Queen of ‘First-Rung Housing’ Relinquishes Her Crown : Housing: Under Judy Lenthall’s tutelage, San Diego became a worldwide model on SRO hotels. Now she’s taking her expertise to private industry in an effort to help the homeless.
In 1985, when Judy Lenthall first heard the three letters that would change her life, she had to ask what they stood for.
“I said, ‘What’s an SRO?’ ” said Lenthall, a senior planner at the San Diego City Planning Department, recalling when her boss asked her to study whether the low-rent inns could be saved. “He said, ‘single room occupancy hotel.’ I still didn’t know what he meant. Finally he said, ‘You know--a sleaze-bag hotel.’ ”
More than four years later, Lenthall is San Diego’s proud queen of sleaze. But now, the SRO booster only uses the word sarcastically.
Under Lenthall’s guidance, San Diego has become the first city in the country to build SRO hotels to help house the working poor. In 1988, while other cities were demolishing SROs, San Diego’s program to provide incentives for SRO construction was recognized by the Ford Foundation as a national model. Since then, Lenthall has become San Diego’s SRO ambassador, traveling from Atlanta to Australia, spreading the word about what she calls “first-rung housing.”
Closer to home, Lenthall, an effusive blonde who wears a scuba-diving wristwatch and a neon wardrobe, has led scores of tours of San Diego’s downtown, where more than 65 SROs can be found tucked above restaurants or next to warehouses. But today, after Lenthall accompanies the lord provost of Edinburgh, Scotland, on one final SRO stroll, San Diego’s continuing SRO program will need to find another tour leader.
Lenthall, 40, is leaving her job as a city planner to become the president of a nonprofit housing corporation, Builders for People, established by the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California. Lenthall’s goal, she says, is to help builders apply their technical knowledge to creating “real brick-and-mortar solutions to homelessness.”
After five years in the city’s employ, Lenthall believes her new job will allow her to do more good for more people--she will be responsible for five counties: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. Her colleagues lament, however, that Southern California’s gain will be San Diego’s loss.
“I remember a time when I was convinced she was daydreaming that she thought the developers would kick in and build” SROs, said Frank Landerville, project director at the Regional Task Force on the Homeless. “But you can’t listen to her without getting energized. She has an infinite belief in the capitalist system, and when she talks about affordable housing, that’s what she’s selling.”
Michael J. Stepner, the city architect, agreed.
“She’s almost like one of these characters in a 1930s movie: a hard-boiled dame with a heart of gold,” said Stepner, who was Lenthall’s boss when she began the SRO project. “She, more than anybody in this town, is probably the low-income housing expert. There are a lot of monuments out there to her ability.”
Foremost among those monuments is the Baltic Inn, the first new SRO to be built in the United States in more than 50 years. Located on 6th Avenue near Horton Plaza, the 207-room hotel is the flagship of San Diego’s SRO fleet and an essential stop on Lenthall’s tour.
The Baltic, as well as several older, well-managed SROs, provide safe, affordable places for thousands of San Diego’s poor residents to stay, some for the night, others for years. But the Baltic also represents a behind-the-scenes victory over bureaucracy.
Before a single brick was laid in place, Lenthall spent a year consulting with developers, fire marshals, building inspectors, bankers, designers and politicians to draft several pieces of city SRO legislation that made the Baltic possible.
Knowing that she was setting out to do the undone, Lenthall sensed that she should dispense with the accepted wisdom about low-income housing and start from scratch. So she came up with a creative method of locating the freethinkers in each city department or agency.
“I went to the deputy city manager and said, ‘Do you have anybody who’s weird on your staff? The kind who comes up with what many people think of as the “dumb” idea? People who don’t automatically say no before they’ve thought?’ ” she recalls.
Once this “avant-garde” committee was in place, the meetings began--always over breakfast, Lenthall said, “because, if people are going to yell at each other, I thought, they’re not going to do it with their mouths full.” It took months, but eventually the group came up with a plan to relax certain building codes and provide low-interest loans to builders in order to get SROs built.
“The fact that we have (SROs) here and elsewhere in this day and age is due to Judy,” Stepner said, ticking off a list of her accomplishments that included a plan to create larger affordable apartments, called living units. “Living unit legislation is due to Judy. A lot of the ills we are dealing with with migrant housing is due to the fact that Judy investigated and brought everyone around. . . . She’s left more (of a) legacy than would be expected of someone in the Planning Department.”
Lenthall’s legacy, everyone agrees, is only made possible by her limitless energy.
A rough-water swimmer, surfer and mother of two, Lenthall seems to be constantly in motion. Whether she is describing an Australian policy to preserve the facades of old buildings (“You know what they call it? ‘Facade-omy’!”) or relating her sons’ reactions to her new job (“Jeremy has started calling me President Mom! Do I look like a president?”), Lenthall is generous with her enthusiasm.
She is quick to laugh at herself. Partial to bright colors, she is accustomed to her outfits raising eyebrows. She also acknowledges that, although she has been a city planner for half a decade, “I’ve never taken a planning course in my life.” Explaining her job history, which includes stints in Australia and the Virgin Islands, she says, “I was following the surf.”
Even in describing her own birth, Lenthall jokes that she was born at the University of Southern California Hospital in downtown Los Angeles “because my mother went to medical school there and got 10% off. Some people say I’ve been 10% off ever since.”
Stepner believes Lenthall’s humor is part of what makes her successful.
“She’s far-out, a little ding-y, a little holdover from the ‘60s and the beach,” he said. “Her style is one that you wouldn’t think people would listen to her. But maybe that’s why they do.”
Indeed. So far, seven U.S. cities, including Berkeley and Santa Ana, and several foreign countries have begun to emulate San Diego’s program--usually after a visit from Lenthall. Using the $100,000 that came with the Ford Foundation’s Innovations Award, San Diego has flown Lenthall around the world to show other cities how it’s done.
Administrators in those cities say a visit from Lenthall makes all the difference.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that we would not be as far along without Judy,” said Thomas L. Weyandt, community development commissioner for the city of Atlanta, which is building its first new SRO in decades and is considering a series of ordinances tailored on San Diego’s. “She was really well-informed and an excellent communicator in getting the whole San Diego thought process across to people here. She knew what to look for, knew what questions to ask. She won some converts.”
Landerville says Weyandt is not alone.
“I get calls on a regular basis from around the country about how to get in touch with Judy Lenthall,” he said.
In coming months, Lenthall hopes the phone calls will increase. As she begins to structure the new Los Angeles-based housing corporation, she says her goal is to create an efficient network linking local municipalities, builders, government agencies and philanthropic foundations.
Guided by a “land ethic” she says she learned as a student at the University of Hawaii, Lenthall plans to seek projects that “start with people’s needs” as one of their design tenets. She is also interested in integrating affordable housing into each community.
“On an island, you have to make everything fit,” she said, explaining how five years in Hawaii affected her planning outlook. “You have to face your problems. If you don’t do it, it’s not going to be done. You can’t (dump) toxic waste ‘over there’ because there is no ‘over there.’ ”
There has been talk of hiring a corporation staff of 60, but, for now, Lenthall is a staff of one. Predictably, she is optimistic.
“If you can cook a Thanksgiving dinner for 20, you can do a development project--especially given my cooking skills,” she said recently. “Actually, I think doing a development project is easier.”
