Affordable-housing market worsens for desperate renters
“For $1,200 a month, Patricia Torres and her family were renting a bedroom, a share of time in the bathroom, one vegetable drawer and one shelf in the fridge, and two cupboards over the stove. They rented not so much a home as a fraction of one. Karen Calderon had even less: a single room in a homeless shelter where she was not allowed so much as a hot plate to cook for her family. Adrian Caratowsa had a studio he had remade as his own, repainting the walls and wallpapering over the kitchen cabinets. But every day for five years, he walked out into a neighborhood he found depressing.”