SAN FRANCISCO — 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’d 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.
For each, San Francisco’s housing crisis had meant living without essential elements of home. A large affordable housing development rising downtown promised what they did not have: 95 complete homes, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments with privacy, a sense of peace, a place to cook.
The development, Natalie Gubb Commons, was reserved for households with incomes up to 50 percent of the local median. The applications were open for three weeks last fall, and 6,580 households applied for a chance to rent there, or nearly 70 for each unit. READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/upshot/these-95-apartments-promised-affordable-rent-in-san-francisco-then-6580-people-applied.html
