Blanca Colín has lived in overcrowded places she can barely afford since she emigrated from Mexico to Contra Costa County 18 years ago. When Colín first moved to Concord with her husband and two children, they lived with three other families in a one-bedroom apartment for nine years. Rent kept increasing until they could no longer cover the cost, even by splitting the payment with the other families. She and her family then moved to a small house, where her 16-year-old son began to develop health problems. In the meantime, the family kept growing, and when Colín tried to find a new place that fit them all, rent had raised over time to $1,300, and their only option was to move out of Concord.
Now she and her family of six share a two bedroom home under construction in Antioch, along with two other tenants who occupy the garage. She still has to use half her salary, along with some help from her working children, to pay the rent, about $1,200. The owner of the house said they will also give Colín and her family the opportunity to purchase the home in ten years if they continue to stay there.
“We [moved] because we had to,” she says in Spanish as her granddaughter plays next to her. They went from living in a fairly safe neighborhood in Concord, Colín says, to a neighborhood in Antioch where she doesn’t feel safe enough to take her young granddaughter for a walk in the park.
Colín’s story is far from unique. Contra Costa County, which has one of the lowest average rents in the Bay Area, is no longer the affordable place it has long been perceived. Between 2000 and 2020, the median rent in Contra Costa increased by 42%, while the median income only increased by 11%, according to the Bay Area Equity Atlas. Renters needed to earn 2.6 times the minimum wage to afford the average asking rent of $2,200 in the county in 2023, according to the California Housing Partnership’s latest report on affordable housing needs.
We use almost half of our salary to pay the rent alone.
Blanca Colín, 53, Antioch
Colín says that she had to choose between working multiple jobs to afford a home on their own, or sharing the rent with multiple families. She chose the latter. “It is the option we have left because then we would not be able to have time for our children if we dedicate ourselves to working two or three jobs,” she says. “We use almost half of our salary to pay the rent alone.”
Habitability is one of the biggest issues plaguing Contra Costa County renters, especially immigrants, says Eduardo Torres, regional coordinator for Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of local tenant organizations. “Some of the biggest habitability issues that I’ve seen, in my experience, were with immigrants,” Torres says. “It’s because they can be taken advantage of. Where else are you going to go if the rent is already high, and you don’t even know if you have rights?”
Some of the biggest habitability issues that I’ve seen were with immigrants.
Eduardo Torres, Tenants Together
Colín and her family were only able to live on their own between 2014 and 2019, in a studio-sized home in Concord that was riddled with problems that impacted the health of the family. Colín says they dealt with rat and roach infestations, mold in the walls, a leaking ceiling, and clogged pipes, which caused the underside of the home to flood.
Colín says that when she asked her landlord to fix their leaking roof, she was told to either fix it herself or to move out because her landlord could not afford to make the repairs. Colín and her family decided to fix the roof, thinking they would get a discount on rent. But that did not happen. Instead, her landlord raised their rent from $950 to $1,300 later that year.
Almost two years into living in these conditions, Colín’s 16-year-old son began having allergic reactions. She says his lips and throat would swell in the middle of the night, so much so that his throat began to close up. Colín took her son to the hospital multiple times. “I changed his bedding and his sheets, thinking it was from the dust. We thought at some point that a spider could cause my son to have an allergic reaction.”
The hospital informed her that it was most likely something in the house, so Colín and her husband began to investigate. “We started looking into the home and noticed the walls were already very deteriorated on the inside,” she says. “There was no insulation at all. It was always very cold in the winters and very warm in the summer. We realized that the house was built in 1942 and that the paint possibly had lead in it. There was also mold accumulating in the walls.
“We decided to leave the house,” she adds. “It didn’t matter that we had put the new roof on or the repairs.”
The struggles of renting with children
For five years, María and her 11-year-old daughter have struggled to find a place where they truly felt comfortable. They were evicted from their apartment in Concord in 2018, and ever since that day, they have moved nine times in between Concord, Antioch, and Martinez. María requested El Tímpano withhold her last name for fear of putting her current housing in jeopardy.
I have to have two jobs to be able to provide for my daughter and to give us a roof over our head.
María, 52, Contra Costa County
María, a 52-old immigrant from Mexico, says that many of the apartments she looked at wouldn’t allow children.
They had lived in an apartment complex in Concord for 13 years until it was bought by a larger corporation that evicted all the tenants to do major renovations, she says. “I wouldn’t be going through this if I was never evicted. If I was paying my rent, why did they evict us?” María says in Spanish.
Because of the high rent across Contra Costa County, María and her daughter have been forced to share units with multiple people, most of the time complete strangers.
“We would only go home to sleep because of how uncomfortable we felt there,” María says.
During the pandemic, María would have to leave her daughter at home to go to work at Taco Bell, and her daughter would stay in their bedroom all day. It made María incredibly anxious to leave her in a two-bedroom apartment with ten people she didn’t know. Her daughter told her that one of the other tenants came into the room unannounced several times. Her daughter asked if they could leave the unit because she was uncomfortable.
“My main concern was that they were going to do something to her,” María says.
During this time, María picked up another job to be able to afford rent. She was living in Antioch, waking up at five or six o’clock in the morning to be able to take her daughter to school in Concord, go to work at her first job doing laundry for a large family, take her daughter back home to Antioch after school, then head to her second job as a fast food worker until she was finally able to get home at two in the morning.
“I have to have two jobs to be able to provide for my daughter and to give us a roof over our head,” María says.
María and her now 15-year-old daughter were finally able to find a studio to live in by themselves in Martinez. Even though the commute is longer, she still has to work two jobs, and they’ve only been living there for about two months, María says she and her daughter are finally starting to feel comfortable in their new home.
