Tenants Can Stay in Church-Owned Homes

A landlord-tenant dispute between one of the city’s best-known black churches and a group of mostly elderly renters ended this weekend when the church told occupants of the Brookins Manor Apartments that they will not be evicted after all.

The announcement, made at a tenants meeting on the rose-covered grounds of the West Adams Boulevard complex, capped a week of protest by the renters, who had been ordered to leave so that the First African Methodist Episcopal Church could offer the units to low-income families.

“When we heard, we were so jubilant we were jumping up and down in the streets,” said 84-year-old Grace Saunders, who has been the resident manager at Brookins Manor for 33 years.

“Who wants to pick up and move out when everywhere we looked the rents were almost double?” Saunders said.

Under the new plan, said the Rev. Cecil (Chip) Murray, the church will allow the tenants to keep their apartments under current rent-control laws until they decide to move. Each unit will be converted to low-income housing once it becomes vacant.

“We have been painted as coldhearted people, but that isn’t the whole story,” Murray said.

“Legally, technically, we had to do what we did,” he added, “but apparently the city’s interpretation of the requirements was modified. We’re extremely grateful. I think our whole congregation at all three services on Sunday offered a prayer of thanks. People come first in our ministry.”

The church had initially ordered the tenants to leave in order to make way for an $8-million renovation and expansion of the stately alabaster complex. Under the church’s plan for the site, the existing units would have been converted to much-needed housing for families living below the poverty line. The rear of the property would be developed to add 30 new low-income apartments.

The project, however, hinged on the church’s ability to obtain a federal tax credit, which it could sell to a corporation to help pay for construction. That tax credit in turn depended on the conversion of all the existing apartments to subsidized low-income housing.

Although many of the tenants are elderly people who subsist on Social Security, the church informed them that technically they would be ineligible for the units under federal guidelines, because most of the units are too big to be awarded to a single occupant under those rules.