Bay Area Housing Costs Hit Poor Hard, Report Finds : Shelter: Expense leaves them with little for other needs. Thousands more are ‘working poor’ at risk of becoming homeless.

The San Francisco-Oakland area may be the worst place in the nation for poor people to live because of its high housing costs, according to a report released Monday.

The high costs are forcing poor households to spend excessive amounts of their limited incomes for shelter, the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said. This forces the poor to divert money from other pressing needs, such as food, clothing and health care.

“For poor households, affordable housing has become nearly non-existent in the San Francisco-Oakland area,” said Ed Lazere, a housing analyst who wrote the report. “Extremely high housing costs have left poor renters and homeowners with little income for other basic needs.”

San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond already have large homeless populations on the streets or in temporary shelters.

But the report said there also are many poor Bay Area residents who are “near homeless” or at risk of being homeless. These are the “working poor”--people who have part-time or entry-level jobs that allow them to barely make ends meet.

“If you are a poor family that spends nearly all of your money on housing and there is a disruption (in income) such as a layoff or a medical problem, you are at risk of becoming homeless,” Lazere said.

Bay Area public officials welcomed the release of the report, but said its conclusions were not surprising.

“I’ve been dealing with these problems for 15 years,” said Brad Paul, San Francisco’s deputy mayor of housing. “I think this (report) puts a new perspective on the housing issue. Most people don’t realize that if you have an entry-level job in a fast-food place, you may only be able to afford to live in your car.”

Alameda County Supervisor Don Perata said the problem has “been pretty obvious to a lot of people for a long time. It accounts for our high rate of homelessness.”

Although affordable housing is needed in the urban core areas of Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda, most new housing is built in the suburbs far from job centers, Perata said. Also, most construction in the inner cities has merely “gentrified” low-income neighborhoods and chased out longtime residents, he said.

The report, based on 1985 government statistics--the most recent available--concludes:

61% of all poor renter households--or 39,900 households--spent at least 70% of income on housing costs.

82% of poor homeowners spent at least 30% of their income on housing, which is the federal maximum for affordability, while nearly 50% of them spent at least 70% of their incomes on housing.

About half of the area’s 101,700 poor households are either in San Francisco or Oakland, with the remainder in other parts of Alameda County and Contra Costa, San Mateo or Marin counties.

Latino and black communities, on average, paid a higher percentage of their income for housing than white residents.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 1990 “fair market rent” for a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco and San Mateo and Marin counties was $887 a month, the highest in the nation, the report noted.

The “fair market rent” in Alameda and Contra Costa counties was $736 a month, the 10th highest for U.S. metropolitan areas.

Government assistance through subsidized housing programs is not available for most eligible people, with some 56,000 households on waiting lists as of last November, the report stated.

Last fall’s Loma Prieta earthquake exacerbated the problem, destroying or damaging at least 5,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing and leaving 8,000 people in the area without homes. In Oakland and Berkeley, many residential hotels have not been reopened. In San Francisco, officials said the city has made substantial progress keeping residential hotels open.

Monday’s report did not include the San Jose area or Santa Clara County, which were addressed in an earlier report by the same group. That report, released in 1988, said the housing woes of low-income people in San Jose were nearly as bad as in the San Francisco--Oakland area.

“While the housing crisis is national in scope, it is particularly bad in the Bay Area,” Lazere said.