Vote for Housing Urged : Election: Officials kick off the campaign for Proposition 107, a $150-million bond measure to shelter the homeless.
Standing on the steps of a shabby Westlake District building that has been recaptured from drug dealers, State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) on Friday launched a campaign for Proposition 107, the bond measure to provide funds for the homeless.
Roberti said the $150 million raised by the measure, if voters approve it in June, “will be pumped into” 4,000 new low-cost rental units, 13,000 shelter beds, assistance to 4,000 low-income, first-time home buyers and restoration of slum buildings like the one undergoing a face-lift in Westlake.
Proposition 107 is the final measure in a $600-million package of Roberti-sponsored bills to rehabilitate 22,000 rental units in California for low-income families. Voters in 1988 approved the first phase, also for $150 million, under Proposition 77, and backed $300 million under Proposition 84.
Tanya Tull, director of Beyond Shelter, a nonprofit group, said the 41-unit building on South Coronado Street would “still be under control of a slumlord and drug dealers” if not for $1.7 million provided by Proposition 77.
The funds helped Beyond Shelter purchase the apartment building and launch modernization work to be completed this year. The total project will cost $3.4 million and includes a playground, library and adult-education classroom on the site.
Beyond Shelter has dubbed the ornate, 1920s building “Columbia House” to recognize a $360,000 grant from Columbia Savings Charitable Foundation. The city Community Redevelopment Agency provided $540,000 in loans, and the California Housing Finance Agency provided an $820,000 loan.
“Forty-one families with more than 100 children will live here when we are done,” said Tull, one of many housing advocates at Friday’s kickoff. “We can take back slum housing and turn it into modern housing for families.”
Alcira Corcio, 34, a 12-year resident of the building, said she remembers when it “was so clean and so neat” several years ago. But an absentee landlord bought the structure, refused to make repairs and hired a succession of managers who allowed drug dealing and prostitution, she said.
“By last fall it was really bad, with most units just empty because families were scared off,” said Corcio, a mother of two boys. “One day we found three men kicking in the apartment doors along our third floor.”
The Corcios and 13 other tenant families will remain in the building during renovations and are assured low rents--$312 to $570 a month--in the spacious one-, two- and three-bedroom units.
Campaign plans for the ballot initiative include a series of news conferences and appearances by dozens of Hollywood celebrities. Friday’s kickoff of the statewide effort drew elected officials from Northern and Southern California.
Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell told the gathering that while local officials “are doing all they can” with limited funds, cities and counties must collectively begin demanding more state funding for low-cost housing.
“Normally I would be saying good morning, but for 100,000 homeless people (in California), morning is just another end to a night on the streets,” said Kell.
National studies have shown that California has the worst shortage of affordable housing in the country.
Despite that, the California Coalition for Rural Housing, which monitors expenditures for housing nationwide, said California spends only 64 cents per capita on low-income housing, nationally ranking it near the bottom with the poorest Southern states. By contrast, Massachusetts spends $18 per capita.
Tull, of Beyond Shelter, said homelessness has reached into every age level and every neighborhood, and “California has to recognize this.”
She said she recently discovered two elderly women living in storage closets of an attic in a decaying building downtown. And last fall, she said, her agency found a family “living in a converted chicken coop” because the father’s $900 monthly take-home pay could not both feed his family and rent an apartment.
