Envy Apartment

The average market rent for a one- bedroom apartment in San Mateo County is $2,053 per month, according to new rental data released by the San Mateo County Department of Housing. This reflects an 8.2 percent increase from last year. This is devastating news for anyone looking for affordable rental housing and comes on the heels of other unsettling trend data for the county, housing officials said. United Way's 211 referral line for  San Mateo   County  reports taking significantly more calls for housing related services than for any other service. Additionally, according to the county's new Health and Human Services Agency report on homelessness, the county's homeless rate has risen 12 percent since 2011. "People can't afford to live here, and not just people who are poor," said Kate Comfort Harr , Executive Director of HIP Housing, a  San Mateo   County  nonprofit specializing in affordable housing programs including Home Sharing . "Anyone maki...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...