Headed by prosecutor Richard Barb, the task force investigates violations of health, fire, and building codes. Barb says at any given time his staff is working on a hundred different buildings where tenants filed complaints. It's so serious that nobody knows because nobody's done a survey. I mean, I've read that there are 156,000 or more apartment units that are substandard. Those statistics were done by the Census Bureau, but they're based on estimates.
Nobody knows for sure.
Nationwide, housing for one in seven American renters is unaffordable. Peter Dreier is a former Boston city housing director, now a public policy professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Dreier says the widening gap between incomes and housing prices is at the heart of the problem. So you have an economic boom in a city or in a region, and, as we said earlier, rents go up, and so the process is often called gentrification, where instead of trickling down the housing market trickles up. So you have two things going on.