After fleeing her home in now-Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Mozhgan Entazari did everything she could to find a new one for her family in the sunny, palm tree-lined communities of Southern California. The 34-year-old mother of two scoured options on Zillow with her husband, while the family lived at a hotel in Irvine, south of Los Angeles. She spent $200 for an Uber ride to see an apartment 90 minutes away only to find it had been rented. Entazari needed a place not just for her immediate family but for seven members of her extended family. In the end, it took four months. On Sunday, they'll move into a five-bedroom house in Corona, about 50 miles southeast of LA, which is renting for $4,000.
The family's struggles are emblematic of what tens of thousands of Afghans are finding since they moved off US military bases and into American cities and towns following last summer's dramatic airlift operation, per the AP. Many hope to settle in Southern California and the Washington, DC, area, where Afghans previously established vibrant communities with halal grocery stores and mosques. But these communities also are among the country's priciest housing markets, and units, especially those suitable for often larger Afghan families, are in short supply. Resettlement agencies report it's taking longer to get refugees out of temporary housing like hotels, Airbnbs, and churches. The search for housing for Afghans comes amid a tightening housing market as the US crawls out of the pandemic.
The nationwide vacancy rate for rental units dropped about 1 percentage point, to 5.6%, in the last quarter of 2020, according to recently released US Census data. The typical US rent was up nearly 16%, to more than $1,850 in January compared to last January, according to the online real estate marketplace Zillow. About half of all Afghan immigrants to the US, many who came decades ago, live in five major metropolitan areas: Washington; Sacramento, Calif.; San Francisco; New York; and Los Angeles, according to the Migration Policy Institute. As a result, these areas are often attractive for Afghan newcomers, and many list the names of relatives or acquaintances already living there as contacts when resettlement agencies are considering where to send them.
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But with some 76,000 Afghans arriving in the US since the Taliban takeover of their country last year, many of these cities are reaching their saturation point, per Krish O'Mara Vignarajah of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The top states for Afghans arriving following the Taliban takeover are Texas (nearly 10,500); California (over 8,200); Virginia (over 5,100); and Washington (over 2,800), per State Department data. Entazari will share a roof with her husband and kids, along with her mother, teen sister, and her brother and his family. Without a job, credit history, or co-signer, she said it was incredibly difficult to find housing. And without an address, she said she and her husband couldn't get jobs and her kids couldn't enroll in school. "All our life depends on housing," Entazari said in Farsi through a volunteer interpreter.
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