Not the Right ‘Habitat,’ Encanto Says : Housing: Residents of Southeast resist low-income homes to be built by volunteers, including former President Jimmy Carter.
Encanto residents used to look upon the old Capps estate as the jewel of their Southeast San Diego community.
Two dozen mature Torrey pines, Phoenix palms and pepper trees tower over the 1.4-acre triangular plot at 60th Street and Merlin Drive, where one-time Mayor Edwin M. Capps built his home in the early 1900s. Until recently, when bulldozers began scraping away the grass, residents regarded the shady lot as the next best thing to a park.
Now, residents of the tidy working-class neighborhood say, the city of San Diego has disrupted Encanto by approving a project to build seven new homes for low-income families on the site. The Encanto Community Council has sued the city and the developer, a nonprofit group called Habitat for Humanity, alleging that the city failed to adequately assess the project’s environmental impact.
City officials deny residents’ charges that they greased the wheels on the project to ensure that, when Habitat’s most prominent volunteer, former President Jimmy Carter, arrives here in June, the Encanto project will be waiting for him. But, on Monday, just before the City Council gave the project final approval, residents said they felt the city is dumping its problems in the “usual” place: in Southeast San Diego.
“We support homes for the homeless. That’s not our problem,” said Ardise Rawlins, chairwoman of the community council, who was among a dozen Encanto residents who took off from work to hold a rainy news conference Monday morning to air their objections.
Rawlins, who has lived across the street from the project site for 25 years, said she would have welcomed a developer’s offer to rehabilitate existing homes in the area. But she said the Capps lot is unsuitable for this many new homes. “It breaks my heart to see it.”
“This is a new form of American apartheid,” said Dr. Thomas H. McPhatter, a retired Navy chaplain and 31-year Encanto resident. “You cluster all these poor people together. . . . It’s what I call a sardine syndrome.”
Spokesmen for Habitat acknowledge that they are not used to this kind of controversy. A Georgia-based group committed to building affordable housing, the group is well known on the East Coast for helping poor people build their own homes. By providing interest-free loans and plenty of donated materials and labor, Habitat puts home ownership within the reach of working poor families. And, by carefully screening applicants to assure “stable” residents, Habitat attempts to enhance the communities where it builds.
In short, said Jim Lantry, a local member of Habitat’s board of directors, Habitat homeowners make good neighbors. He said he is exasperated that the lawsuit seems to ignore that, pitting one group of poor people against another.
“The suit is now dealing with real lives, real hopes and dreams,” he said, pointing out that the seven families selected for the Habitat homes recently visited the site. “It’s a shame that a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome has to come in the way. . . . We’re not dealing with abstract developers’ profits here. We’re dealing with people’s lives.”
That’s the argument used by the Encanto community council as well.
Milton Chambers, a pastor at New Hope Friendship Baptist Church, said he sees the Habitat project as “a quick fix.” Instead of doing some legwork, he said, to find existing homes in the area that need renovating, Habitat grabbed the best open space in the neighborhood to “create something like a ghetto. . . . You’re trying to help one group at the expense of creating disharmony in another community.”
Hazel M. Higgins, a real estate associate who has lived in Encanto since 1961, said the challenge has brought the community together like never before--about 30 nurses, Navy retirees, shipbuilders, transit workers and others have chipped in to hire Denise Moreno Ducheny, the lawyer who filed their suit Friday.
“When Ardise called me, I said I’ll put in $100 and whatever else we need. I’ll sell chicken dinners--we’ll raise the money some kind of way,” Higgins said. “The city does us this way because they know we’re poor and we can’t do nothing.”
Late Monday, San Diego City Atty. John Witt said he had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.
Ducheny, the residents’ lawyer, said, “From the community’s perspective, (Habitat) is no different than any developer that comes in and tries to run roughshod over Southeast San Diego.”
But Lantry says Habitat has listened to the community. When they wanted fewer houses built on the site, Habitat reduced its proposal to from 10 homes to seven. The single-family homes will have from two to four bedrooms. When they protested a plan to raze the Capps house and move some of the trees, Habitat redesigned the project to ensure that would not be done. At this point, Lantry said, Habitat is considering making the Capps home at the center of the lot into a day-care center.
Lantry said that, last summer, Habitat surveyed the neighborhood, going door to door and talking to Encanto residents, with positive results. They invited Encanto residents to join the selection committee to help sort through the 70 candidates and choose the seven families that would become their new neighbors. Lantry says the community refused.
“We have bent over backwards to listen to people,” he said. “For them to say we haven’t listened is ludicrous. I’m not sure what more we can do.”
“We tried. You bet,” said Jeff Snider, director of Habitat’s Tijuana-San Diego Carter Work Project 1990. “We obviously haven’t succeeded 100%. If I knew how to extend the olive branch, I would certainly do it.”
Snider concedes that he would like to have the Encanto project on line by the time Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, arrive in June.
