Pulling Housing Opportunity Out of a Hat in Poway : Drawing: Woman is elated when her family is one of 30 eligible for affordable housing in the affluent town.

Marcia Slusher and her two sons have finally found a home.

On Wednesday, the Slushers became one of 17 lucky Poway families whose names were among the first drawn from a fish bowl to determine who would be able to move into the Haley Park Estates at reasonable rents.

“I’m elated. I can’t wait to go home and tell my kids,” said Slusher, who had been on a waiting list for Poway’s only other affordable housing project for four years.

The 65-unit Haley Park Estates was built to accommodate the households being relocated from a trailer park that stood in the way of the proposed 17-acre Creekside Plaza shopping center.

But, during the time the project was under construction, 17 households either left the trailer park or the tenants died, leaving the city to distribute the remaining vacancies, the ones up for grabs on Wednesday.

“There is a constant need for affordable housing for persons of all segments, including senior citizens, small families and large families,” said David Narevsky, manager for the Poway Redevelopment Agency which, along with the shopping center developers, built Haley Park.

More than 140 households applied to be included in the program, but 52 were rejected as not meeting the program’s basic criteria, Narevsky said.

Thirty names were picked Wednesday from the pool of 89 eligible applicants, and the first 17 who pass an in-depth screening will be allotted one of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom rental houses. The first 17 names that were drawn are virtually certain to be approved.

For every elated Slusher, however, there were two Joanne Foxes.

“Everyone wants too much money, and who’s got it these days?” the 29-year-old Fox said.

Fox, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter have been living with Fox’s mother in Poway for six months. And now, they may have to move from the city Fox has called home since 1969.

In the new Haley Park Estates, a family of four earning $20,000 a year can rent the 1,200-square-foot manufactured homes, which include two-car garages and dishwashers, for $437 a month, utilities included.

“Poway is an affluent community, but, at the same time, there are people who are not the lawyers or doctors but are employed in Poway who would like to have a decent house to live in and they can afford,” Narevsky said.

But Narevsky acknowledges that the 17 units are “a drop in the bucket” toward meeting the city’s needs for lower-priced housing.

Poway has routinely been chastised by low-cost housing advocates as one of the slowest North County cities when it comes to meeting the housing needs of its lower-income residents.

The only other lower-priced housing project in the city, the 60-unit Poway Villas, has a 10-year waiting list for civilian families. It is geared toward military families and was built by the federal government with little help from the city.

Narevsky said the developers of the shopping center, Poway Land Inc., had the legal right simply to close the mobile home park, forcing residents to find new housing on their own.

“But the City Council chose to take steps to provide for those residents. It showed sensitivity to protect the residents who lived there,” Narevsky said.

But Catherine Rodman, of the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, which sued the city two years ago over Poway’s misuse of low-income housing funds and continues to be in litigation, said the Haley Park project wastes city redevelopment funds.

Rodman contends that the project is expensive housing being subsidized by the redevelopment agency, as opposed to housing that is truly low-cost. She said the money would be better spent on projects with higher densities, meaning the construction of more housing units on the same plot of land.

“What they want to do is waste their money by creating affluent housing on large lots only, dumping their money into an affluent housing plot,” said Rodman.

In that way, the city opens as few affordable housing units as possible, keeping poor people out of the community, said Rodman, explaining the solution lies in the city increasing its housing densities.

Narevsky denies that any waste took place.

“We built an appropriate project that was of benefit to the community. . . . It’s not a high-rise slum,” Narevsky said.

However, Nerevsky could not explain why a project intended for low-income families would need two-car garages.

Rodman has long assailed Poway as being “the most exclusionary city in this county,” pointing to a San Diego Assn. of Governments study showing that it has by far the lowest proportion of lower-income households in the county.

The Haley Park project, which cost an estimated $11.5 million, was built without state or federal funds “because there wasn’t any available,” Narevsky said.

“The (state and federal housing) programs still exist, but the funding has dried up,” Narevsky said.

But Rodman said state and federal programs do exist for cities such as Poway to leverage redevelopment funds for affordable housing, and that some banks are also mandated to provide low-interest loans for such projects.