A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : In Dispute : SEEKING CREATIVE LOCAL SOLUTIONS : Another Way: : There are no sweeping solutions, but what’s most effective are smaller projects sponsored by nonprofit corporations, with funding from many sources and plenty of community participation.

Poor people have faced the reality for years, but now Los Angeles County is officially recognized as the most expensive place in the United States for low-income people to rent housing. The affordability of basic shelter is finally an issue with visibility, but that has not translated yet into consensus about the right solutions.

The federal government is trying to ease away from the subsidized-housing business, but private development has not taken up the slack. There are thousands of people on waiting lists for public housing and thousands more waiting for a place on the list.

Under the Republican Administration’s leadership, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been promoting resident management and ownership for public housing. These policies have resulted in programs like HOPE (Home Ownership for People Everywhere), which transfer ownership of public housing complexes to current residents. The complexities of managing large housing developments as well as the provision of funds for future maintenance are not adequately addressed. This program is designed to convince the public that turning over substandard, poorly maintained housing complexes to resident ownership is a fulfillment of the “American Dream” and not an abandonment of government responsibility.

But no matter who is elected President, there is no likelihood that government will get back into the housing development business on a large scale. Alternative methods of housing development, however, may prove far more successful than either all-government or all-private efforts.

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles is experimenting with private/public partnerships. The city is leasing the Normont Terrace complex in Harbor City to a private developer who will raze the 400 dilapidated units, built as temporary housing during World War II, and replace them, at no cost to the city, with brand-new units. They will be able to do this because they are also building 400 new market-rate units on the same site, thus doubling the density of housing.

There was some resident participation in the project, but the for-profit developer is the leader here. Whether this is a successful approach will be clearer in a few years.

But alternatives do need to be considered. In recent years, the City of Los Angeles has managed to fund only 2,000 new units of affordable housing per year, and the housing authority is just building its first new public housing units in five years. This is partly due to a lack of taxpayer commitment to financing new affordable housing, and partly to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome: New public housing in California is being built in groups of 30 units or less because state law requires larger developments to go through a difficult public referendum process.

This scaled-down approach, while a reaction to a problem, itself suggests part of a solution. Community-based nonprofit groups are initiating housing development, generally on a scale smaller than the older, bigger public developments, resulting in a variety of housing types going up all over Southern California. Funding is assembled from many places--from the federal government, including HUD, from city sources like the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Housing, Preservation and Production Department, and from private sources. Interestingly, there is a current near-explosion of rehabilitations and even new construction of single-room-occupancy hotels in Los Angeles, organized by, among others, the Skid Row Housing Trust. Other nonprofit groups include New Economics for Women, which is constructing 110 units of affordable housing for single mothers (with built-in day care facilities) near downtown Los Angeles; the Ward Economic Development Corporation, associated with the Ward AME Church, which has built 120 new housing units for low-income senior citizens in South Los Angeles, and the Korean Youth Center, which is developing a new headquarters and 19 units of family housing in Koreatown.

Community-based nonprofit groups can answer real current needs of citizens as well as empower them to deal with future problems by involving them in the process of development. Many of these projects are developed with the help of community workshops. The nonprofits are aware of the needs of particular populations, needs that are not limited to housing. They often include child care, job training, counseling and other social services, components that the government has virtually eliminated from public housing and which private development rarely even considers.

This grass-roots housing development process avoids the pitfalls of large-scale projects imposed on neighborhoods by outside public or private sources. Appropriately-scaled, well-managed, community-controlled affordable housing avoids NIMBY-ism and stigma. This is where we should put public and private funding if we want to create successful new housing.