Brea Should Make Room for City’s Poor : Residents Who Are Displaced by Redevelopment Have Right to Affordable Housing
In 1985, Brea city officials went to court to get out of using redevelopment funds for affordable housing so they could spend $25 million of that money for roads and sewers. The city won that permission, successfully arguing that improving the roads in low-income neighborhoods would benefit the city’s poor people.
But now that the roads are built, the only benefit they seem to have provided the poor is better pavement to speed their way out of town.
City officials maintain that no deliberate plan is afoot to drive the poor out of Brea. But the reality is that, intended or not, the practical result of the city’s policies and actions has made Brea’s poor population victims of the city’s downtown redevelopment.
Since 1985 nearly 700 people in the lowest-income brackets have been forced to move because redevelopment pushed them out of their homes. Some moved to nearby cities. By not providing its fair share of lower-cost housing, Brea is being unfair to its neighbors.
Other displaced residents had to leave the county to find other places to live that they could afford. And some, the county’s homeless task force officials fear, have been forced to join the ranks of the homeless, living in cars, parks or wherever they can find some kind of shelter.
Cities, in the name of progress, shouldn’t displace people without assuming responsibility for relocating them.
It’s true that displaced residents do receive some state-mandated relocation funds, but there is really no place in Brea for the poor to relocate to. According to government requirements, Brea will need at least 3,447 affordable housing units in the next 10 years. It has nowhere near that many, and the number of low-income units being constructed to make up for the loss of housing to redevelopment is so low that it can be considered practically nonexistent. And Brea is the only city in Orange County that has not joined the federal HUD program that provides rent subsidies to families below the poverty level. So rental apartments that poor people can afford are not to be found in Brea.
There is a critical need for more affordable housing in the county and public officials have a responsibility to help provide it. That’s especially true in Brea, where city policies contribute so much to the shortage--and have so radically modified the American dream of owning your own home. For the poor in Brea, the dream nowadays is just keeping a roof over their heads.
