Aleyda Rebelo hasn’t slept well since the pandemic began.
Many nights, she tosses and turns in bed, anxious about how she’ll pay the $1,200 monthly rent on the house she shares with her family in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.
“I’m so worried because my family depends on me. If I don’t make money, it’s very difficult,” said Rebelo, 35, in Spanish.
The mother of four became the main breadwinner in her household about five years ago, she said, after her husband was disabled at his last job.
Rebelo cleans homes in San Francisco and the Oakland hills but, since March, she has lost several clients and more than half of her earnings, she said.
Rebelo is one of hundreds of thousands of Bay Area renters who saw their incomes drop during the pandemic, as shelter-in-place and social distancing measures became the norm. The economic slowdown has compounded the stress on families for whom the regional housing market was already unaffordable — and the strain is felt especially in lower-income areas like Fruitvale.
At the same time, the health of people in the neighborhood has been battered by the coronavirus. A cluster of three ZIP codes there, including 94601 — where Rebelo lives — has the highest case rates of COVID-19 in Alameda County, according to its public health department.
Rebelo said her 2-year-old niece, whose family lives in the neighborhood, tested positive for COVID-19 this month. And Rebelo worries about bringing the virus home to her husband, who she said suffered lung damage by inhaling chemicals used to treat wood floors at his job.
“If my husband gets the virus he could die, because he already has a more delicate health condition,” said Rebelo, an immigrant from El Salvador. “So, it’s a huge stress having to go out.”
Like Rebelo, most of the residents in ZIP code 94601 work in jobs that can’t be done from home, so they are at higher risk for contracting the virus. And wages for Rebelo and her neighbors tend to be low.
As a consequence, more than 28% of people in the ZIP code live in poverty — twice the state average, according to census figures.
‘We’ve Just Seen the Need Intensify’
Even before the pandemic, many in Fruitvale and adjacent parts of East Oakland were already spending a big share of their paychecks on rent and had no financial cushion to cope with lost income, said Carolina Reid, an assistant professor in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
“It’s hard to come up with the words that are sufficient to describe what a crisis this must be for some households in terms of concerns over their health … concerns over paying rent,” said Reid, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
For now, local and state eviction moratoriums have been a lifeline for renters like Rebelo. But once those policies end, tenants may still have to pay landlords the full amount of their back rent.
Reid and others worry that could lead to an unprecedented wave of evictions, especially hitting low-income renters of color. As many as 5.4 million people in California are at risk of eviction, according to estimates by the Aspen Institute.
