Tenants, landlord groups debate city’s housing crisis as rent hikes loom
“There’s one thing they do agree on: there is a housing affordability crisis that needs to be solved. The city’s population is slightly decreasing, according to Oksana Mironova, housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society (CSS), who cited data from the U.S. census. ‘Housing affordability is likely contributing to this decline,’ said Mironova. According to CSS’s testimony, median asking rents jumped nearly 30 percent above inflation from 2014 and 2017, when that figure had been just 2.1 percent in the previous three years.”