents said they were victims of rent increases. At least a third of the Jungle’s residents were not placed in housing and are now wondering where to go. Even without the Jungle, the city is veined by a network of at least 200 other outdoor encampments.

The action is similar to what took place in New Orleans in August when the city cleared out a homeless encampment under the Pontchartrain Expressway of more than 140 people.

Matt King of Sacred Heart Community Service, a community organizing and poverty service group explained  "There is no margin of error in the Silicon Valley. If you don't have nonstop good income, it's a very fast fall from a two-bedroom apartment to a tent in the Jungle."

Brooklyn, New York is the most expensive place to rent or buy in America. A resident would need to devote 98 percent of the median income to afford the payment on a median-priced home of $615,000, was the least-affordable market, followed by San Francisco and Manhattan. Investors and foreign buyers have helped drive up home prices in high-cost markets, keeping many residents locked into rentals, where costs also have been rising.

Vice president of RealtyTrac Daren Blomquist said, “Incomes have not grown nearly as fast as home prices. … That disconnected home-price growth has been driven by investors and other cash buyers who aren’t as constrained by income.”

Consequently, many neighborhoods are out of reach for people who could previously afford them.

Meanwhile here in the UK the number of tenants evicted from their homes in England and Wales hit record levels in November. Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that 11,100 properties were repossessed by bailiffs between July and September this year, the highest quarterly figure since records began in 2000. The homelessness charity Shelter estimates that over 1,300 people a day (560 households) in England are put at risk from eviction or repossession.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, says: “A wave of welfare changes including the bedroom tax, mixed in with a chronic lack of affordable homes and a hugely insecure private rental market are leaving more and more families teetering on a financial knife-edge. More than 40,000 households lost that battle to stay in their home in the last year, and right behind them are thousands more but a few steps away from the same fate.”

Gillian Guy, the Citizens Advice’s chief executive, says: “The imbalance of power in the private rented sector leaves people vulnerable to the whims of landlords. Renters’ rights need to be brought up to a decent 21st century standard.”

Islington plans to force owners of newly built homes to prove they are occupied. If homes are left empty for longer than three months owners will face high court injunctions which if breached, could bring fines, repossession and, in the worst cases, jail for owners, the council said.

The drastic action has been proposed as the north Londonborough revealed that 30% of 2,000 homes built in the last six years have nobody on the electoral register and, even when students and foreign tenants are discounted, close to a quarter of homes in five of the newest residential developments appear to be empty.

Owners will have to prove they are not “buy-to-leave” investors by showing up-to-date utility and council tax bills, evidence of deliveries, registration documents for health services, schools and social services, and even prove the homes are fully furnished.