Schuller Donates Apartments for Low-Income Use

Thirty units of a Garden Grove apartment complex to be razed for the Rev. Robert Schuller’s planned Family Life Center have been donated for low-income housing in Santa Ana and will be relocated to new sites beginning Friday, officials said.

Twenty-two of the apartments are being given free of charge to the private, nonprofit Civic Center Barrio Housing Corp. of Santa Ana, which will move the units within the next two weeks to several vacant Santa Ana lots owned by the corporation, officials of the corporation said Wednesday.

Eight others are being donated to a Santa Ana woman, who will also relocate them to a vacant lot in downtown Santa Ana within the next two weeks, church officials said.

Civic Center Barrio President Helen Brown said that most of the units will be rented to low-income people and that a few will be sold to a total of 14 low-income families and 35 elderly people.

“We are extremely grateful to the Crystal Cathedral and Schuller Ministries,” Brown said. “They are the first church organization (in Orange County) which has become this actively involved in giving a solution to the homeless problem.”

Crystal Cathedral officials said the donation of the buildings corresponds with their long-term goal of helping the homeless.

Church Goal

“The church has always had the goal of having these particular buildings for homeless people,” church spokesman Michael C. Nason said. “Through this agency in Santa Ana, this is now going to be accomplished.”

Officials of Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, whose five-story family center will consist of an education and recreation center next to the church, donated the property following settlement of a lawsuit filed by previous buyers of the low-income complex, Brown said. The first buyers had claimed that the buildings were contaminated by asbestos.

In the suit filed late last year in Orange County Superior Court, Dorothy Malis of Costa Mesa and Pat Howard of Hesperia alleged that asbestos insulation had been found in 19 apartments they had bought from the church for $67,000. They said that the units were intended for use as low-income housing but that they could not afford to remove the toxic material.

Suit Dismissed

They agreed to dismiss the suit in January, however, after an independent expert licensed by state and federal environmental agencies found no asbestos in the buildings. Subsequently, Malis and Howard were allowed to back out of their purchase agreement.

Church officials then began looking for someone else to take the apartments.

Two months ago, church administrator Chuck Tolson literally was standing on a street corner outside the apartments trying to decide what to do when Brown drove up and expressed interest in the complex, Nason said.

Brown said the deal to give the apartment buildings to the barrio corporation was made official two weeks ago. She said a press conference was scheduled Friday to announce the plans formally.

The Crystal Cathedral purchased the 84-unit apartment complex and its 3.5 acres of land on Jetty Circle for about $5 million in December, 1986, after area residents objected to plans to build the family center on the church’s existing land. The church later arranged for the tenants in the complex to be relocated to other low-income housing units in the area.

First Floor to Be Razed

The church plans to raze the ground-level apartments, which church officials said cannot be relocated because they have no foundation base.

Eight of the apartment units will be given to Margaret Lindsey, a Santa Ana resident who also provides low-income housing.

Lindsey’s eight units also will be relocated within the next two weeks to a vacant lot on Susan and Camille streets in Santa Ana, church officials said.

Brown’s relocation plans for the remaining 22 buildings include:

- Five buildings with 10 units are going to a lot at 2nd and Raitt streets and will be used for a senior citizens center.

- Three buildings with six units are going to the 600 block of East Adams Street and will become rehabilitation condominiums for low-income buyers or families with an income of less than $20,000 a year. The condominiums will sell for about $70,000, Brown said.

- Two buildings with four units will be going to the 1100 block of West 2nd Street as low-income rentals.

- One building will be going to the 1100 block of West 3rd Street as a replacement house for low-income resident Tony Moran, whose home was condemned by the city of Santa Ana two years ago.

Brown said it will take 10 days to move the apartments, at the rate of two buildings per day. A $190,000 loan from the state Department of Housing and Community Development is subsidizing the move, she said. The loan has to be repaid in one year.

The Civic Center Barrio has a two-year waiting list for its existing 40 low-income units, Brown said. Applicants are screened by the city housing authority or by private mortgage lenders if they are buying a low-income house, she said.

Schuller won permission from the Garden Grove City Council last June to build the family center, as well as a prayer tower, a project estimated to cost at least $18 million.

Once the Jetty Circle apartments are gone, Crystal Cathedral officials said they will begin building the 137,000-square-foot family center, which will house classrooms, a gymnasium and a school for pastors. The center will also house the “international mail-handling” department for the church’s televised sermons, Schuller has said.

About 150 employees work in the mailing department, handling more than 40,000 letters a week from followers and viewers of Schuller’s “Hour of Power” TV show, which he has said draws about 3 million viewers every Sunday.

Schuller, who started out with a ministry at a drive-in theater, now has a complex featuring the 15-story Tower of Hope office building and an $18-million cathedral with about 10,000 panes of glass. Schuller told the council that construction of the family center and crystal prayer tower would represent the fulfillment of his 31-year-old dream.