Lawsuit Seeks to Block Home for the Elderly

The proposal by Frances Wu and the Chinese-American Golden Age Assn. seemed simple enough: Expand a housing project for the elderly by adding a 4-story building with 100 rooms and central dining and recreational areas.

The nonprofit association, which Wu founded, had already built three 3-story buildings for 200 elderly residents on 3.5 acres just south of the San Bernardino Freeway.

But Wu’s proposal came last fall, amid calls for a slow-down in development. It received initial approval from the Planning Commission only two days after voters overwhelmingly endorsed restrictions on the height of new buildings.

Variances Questioned

And by January, despite Wu’s assurances that additional housing for elderly residents would not contribute to further congestion, a suit was filed to block the project.

In their suit, residents Saul Leff, Phyllis Rabins and John C. Nugen claimed that zoning variances, including one for height, were improperly granted by the city.

“You have a major project going into a fairly low-density neighborhood,” said Christopher A. Sutton, the Pasadena attorney hired by the three.

Leff and Rabins have long been activists in moves to control growth in the community. Nugen lives near the proposed construction site.

Hearings Held

“There is a public health and safety issue. The sewers simply cannot handle that project,” Sutton said. “People at certain times of the day are not going to be able to flush their toilets.”

But Wu’s attorney, Robert L. Toms, said: “It’s the anti-growth movement taken to an insane extreme. It’s mindless. This is not an optimum case for a crusade (against development), and that’s why it’s astonishing there is one.”

The suit, for which no trial date has been set, also names the City Council and the Planning Commission as defendants. Both bodies held hearings and eventually approved the project after some changes in the plans and despite opposition by several members of the council and the commission. “We think we did everything properly,” said Asst. City Solicitor Thomas D. Green.

In interviews last week, Leff and Rabins said neither they nor Nugen wanted to elaborate, saying it was inappropriate to comment before depositions are taken.

Minutes of council and commission meetings recorded members’ fears that the project would be a burden on sewers and public utilities and could eventually be converted into apartments.

Furthermore, Leff and other opponents raised the issue of the building’s height.

On Oct. 20, by a 4-1 ratio, voters approved severe restrictions on granting variances for the height of buildings. The standards went into effect three weeks later.

But before the ordinance, approved by 83% of the 3,113 people who voted, could take effect, the project had received partial approval.

Three Planning Commission members questioned the need for a 4-story building in an area zoned for buildings of no more than two stories. So, on a 3-2 vote, the commission permitted Wu to build only a 3-story building instead of a 4-story one as proposed. And the commission unanimously ruled that the building could be used only for housing the elderly, not as apartments.

The issue was hotly debated for more than two hours at a City Council meeting Jan. 11.

‘Have Enough’

The council minutes recorded that one opponent of the project, Jonna Zahn, said: “If there is a problem regarding enough room for senior citizens, (then) we have enough senior citizens here. . . . There is no reason to ship them in by the boatload from every other place in the world.”

Zahn, in a letter to the editor of the Monterey Park Progress that week, had said: “Wu is now seeking a fistful of variances that are aimed at again forcing a sardine-can environment . . . (on our city) in brazen defiance of the voters’ choice.”

But the City Council voted 3-0 to approve the project, with council members Barry L. Hatch and Patricia Reichenberger abstaining. They expressed concern about the location of the project but, according to the minutes, said the city needed to reassess the housing needs of elderly residents.

The proposed project at 641 E. Emerson Ave. would primarily serve residents 80 and older who are no longer able to cook and take care of themselves but who have no major health problems. This kind of facility is referred to as a board-and-care home; residents live in individual rooms but eat in a central area.

The present facility houses low-income residents in efficiency apartments in a federally financed portion of the project, which first opened in 1980. In a separate section, middle-income residents occupy 33 units that were sold in 1986 as condominiums for the elderly.

More than 400 people are on waiting lists to live in the bamboo-green buildings whose architecture invokes the Orient and whose grounds are landscaped with rock gardens, courtyards and rose gardens maintained by the residents, many of them born in Asia.

Two-thirds of the project’s residents, Wu said, are of Asian ancestry. The rest are Latinos and Anglos.

Wu, 67, was born in China. She came to Monterey Park in 1971 after living in New York, where she attended Columbia University and also worked in the child welfare field.

For many years she was interested in the problems affecting aging Asian immigrants in America. That interest led her to USC, where she received a doctorate in gerontology.

With the help of the university’s gerontology department, Wu developed the Chinese-American Golden Age Assn. and obtained approval to develop a federally sponsored project under the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department.

Wu said she has long been a member of the Residents Assn. of Monterey Park (RAMP), a homeowners group fighting to control development. “I believe in a planned community,” she said. “(City officials) should have started planning many years ago before they made a mess.”

Better Quality of Life

Although Wu said she realizes that some RAMP members, including Leff and Rabins, oppose her proposal, she said the board-and-care facility will enhance the city’s quality of life.

“Basically, Ms. Wu is a nice person and has the sympathy of the City Council and the city staff,” said attorney Sutton. “Being a nice person and having a nice organization is one thing. But sewers and traffic is another.”

The case represents the second time in recent years that the city has been sued over the issue of housing for the elderly.

In the first suit, in 1986, the Taiwanese-American Affiliated Committee charged that the council acted in a discriminatory fashion by blocking construction of a $2.1-million apartment building for the elderly.

The council was accused of discriminating against the poor, the elderly and nonwhites. That suit was dismissed in August. By then, the group had decided to drop its plans to build on Whitmore Street on the city’s eastern edge and instead built the project in neighboring El Monte.

When the suit was dismissed, the city wrote a letter to the group saying it supported the concept of housing for the elderly.

The council’s rejection of the Taiwanese project figured in last year’s unsuccessful recall campaign against Hatch and Reichenberger. In July, 1986, the council vote against the housing project was cited by some of the 400 demonstrators outside City Hall who chanted: “Stop racism.”

“Monterey Park is a very charged environment, and that’s too bad,” said Sutton. “The whole environment needs to calm down and focus on planning and environmental issues, not on personalities, race or religion.”

Sutton, who is involved in land-use cases throughout Southern California, noted that his wife was born in Japan and is still a Japanese citizen.

“In this case, I believe we have a dispute involving the environment,” he said. “My clients are not part of the English-only movement. I wouldn’t take this case if I thought there was anything racial. But I am sure there are people on both sides . . . who may have racial motivations.”

No matter, Sutton said: His clients’ only aim is to force the City Council to hold another hearing on the proposal.

But Wu’s attorney, Toms, said: “The crying tragedy here is that we’ll win, but it might be 18 months from now. And it might cost $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 to go to trial.

“It’s just hard to connect up the logic of the plaintiffs,” Toms said. “Maybe it is just a sense of too much change.”