Lawndale Demands New Lottery for Low-Cost Senior Housing

Though Lawndale is just months away from having its first and only subsidized apartment complex for low-income seniors, relatively few Lawndale residents are likely to be among its tenants.

Now the City Council is trying to figure out who is to blame for what some council members say is the developer’s failure to notify Lawndale seniors that applications for the coveted, low-cost apartments were being accepted.

To determine who would get priority, potential tenants for the 56 units were drawn in a lottery on March 13. Of the 306 people who applied, only 52 were Lawndale residents. Of the 100 chosen, only 17 were from Lawndale.

“The intent when we started this was to provide housing for existing seniors of Lawndale,” City Councilman Harold E. Hofmann said Friday. “But something fell through the cracks that shouldn’t have.”

The council voted unanimously Thursday to press the developer to reschedule the lottery. But an attorney for the company said that is unlikely to happen because a new drawing would be unfair to those who were picked and would delay occupancy of the complex.

Hofmann blamed the developer--Cooperative Services Inc., a nonprofit company based in Detroit that has been building subsidized housing since 1945--for the shortage of Lawndale residents in the lottery pool.

Although no one complained to the council the night it voted to seek a new drawing, Councilwoman Carol Norman said it is clear that Lawndale residents were not informed of the drawing. The list of eligible seniors was five years old and didn’t include many people who moved into the city since then, she said.

“I didn’t even know about it,” Norman said. “And I pay for newspapers and have cable television.”

Norman and Hofmann said Friday that the city might sue if the company refuses to hold another drawing.

But Alan Ross, an attorney representing Cooperative Services, said he had never heard of a lottery being rescheduled.

“If the lottery is delayed, it could mean occupancy is delayed,” he said. “I’d be surprised if they would jeopardize all the seniors who want to move in for a lawsuit. I don’t think it would be in anyone’s best interest.”

The three-story complex, expected to be completed in June, is on 153rd Street near the Inglewood exit of the San Diego Freeway. Among those eligible for a unit are the disabled and people who are at least 62 and who have a yearly income below $14,600.

The city agreed to sell the property for about $460,000--less than market value--to attract a developer. In addition, the city paid $60,000 to bring electricity and water lines to the project.

Because tenants in federally subsidized apartments pay no more than 30% of their income in rent, competition for the units is fierce. To prohibit favoritism and ensure that all eligible seniors receive an equal chance, federal guidelines require that a lottery be held to determine who gets a unit. Residents of the city in which the housing is built may not receive preference.

Tenants will be approved in the order of their lottery numbers. More than 56 names were picked in case some applicants choose not to move in or do not meet income or other qualifications.

Joyce Ellenbecker, Cooperative Services’ Western regional manager, said the company did everything required to give adequate notice of the lottery. Based on a marketing plan that was approved by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the company placed advertisements in several newspapers and handed out flyers at a local senior center.

“We made our best effort to inform the people of Lawndale,” she said at the council meeting.

But fixed-income seniors who often can’t afford to subscribe to a newspaper or cable television service had no way of knowing about the drawing, Norman said. And notices posted at the Prairie Avenue Community Center were little help for seniors who cannot leave their homes.

Although applications for the lottery went out in late January, Norman said the council didn’t learn of it until late February, just one week before the March 5 cutoff date.

Norman asked the company for a copy of the list of Lawndale residents who would be receiving an application. That’s when she discovered that the list was five years old, contained phone numbers but no addresses and was alphabetized by first names.

Part of the problem, she said, was that the city worker who compiled the list was new.

Nevertheless, the company denied her request to delay the lottery by a couple of weeks to give the city a chance to update its list, Norman said.

“The whole thing became a terrible, terrible mistake,” Norman told the council. “I just feel Lawndale was terribly under-represented and didn’t have the chance other cities had.”

Although she agreed that the oversight is unfortunate for Lawndale citizens, Mayor Sarann Kruse said Cooperative Services shouldn’t bear full responsibility for making sure that the city’s seniors knew about the drawing.

“It sounds to me like the two of you (Norman and Hofmann) are beating on Cooperative Services,” Kruse told the council. “But all I’m saying is that the responsibility also has to be here in City Hall. Somebody should have been monitoring (the process) a lot more closely.”

Lawndale resident Dorothy Pharris, 72, who uses more than three-fourths of her monthly income to pay her rent, agreed. She and her 73-year-old husband, Val, were among those who filed an application and were chosen.

“I know the people of Lawndale that have been residing here for three to five years were notified, because I was,” Pharris said. “If others weren’t, it’s because they just recently moved in.”