Alameda settles suit to add low-cost homes - April 30, 1990

“Alameda settles suit to add low-cost homes”

By Janet Joson (The Tribune)
April 30, 1990

ALAMEDA – Fearing the courts could overturn its low-density law, the city council has settled litigation with two residents who claimed the measure discriminates against poor people.

Measure A, approved by voters in 1973, prohibits construction of homes larger than a duplex. But the city has agreed to an interpretation of the measure which allows the Alameda Housing Authority to replace lost low-cost homes built with federal funds, said City Attorney Carole Korade.

The Housing Authority can now provide up to 325 low-income apartments by building new units or acquiring existing ones.

Clayton Guyton and Modessa Henderson filed their lawsuit on behalf of the Buena Vista Community Association in January 1989 after the city refused to provide low-cost housing when the 615-unit Buena Vista Apartments converted from subsidized to market-rate rents.

“I’m glad it’s over,” said Henderson, a single mother who’s lived at the complex (now called the Bridgeport Apartments) for 13 years. “It’s been three years of personal sacrifice.”

“We’re not bitter. We’re not disgruntled,” added Guyton, a transportation dispatcher at the Presidio in San Francisco. “We’re very pleased with the results of this lawsuit.”

The city council agreed to the interpretation Tuesday. None of the council members would reveal the closed-session vote, but Vice Mayor Lil Arnerich and Council members Lil Arnerich and Bill Withrow said in separate interviews that approving the settlement was the best way to save Measure A from further tampering.

“All of us want to preserve Measure A,” Arnerich said. “If this had continued through the courts…the courts would have probably struck it down in some manner.”

But Mayor Chuck Corica, who was elected to the city council on a Measure A platform, disagreed.

“How do they know we would have lost in court? If we did, we could have appealed,” he said.

Council member Barbara Thomas could not be reached for comment. The settlement requires the city to provide money for additional affordable housing using redevelopment and federal Community Development Block Grant funds and new commercial development fees. The city also will have to pay the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, which represented Guyton and Henderson in the lawsuit, $95,000 in attorneys fees and other costs.

Legal Aid attorney Michael Rawson said his clients were instrumental in rallying other low-income tenants together and using state and local laws to challenge the city’s housing and land-use policies.

“This wasn’t handed to us on a silver platter,” Guyton said. “Nobody did more for us than we did ourselves. “He and Henderson said Friday at a press conference that they will help other tenant activists fight for low-income housing.

Tomorrow the council will vote on a resolution reaffirming its support of the law and discuss the merits of rezoning the city’s residential areas to better preserve Measure A.

Source: Joson, Janet, "Alameda settles suit to add low-cost homes." Oakland Tribune. 30 April, 1990.

Tenant activists see more fights - April 28, 1990

Tenant activists see more fights
Couple wants others to take bigger role in addressing demands for affordable housing

By Karen Matthews (Alameda Times Star)
April 28, 1990

ALAMEDA – Tenant activists Clayton Guyton and Modessa Henderson, whose suit challenging the city’s housing policy was settled this week, said Friday that their fight is not over.

Rather than resting on their laurels after having reached a settlement with the city that will allow up to 325 low-cost apartments to be built, they want to make sure that when and if those units are built, they can be part of the process.

“Tenants should be in on every phase, when it comes to affordable housing,” said Guyton. “Cities don’t know how to approach tenants.”

Guyton and Henderson filed a suit in 1989 challenging Measure A, the city law that restricts new housing to duplexes and single-family houses.

The settlement allows a 325-unit window in Measure A for low-income apartments.
Guyton and Henderson sued after the Bridgeport Apartments, formerly the Buena Vista Park Apartments, were converted in 1987 from subsidized to market-rate rents – something that is happening all over the country as landlords pay off the mortgages on federally subsidized low-income apartment buildings.

The 325 potential units won through the settlement are supposed to replace the low-income units lost in the conversion.

Guyton said he would like tenants to be involved in the process of developing low-income housing, rather than non-profit corporations like the San Francisco-based Bridge Housing Corp., which is developing Alameda’s Independence Plaza senior housing complex along with the Housing Authority.

Two San Francisco tenant activists joined Guyton and Henderson for an informal news conference Friday at a Bridgeport Apartments playground.

They said Guyton and Henderson are role models to them.

“They’re like a big brother and a big sister,” said Raja El-Amin, who lives in the Ammel Park Housing Cooperative.

“Everyone has to start somewhere,” said El-Amin. “They’ve laid some groundwork for us and others.”

Source: Matthews, Karen, “Tenant activists see more fights.” Alameda Times-Star. 28 April, 1990:3.

