Project’s Sale No Answer to Housing Crisis
By putting the Jordan Downs housing project, in effect, on the auction block, the hapless Los Angeles City Housing Authority has put its neck on the block.
The ill-considered proposal could not come at a worse time for the authority and its partner-in-crime, the city, given the current housing crisis.
First, to say there is a housing crisis in Los Angeles is an understatement, what with an estimated 50,000 people homeless, 200,000 living in garages and other illegal shelters and 500,000 paying more rent than they can afford, according to recent surveys.
“Tragedy” might be a more apt description, especially for those directly affected, such as families already on the street or facing imminent eviction.
That this is happening when there is actually a building boom here of gilded commercial developments, over-designed and overpriced apartment houses and monster mansions in neighborhoods that won’t permit a granny flat, raises both land-use and moral issues.
As for buying a home here, that hope continues to slip further and further beyond the reach of an increasing number of families. According to a recent study, only 17% of Los Angeles families could afford today’s median-priced homes.
For the remaining 80% plus, talk of Los Angeles as a world-class city, a caldron of hot properties and a showcase of the latest architectural styles must sound very hollow.
Economic experts consider this shame to be the Achilles’ heel of the American dream of home ownership that for the last century has fueled the prosperity of Southern California.
Businesses and institutions here increasingly cite the lack of affordable housing as a deterrent to hiring workers and to growth.
Meanwhile, thousands of affordable housing units are being threatened with demolition because they are not up to earthquake standards, or more commonly because they sit on a piece of land that can be developed for more apartments at higher rents.
Then we have the Housing Authority, the landlord of last resort, looking to sell Jordan Downs in Watts. With 3,150 residents, most of them children, the project represents about 10% of the authority’s total tenancy in its 21 projects.
The plan that the authority had worked on in secret for a year before arbitrarily presenting it to the tenants has as many holes in it as a “no shooting” sign in the Mojave Desert.
The authority says that with the money from the sale, anywhere from possibly $10 million to $20 million, it would be able to make needed repairs elsewhere and perhaps initiate a new rent subsidy program.
No doubt, much of those subsidies would be consumed by the present tenants of Jordan Downs trying to meet the new and inevitably higher rents of whatever private entity buys the project. Surely, after making repairs and paying investors and themselves they are going to have to raise the rents.
To be sure, Jordan Downs has its problems, including the litany of deterioration, vandalism, gangs and apathy. But covering as it does 50 acres, it also has the potential of being rehabilitated, redesigned and restructured with social services to once again become an attractive and secure community.
Such a plan is being worked on for the Nickerson Gardens project in South-Central Los Angeles by a group of UCLA students in cooperation with tenants there, and could be a model for a similar effort in Jordan Downs.
The plan calls for increased security through better design and greater tenant involvement, more apartments and an array of cultural, commercial and child-oriented services.
Instead of abandoning Jordan Downs, the authority should be exploring imaginative ways to better manage it and its other projects. After all, that is its public charge. And it should be doing it in cooperation with the tenants, for no plan is going to work without them.
As studies have told us again and again, when residents feel they have a role in shaping and maintaining their communities, be it a troubled housing project or a nondescript neighborhood, a sense of pride and place follows.
Other cities are doing it. They are floating bonds and working with tenants to develop viable housing alternatives. These include a variety of self-management and cooperative efforts that have markedly improved project life.
But not in Los Angeles.
Here an embattled authority pleading poverty spends scarce operating dollars on expensive, well-connected consultants and the mayor pleads ignorance. While housing director Leila Gonzales-Correa twists in the wind, it is Mayor Bradley who is ultimately responsible.
Instead of taking a leadership role, however, Bradley hands the reins over to appointees to the authority, and steps back into the shadows.
First there was Alvin Greene, who was forced to resign because he had failed to attend meetings for six months, and now there is Carl Covitz, a former undersecretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Reagan Administration.
During the Reagan years, funding for day-to-day public housing operations, rehabilitation and new construction declined 80%, from $35 billion in 1980 to $7 billion in fiscal 1988. Those crippling cuts, in which Covitz had a hand, created many of the authority’s problems.
Covitz’s appointment cannot engender confidence among low-income housing advocates. As for Bradley, a Democrat, such appointments have led to his being called by housing activists the best Republican mayor to ever serve the city.
Meanwhile, there have been some positive aspects to the Jordan Downs situation. These include efforts in it and other projects to organize tenants to take a more active and positive role in management. This has been supported by a few authority officials, including Commissioner Dori Pye, and involved social agencies, such as the Legal Aid Foundation.
The key to the city meeting its obligations to the less fortunate is not selling frail, low-income housing projects, but instead trying through new public funding programs to salvage what once had been a hopeful program to provide decent homes for families.
