Helping Hand for Housing

Neighborhood groups are learning to build affordable housing that Washington once paid for. But it takes more than 2-by-4s, nails and stucco. Novices need to know the housing business from the ground up. A nonprofit organization, best known for raising private capital to finance low-income housing, is beginning to help there as well, with technical training designed to teach the novices how to think like developers.

The Local Initiatives Support Corp. teaches participants during four weeklong training sessions spread over a year how to acquire a building site, get into escrow, find financing, review construction budgets and close deals. Step by step, neighborhood groups learn from start to finish what it takes to put up housing. They also are taught never to lose sight of the people who will live in the new apartments, so that they build housing that poor people can be proud of.

The first training program, which ended last week, cost $250,000 and was underwritten by the ARCO Foundation, the California Community Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation and the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. The Los Angeles Community Design Center provided technicalassistance. The 14 participants also received grants of $12,500 to help with start-up costs.

Ten graduates are already putting their new skills to work in South-Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, Little Tokyo, San Pedro, the Westside and Skid Row. They are starting to develop apartments for poor families, group housing for mentally ill adults, single-room occupancy hotels for homeless men and women and senior citizens’ housing. The 455 new units are expected to provide homes for about 1,500 low-income people.

The new housing, although a drop in the bucket compared to the region’s needs, is essential because of federal indifference to the housing needs of poor Americans. The massive housing cutbacks during the Reagan Administration demonstrated a contempt for poor Americans who are ill-housed or homeless.

Community organizations can’t singlehandedlyfill the housing gap in Los Angeles, where an estimated 500,000 families need better and more affordable housing. But at least local organizations, with training and encouragement from the Local Initiatives Support Corp., can make the affordable housing picture less bleak than it is today.