Council majority praises deal - April 26, 1990

Council majority praises deal
But Corica says city should have kept fighting the lawsuit against Measure A

By Karen Matthews (Alameda Times Star)
April 26, 1990

ALAMEDA – Tuesday’s settlement of a lawsuit challenging the city’s density-limiting law, Measure A, was praised Wednesday by the plaintiffs and by three of the five City Council members.

“I’m quite satisfied,” said plaintiff Modessa Henderson, who along with Clayton Guyton, charged that Measure A discriminates against poor people because it makes it difficult to build affordable housing.

“It was a long process, but we didn’t leave any stone unturned,” Henderson said. “Unfortunately, we had to go to court.”

Measure A; which the voters passed in 1973, prohibits new residential development except for single-family houses and duplexes.

[insert photo: Photo of Lil Arnerich & Bill Withrow] [link to other article]The city may have saved the law by changing it. –back of section

With the settlement, the city has opened up a window in Measure A to allow the Housing Authority to build up to 325 low-cost apartments.

Councilmember Joe Camicia said Wednesday that he believes the city “came out pretty well.”

“It’s a small price to pay, compared to losing Measure A,” Camicia said.

Councilmen Bill Withrow and Lil Arnerich agreed that the settelement represented the best deal the city could have negotiated.

“It’s not an easy decision, but it’s a decision that had to be made,” said Arnerich.

Mayor Chuck Corica disagreed, saying, “I’d rather have fought it in court.”

Councilwoman Barbara Thomas did not return calls to the Times-Star, but she criticized the agreement in an interview on a local cable television program Wednesday.

Although Tuesdays’s vote settles the Guyton-Henderson suit, many questions about the future of the city’s housing policies remain.

Corica said Tuesday that he would like to put another ballot measure before the voters, this one to “down-zone” all the residential zones in the city to relatively restrictive designation of R-2, which he said would preserve the “intent” of the weakened Measure A.

Camicia said he would prefer that the council adopt an ordinance to down-zone the city and ask the voters reaffirm the vote during a regularly scheduled election.

Norton prepares report
City Manager Bill Norton said he will prepare a report for the council at its Tuesday meeting outlining the different approaches “to see if they can select an approach at that time.”

The settlement does not require the city to build 325 low-cost apartments.

Rather, it allows the Housing Authority to build up to that number of units to replace the low-income apartments that were lost when the owner of the Buena Vista Park Apartments, now called he Bridgeport Apartments, converted the complex to market-rate rents.

Housing Authority Executive Director Tom Matthews said it’s unlikely that his agency will develop a single 325-unit complex.

“There isn’t a while lot of land left in town,” Matthews said. “It’ll probably be a lot of little ones.”

While there are no deadlines for developing the affordable housing, the settlement does require the city to apply to the state for a grant under Proposition 84, a 1988 bond issue, to built at least 85 low-income units.

Other provisions of the settlement require the city to commit resources from an expanded redevelopment area, impact fees on new development and federal Community Development Block Grant funds to low-cost housing.

Housing element scrutinized
Also still at issue is the housing element of the city’s general plan, a blue print for development through 1995.

The city submitted a revised housing element to state housing officials in November. On March 1, the Department of Housing and Community Development found the document to be out of compliance with state law, in part because of Measure A.

Nancy Javor, chief of the Division of Housing Policy Development, said Wednesday she is still awaiting an official response from the city to the state’s rejection of the housing element.

Javor said she had not seen Tuesday’s settlement agreement.

The city will be required to pay out $95,000 to the Legal Aid Society of Alameda county for Guyton’s and Henderson’s legal fees and costs.

The city will also have to pay an undisclosed amount to McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, the law firm it hired to handle the case.

Before going into closed session Tuesday, council members debated whether they should discuss the settlement in an open meeting.

Only Corica and Thomas favored an open vote on the settlement.

Withrow said Wednesday that to discuss litigation in an open session “would have set a bad precedent.”

Discussion of pending litigation is one of the exceptions to California’s open-meetings law, the Ralph M. Brown Act, which in general requires legislative bodies to conduct their business in public.

Source: Matthews, Karen, “Council majority praises deal.” Alameda Times-Star. 26 April, 1990:1.

Critics rip city’s 15-year ban on new apartment projects - July 14, 1988

Critics rip city’s 15-year ban on new apartment projects

By C.J. Clemmons (The Tribune)
July 14, 1988

ALAMEDA – The loss of a low-rent housing complex has sparked a campaign to remove this island city’s 15-year-old taboo against construction of apartment buildings.

