Fire At Home With 13 People Highlights Need For Affordable Housing In South Bay
SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) -- More than a dozen people needed a place to stay after a fire damaged their San Jose home, an incident which helps illustrate the state of affordable housing in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.
If you want to get a sense of just how bad the housing situation has gotten, look no further than the 500 block of Nokomis Drive in South San Jose.
Around 5:00 p.m. Tuesday morning, a fire broke out in the garage. The smoke alarm went off and everybody got out ok - all 13 people.
A Red Cross volunteer said multiple families living in a single home is not an unusual situation. "It happens quite often," said volunteer John Snyder. "I don't know the statistics, I can't speak to that, but yes, it happens quite often."
To help make the mortgage payments, the house has a couple of add-on bedrooms for the extra tenants: a family of seven, a second family of three, and a couple more individuals, some of whom are elderly.
"I would say it's typical for our community, our Vietnamese American community," said resident Wilson Tran. "Where we know a lot of people who need a place to stay, our friends, family, et cetera."
The Red Cross plans on helping the residents find a temporary home, perhaps in a local hotel or motel.
Having grown up in east San Jose, I can tell you this living arrangement is not unusual. And given how expensive it has become to live in the Silicon Valley, this type of situation is becoming more common.
The owner of the home told me she charged the other family $600 a month to live here. "They're like my family," said homeowner Marilyn Tran. "Like a brother or something like that."
Tran says her husband died a few years ago, and now she helps out fellow Vietnamese families who are new to America by giving them an affordable place to live.
"I'm just a babysitter. I don't get a lot of money. I just want to share," she said. "I don't want to like, business. Not a business."
No word yet on the cause of the fire.