East Bay Times: Housing woes in Hayward take center stage

Ramon Rios-Parada has lived in Hayward his whole life and can see that things are slowly changing. When the time came for the 32-year-old social worker at La Familia Neighborhood Resource Center to look for his own place to rent, he heard stories from friends about rents in Hayward being high. What he found were studio and one-bedroom apartment rents looming around $1,200 a month and homeowners charging around $950 a month to rent individual rooms. “When I started looking for a place to live two years ago, I wasn’t focused on Hayward; I was just focused on where would be the cheapest, so I was looking at Oakland Berkeley and other areas,” Rios-Parada said in a phone interview. The Hayward High and San Francisco State University graduate eventually caught a break when two homeowners offered to rent a room in their house near the Impact Academy Arts & Tech charter school for a little more than $800 a month.