Rents will as much as triple this year at the Bridgeport Apartments complex as hundreds of units there were converted from low-rent to market rate, and critics charge that low-income families are being forced from their homes.

The city has an obligation to build 615 apartments to replace those “lost” under the conversion, says attorney Michael Rawson of the Legal Aid Society of Alameda.

“Tenants are moving out and I can only see the situation getting worse,” says Rawson, who represents the Buena Vista Community Association. “The city can do more than they’re doing.”

The apartment complex – one of the largest low-income communities in the Eastbay – is also one of the first in the nation whose owners have paid off their government-insured loan, freeing the property from federal regulations that have kept rents low. The 3-percent, 40-year load was paid off last year by The Gersten Co. of Beverly Hills after just 20 years.

Rents began to rise.

“A lot of people have had to leave,” says tenant leader Clayton Guyton. “One family was living in their car. There are a lot of horror stories here.”

A Bridgeport Apartments goes, housing advocates say, so goes the nation.

The Northern California Association for Non-Profit Housing says the Eastbay alone could lose 10,000 units of subsidized housing over the next 20 years. The nation, the group says, could lose a full fourth of its low-income housing supply.

The chance for an apartment building boom – for any income range – appears slight in Alameda.

City Council members say they will consider the request for more apartments as they update the city’s general plan later this year.

But the city has an anti-apartment commandment – Measure A, an initiative passed in 1973 that bans construction of residential buildings with more than two units.

That measure, approved in an era when apartment developers were building big and thinking bigger, would have to be an amended before any apartments can be built.

“The residents of Alameda don’t want Measure A tampered with,” says Mayor Chuck Corica. “There will be no more apartment complexes built in this city.”

In 1984, he notes, Alameda voters defeated a proposal to construct apartments at the Marina Village development.

Alameda Council member Rita Haugner says the city is stuck between a legal obligation to city residents not to amend Measure A and a moral obligation to the Bridgeport tenants to provide affordable housing.

“These people are asking for help so they can stay in Alameda,” she says. “I know a lot of tenants and they give a richness to this community. We’re got to do something, but Measure A is necessary. Beautiful houses were being torn down to build apartments.”

The solution, she says, may come by working through options presented by the tenants.

But Guyton labels the measure as “an excuse. There is a small group in Alameda that does not want to see different cultures in this city.”

Alameda – which is simultaneously a Navy town, a small middle-America city and an island of suburbia of 70,000 people in the Eastbay’s urban core – is 80 percent white, with an average household income approaching $40,000 a year.

Bridgeport tenants have threatened to sue to challenge the constitutionality of the apartment building ban.

Members of the Buena Vista Community Association are also conducting a rent control drive. More than 3,000 signatures have been collected since the campaign began in April. The group has until September to collect 400 more signatures to put an initiative on the ballot for the regular spring election for March.

Tenants at the Bridgeport complex – formerly known as the Buena Vista Apartments – say alternative housing is needed immediately because of the recent wave of rent hikes.

Nearly 180 families have already moved out, they say.

The first increase, on Jan. 1, raised the rent for a two-bedroom apartment from $271 to $450. The second increase on July 1 raised the rent for a one-bedroom apartment from $375 to $425; two-bedroom from $450 to $510; three-bedroom from $525 to $595 and four-bedroom from $563 to $638. A third rent hike is scheduled Jan. 1.

More than 200 families receive Section 8 rent subsidy vouchers. Although the federal government will continue to pay 70 percent of those tenants’ rent 1992, the apartment owners “have given us no indication they will accept those vouchers next year,” Guyton says.

“These people can’t afford these rents,” he says. “They will be forced to leave.”
Gersten Co. executives could not be reached for comment.

Mayor Corica, who went to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington D.C. to obtain Section 8 certificates for the neediest households in the complex, insists that the city is doing all it can to help.

“I went and got those certificates and it’s still not enough for them,” he says. “We’re doing our best.”

As far as subsidized housing is concerned, Corica says, “We’re near the top in this county.”

Thomas Matthews, director of the city’s housing authority, does not share the mayor’s optimism.

Out of about 29,000 rental units in Alameda, just 1,319 are either low-rent or subsidized, he says. There are 1,200 families on a waiting list, and they will be waiting from three to eight years.

“Low-cost housing is certainly a problem in Alameda, but it’s not specifically an Alameda problem. It’s a national problem,” Matthews says.

Source: Clemmons, C.J., "Critics rip city’s 15-year ban on new apartment projects." Oakland Tribune. 14 July, 1988:A13.