In a narrow building near the border of skid row, third-year
UCLA law student Matt Williamson sat in a folding chair and
listened to Delvina Thompson read a litany of complaints about her
home at the Huntington residential hotel. The hotel staff has
entered her room when she is not there without giving her notice,
the hotel is rat-infested, and the management tried to make her
sign a new contract that was incomplete and erroneously listed a
swimming pool among the hotel’s amenities, she said. When she
finished, Williamson brought out a thick book of California’s
legal codes and read out the statute that requires apartment
managers to give tenants 24-hour notice before entering their
apartments. Thompson’s situation is not an isolated one.
Downtown Los Angeles residents are facing a dire shortage of
housing, and UCLA students and professors are joining community
advocates to give voices to some of the city’s poorest
residents. Williamson is one of three members of El Centro Legal, a
UCLA law student group, who spent the evening giving legal advice
at the offices of the Los Angeles Community Action Network on
Thursday. Thompson is one of about a dozen downtown Los Angeles
residents who came to the clinic seeking legal help. Many came
complaining of what they said were unfair evictions. Illegal
evictions are becoming increasingly common as development dollars
continue to pour into downtown, causing property values to rise,
community activists and residents say. “They’re trying
to force people out of the hotel. There’s no doubt,”
said Al Sabo of the Frontier residential hotel, where he lives.
Residential hotels, or single-room-occupancy hotels, offer very
low-income housing. Residential hotels are sometimes referred to as
last-resort housing, and community advocates say people evicted
from them often become homeless. Sabo has been living in a
residential hotel downtown since he became ill and went into a
four-month coma three and a half years ago, he said. During his
stay at the Frontier Hotel, the management has tried to make him
move floors, which community activist groups say is a common tactic
to keep residents from establishing tenancy. “I refused to
move because of what I had learned at LA CAN,” he said,
adding that he now pays his rent to the LA Housing Department as
part of the Real Estate Assessment Program, a program designed to
motivate negligent landlords to fix their properties. Neither Rob
Frontiera, owner and manager of the Frontier Hotel, nor Landmark
Equity Management, which manages the Huntington Hotel, returned
repeated calls seeking comment. Building boom and housing crisis In
recent years, increased interest in downtown property has caused a
building boom. The number of market-rate units, whose costs
fluctuate with the market’s demand, have skyrocketed downtown
but numbers of affordable-housing units, or those affordable to
people earning 80 percent of an area’s median income, have
grown only slightly, leaving parts of downtown a mix of new
gleaming buildings and dilapidated old ones. In 2003, the median
income for a family of four in Los Angeles was $53,500. From 1998
to 2005 the number of affordable-housing units downtown increased
from 8,566 to 9,414 while market-rate units went from 3,208 to
8,564 according to figures from the Downtown Center Business
Improvement District. Downtown Los Angeles is defined as the area
between the 101 and 10 freeways, and between the Los Angeles River
and Lucas Street. Los Angeles spends less than other large cities
on affordable housing. In the 2002-2003 fiscal year, Los Angeles
spent $43.16 per person on affordable-housing production. In the
same time period, New York, San Diego, San Jose, and Chicago spent
$74.88, $69.40, $101.87, and $57.89 per person, respectively,
according to a 2003 report produced for the City of Los Angeles
Housing Department. Only Phoenix, the sixth and final city in the
study, spent less than Los Angeles, at $30.52 per person. And as a
new wave of planned developments, including the Grand Avenue and LA
Live projects, plan to change downtown Los Angeles into an
attractive place to be, questions arise as to who will be able to
afford to live there and who is responsible for creating affordable
housing. Developers, city officials, and community advocates have
vastly different answers to these questions. Developers express
their sympathy for the city’s poor, but without public
subsidies they say it is not their job to house them. “The
people in the business community are all for affordable housing. We
know it’s needed, we know it’s important, we just
don’t want to do it without the help of the government.
It’s not fair … We’re not taxing every other industry
to build affordable housing,” said Hal Bastian, vice
president and director of economic development for the Downtown
Center Business Improvement District. There is demand for
market-rate housing because many people want to live in an urban
environment within walking distance to work and near cultural
amenities and public transportation, Bastian said. Bill Stevenson,
a Los Angeles developer, said developments like his ““ some of
which are built on the sites of abandoned buildings ““ bring
money into the city, meet the demands of people who want to live in
an urban environment, and do not displace people. Community
advocates say they are not against development, but they want the
city to look into strategies for building more low-income housing,
and they want developers to think about the social implications of
making formerly low-income housing into more expensive housing.
“Right now people who have $3,000 for rent have a lot of
choices, but if you have $700 for rent you have almost no
choices,” said Gilda Haas, executive director of Strategic
Actions for a Just Economy, a downtown community activist
organization, and a professor in UCLA’s urban planning
department. “Right now we really really really don’t
need a single unit more that rents for $3,000 or more
dollars,” Haas said. Other community activists make more
confrontational criticisms, calling the new wave of development a
move toward “gentrification,” a process of rebuilding
that brings in middle-class residents and often replaces previous
poorer residents. And they criticize policy makers for allowing it.
