The 234 Apartment

Cities are neighborhoods writ large . They ebb up and down, depending on who is moving in and out. They proclaim their attractions, hide their warts, burnish their numbers. After all, real estate values ride on the telling. In the chest-thumping of the Bay Area, San Jose has always sought to distance itself from Oakland. San Jose was bigger, richer, safer. With one horrible event last week, however, a piece of that myth vanished. And we’re left pondering the irony. I’m talking about the killing of off- duty Oakland firefighter Jake P. Walter, 30, who was shot to death last Thursday night outside a night market on the edge of San Jose’s Japantown. Police called it a random and unprovoked attack. In San Jose, we suppose things unfold very differently.  A random attack like this might occur elsewhere in the Bay Area, but not in a vibrant San Jose neighborhood filled with upscale apartments. And it would never take a firefighter, one of the good guys. Under former Mayor Ron Gonzales , ...

In a few overbuilt downtowns , apartment rents are starting to fall. But experts claim that demand for apartment units continues to be so strong, the trend won’t last for long. “The story in these markets is the apartment story writ large : the high levels of apartment construction are not enough to house the 1.2 million or so new households formed each year without increased single-family construction,” says John Affleck, research strategist with the CoStar Group. Apartment rents are still growing, but not as quickly as they had been, in markets across the country, according to research firm RealPage Inc. Rent growth is slowing the most in a handful of cities where developers have opened thousands of new apartments recently. Rents fall in Houston In Houston, rents dropped by 1.6 percent on average over the past year, according to RealPage. In the top “urban core” neighborhoods where developers have opened the most new apartments, rents have fallen by more th...