Council Puts Housing on Front Burner : City Hall: New majority votes to create $54-million “trust fund” to assist poor and low-income residents.

Wasting no time in addressing an urgent need of the city’s poor, the San Diego City Council’s new progressive coalition Monday engineered approval of a $54-million “trust fund” to preserve and expand low-cost housing in a market deemed America’s least affordable.

Unless the council reverses its 5-3 vote, Monday’s action sets aside $54 million annually for “affordable” housing regardless of council deliberations in coming months on how to fund expensive, long-term city priorities such as $1 billion in badly needed infrastructure, more police officers and a new city library.

“We want it to be known that this is going to be a priority,” said Councilman Wes Pratt, who led support for the trust fund and urged the council to consider housing separately from the city’s other needs. “I just didn’t want the issue to get lost in the hodgepodge of other issues. Affordable housing is going to be the issue of the ‘90s.”

The decision was the second victory in a week for the new, more liberal majority installed by the recent election that replaced council members Ed Struiksma and Gloria McColl with Linda Bernhardt and John Hartley.

The newly elected council members joined Pratt, Councilman Bob Filner and Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer to approve the trust fund over the objections of council members Ron Roberts, Bruce Henderson and Judy McCarty. Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who was giving a deposition for a lawsuit, was absent.

A week ago, the same majority forced O’Connor to oust Henderson as head of the council committee that oversees parks and replace him with Filner, a favorite of city environmentalists who had campaigned hard for Hartley, Bernhardt and Wolfsheimer’s re-election.

After the vote, Pratt said the trust fund probably would not have been approved without the election of Bernhardt and Hartley.

“Recognizing the political philosophies of prior councilmen . . . I might have been on the other side of a 5-3 vote,” he said.

Opponents of the measure argued that the council should put off the decision until it weighs the relative merits of similar fees to fund badly needed parks and roads in the city’s urbanized communities, the need for more police and how to pay for facilities used by all San Diegans, such as a new central library.

In addition, Roberts noted that only 10% of the funds are targeted toward middle-income wage earners.

“For the most part, this program is going to bypass all of these people. The teacher, the policeman, the nurse, all making about $30,000, are going to be excluded from about 90% of the program,” Roberts said.

As proposed, revenues for the trust fund would come from a variety of taxes and fees on business and commercial ventures. They include a $280 average annual business tax that would generate $17 million in 1990 and more in subsequent years; $12 million in fees on commercial, industrial, hotel and retail space; $12.1 million in yearly utility users’ taxes and $5.36 million in hotel taxes.

However, the council authorized City Manager John Lockwood to analyze those revenue sources and advise them within 90 days of the best options. City Atty. John Witt also said his staff must determine whether the new fees are legal without the two-thirds vote mandated under Proposition 13.

Evan Becker, executive director of the city’s Housing Commission, which proposed the trust fund, said the agency’s attorneys believe that the new fees are legal without a vote.

The council still must approve ordinances setting up a new agency to oversee the trust fund and establish its procedures. But, if enacted, the trust fund could begin funneling assistance to poor and middle-income city residents by March, 1991, Becker said.

As envisioned by the Housing Commission, 60% of the money would be spent on rental housing for families earning less than $18,250 annually; 20% would go for rental housing for families earning from $18,250 to $29,360; 10% would help families earning less than $36,700 purchase first homes; and 10% would pay for transitional housing for the homeless.

The new agency would give money to private and nonprofit groups to build low-cost apartments or purchase existing apartments, single-room occupancy hotels and mobile home parks. Other money would be devoted to rent subsidies, rehabilitation of existing housing and “land banking”--the purchase of land to be held for construction of affordable housing.

According to the city’s Planning Department, 80,000 families need affordable housing, and the number will increase by 4,500 annually. Yet the city has built just 258 such apartments in the past three years, including federally financed apartments. About 21% of San Diegans can afford to buy homes, according to a study that also calls San Diego the nation’s least affordable rental housing market.

A coalition of more than 40 human service, environmental, housing and community groups brought about 200 people to City Hall to urge approval of the trust fund, arguing that the lack of affordable housing for the poor contributes to homelessness and crime, and inhibits children’s learning skills.

“Safety and security will not be enhanced by opposing low-income housing,” said Hans Jovishoff, a housing activist. “Once and for all, we must dispense with the myth that low-income housing breeds crime and that the residents will be criminals.”