“The gentrification climate is being led by developers. The
policy makers are in tow,” said Pete White, founder and
co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an
organization that does grass roots organizing of Los Angeles’
homeless and very low-income residents. Los Angeles’ housing
crisis extends to housing of all types and income levels, city
officials say. Market-rate development is important because
everyone needs housing and more housing means less demand pushing
up the prices, said Sergio Barajas, director of housing for the Los
Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, in an e-mail. Barajas said
if developers point to the city as the party responsible for
creating affordable housing, they should be more amenable to
policies the government uses to encourage them to build affordable
housing. “If you are talking about government
(responsibility) in creating a solution you have to be aware that
that will involve more than just money. It will be policies,”
he said. The CRA funds affordable housing by giving developers who
build such units opportunities for tax credits and tax-free bonds
so they can build at lower cost. For projects that receive CRA
funding, the agency requires that 20 percent of the units be
affordable to people with low or moderate incomes. Though their
interests sometimes collide, community advocates, developers and
the city have worked together successfully in the past. During the
planning of the Staples Center, the Figueroa Corridor Coalition, a
group of about 23 community organizations, negotiated with the
Center’s developer, AEG, and city officials to come up with a
“community benefit agreement.” The agreement included
provisions for 20 percent of the project’s housing units to
be affordable. The agreement also yielded $100,000 for a community
jobs program, and a total of $650,000 which non-profit developers
could take out as no-interest loans. As part of the agreement, the
company also invested more than $8 million in affordable-housing
projects. Community benefit agreements like the one negotiated for
the Staples Center project are positive for the community, but they
are not an answer to the housing problem, said Lizette Hernandez,
coordinator of the Figueroa Corridor Coalition. “It is not a
panacea to the issues that are facing the community,”
Hernandez said, adding that though the Staples Center agreement
brought in new low-income housing units, the city is still facing a
net loss of affordable housing as parts of the existing stock are
bought and converted into market- rate housing. Assigning
responsibility for low-income housing is tricky business, and
community advocates spend a lot of their energy trying to make it
possible for downtown’s low-income residents to take more
control of their situation. Power in numbers At El Centro
Legal’s Thursday night legal clinics, UCLA law students take
the time to listen to downtown residents and help give them access
to the legal system. Thompson said the clinic was very helpful.
“I got a lot of information,” she said.
“We’re gonna be back.” Members of El Centro Legal
help residents construct a legal basis for their complaints. They
fill out habitability complaints and send them to the Los Angeles
Housing Department, write letters to landlords, and photocopy
payment receipts to establish tenancy. For people facing eviction,
establishing tenancy is important because it is the basis for any
legal claim a person might have to fight eviction. When a tenant
has a valid legal complaint, the members of El Centro Legal call
Barbara Schultz, an attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los
Angeles, to check on the legal advice they are giving out. Clinic
volunteers say their task is about giving voices to people who are
intimidated by the system. “The major theme is that there is
power in numbers,” said Emmy Levens, a second-year law
student who is a member of El Centro Legal. “People who are
poor don’t have power in the system so they are not taken
seriously … What Barbara and LA CAN try to do is bring people
together so people will listen to them.” Several efforts to
promote the preservation and construction of affordable housing are
underway. The Legal Aid Foundation is among organizations
advocating a “no net loss” policy, which would require
the city to keep the numbers of available low-income housing units
constant by either building new affordable units or preserving old
ones. The CRA has promised to review the policy, Schultz said.
A proposed solution And on a city-wide level, some organizations
have gathered behind a proposal for an inclusionary housing
ordinance as a way to increase the city’s stock of low income
housing. The proposal would require new developments to make
between 5 and 20 percent of their units affordable to people at
certain income levels. The lower the price of the units, the fewer
the developer would have to build. To build low-income units,
developers would be able to take advantage of state incentives
which allow them to build more densely than is usually allowed. The
city commissioned a study in 2002 which found that this proposal
was feasible, and it spent months being reviewed by the City
Council. However, when the mayoral election shook up the balance of
power in the city council, the proposal was removed from the
council’s agenda. Hope on the distant horizon Balancing a
city’s housing needs is difficult, but there is hope for Los
Angeles because other cities have shown that effective community
organizing and willing policy makers can implement workable housing
policy, said Jacqueline Leavitt, a professor in UCLA’s urban
planning department. She said community organizers in New York and
Boston were able to secure state funding for affordable housing in
the early part of the century, and in recent decades the Canadian
government was very supportive of affordable-housing projects in
Vancouver. As a result, these cities currently have better
low-income housing situations than Los Angeles, though need has
continued to grow there too. Los Angeles is moving in a positive
direction, but it will take time to work past the obstacles the
city’s housing situation is facing, according to Leavitt.
“You need pressure from the bottom and collaboration from the
top,” she said.