Housing Plan Becomes Window of Opportunity : Development: Cypress Grove project is a prime example of an ambitious city program that gives low- and moderate-income families chance to own a home.
When the Cypress Grove Villa housing development was under construction last spring, Ken White often stopped by after work just to check on the progress of his new house. “My wife laughed at me,” said White, a 28-year-old contract manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But for White, watching the handsome townhouse with the slatted blue walls take shape in Northwest Pasadena was like the slow materialization of a dream.
“This is what my mother made me work for,” said White recently, still walking on air two months after he and his wife, Melina, moved in. “This is the American dream.”
For Pasadenans of moderate means like the Whites, it’s a dream that has all too often been out of reach.
Like other communities in Southern California, Pasadena has been afflicted by a scarcity of real estate financing and by some deep-seated neighborhood-level resistance to new housing development. During the 1980s, the city’s population increased 11% to about 132,000, but the number of housing units increased by only 6%, about 50,000 apartments and houses.
Unlike many other cities, however, Pasadena elected to do something about it. The City Council and the Department of Housing and Development have fashioned an ambitious program of construction and rehabilitation for the housing needy, using a variety of federal and state programs, as well as redevelopment revenue.
Many of the city’s housing have-nots have been left stranded by the vagaries of the real estate market, says Housing and Development Director William Reynolds. Not only have low-income residents been struggling to come up with apartment rents that were averaging $655 by the late 1980s, but moderate-income home buyers are being dealt out of a market where the median home price is, at $284,100, almost $60,000 higher than the Los Angeles County rate.
“What about the entry-level teacher or fireman?” Reynolds said. “We’re not providing housing for them. That’s the issue. Are those people going to have to drive in from Moreno Valley?”
From the point of view of state housing officials, Pasadena’s program is already working. The city has exceeded its five-year goal, set in 1989, of rehabilitating 300 units of housing for low- to moderate-income families, and it is almost halfway to its goal of 750 new units to be built by 1994.
Pasadena is one of only two San Gabriel Valley cities--the other is Alhambra--that are in full compliance with the state housing element law, which requires the establishment of affordable housing goals, says Cathy Creswell, program manager for the state Housing and Community Development Department.
How does a city create new housing when there’s a shortage of vacant land and an excess of anti-growth sentiment?
For the most part, the city has emphasized small and medium-size projects such as Cypress Grove, which now includes 15 units on an odd-shaped lot next to the Foothill Freeway (210).
Four years ago, the city began using tax increment revenue in redevelopment areas to buy small vacant parcels, mostly in the Northwest neighborhood, and offering them to developers as sites for affordable housing. To date, 14 developments of 35 affordable housing units or less--”in-fill projects,” housing bureaucrats call them--are either completed or under way.
The approach has yielded some surprising secondary benefits, city officials say. Developments such as Cypress Grove, which opened in September, have provided housing to low- and moderate-income families. They have also spread the notion of neighborhood betterment in some of the city’s down-at-the-heels areas.
“It’s much more than just the sticks and bricks,” Reynolds said. “These projects have a great impact on the way a neighborhood perceives itself.”
Cypress Grove is spread out on a piece of land in the crook of the 210 Freeway’s elbow, where westbound travelers turn north toward San Fernando. There will eventually be 29 townhouses--with wood siding, stone foundations and tilted, Craftsman-like roofs--along the project’s meandering driveway.
Presiding over the $5-million development is an imposing man named Jim Morris, the project’s developer, who still works out of a big trailer at the north end of the lot. Morris, 48, a Brooklyn-born UCLA graduate, talks about building affordable housing with evangelical fervor.
He’s a profit-making developer, he concedes. But much of the profit has been plowed back into the project, he says.
“The profit could be great if I wanted to give the people less quality,” he said.
White, for one, is convinced of the high quality of his new home. He is ebullient as he shows a visitor around. “You see, there’s recessed lighting,” he said, pointing to the dining room ceiling. “There’s a ceramic fireplace, a dishwasher and, look, they’ve installed an alarm system.”
City housing officials confirm that Cypress exceeds city design standards in its landscaping and in some of the details of construction. For example, kitchen countertops have been finished with ceramic tile rather than Formica, and especially thick window glass has been installed to baffle freeway noise. And the tract has been liberally sprinkled with trees and bushes.
“There are a lot of little things that he (Morris) has added to make the project attractive,” said John Andrews, design development coordinator for the Department of Housing and Development.
“Some things are extremely important to me,” Morris said. “I don’t want to build anything unless I’d live in it myself.” In fact, Morris and his wife and infant son will move into one of the next round of 14 townhouses, which will be completed by next spring.
There’s a bustling air in Morris’ trailer as workmen are dispatched on missions and tenants drop by to shoot the breeze. Mauricio Mejia, a technician with Pasadena Water and Power, is there on his lunch break to get the good news that a snag in his paperwork has been cleared up and that he and his family will soon be able to move into a home near the top of the lot.
“I’ve been in an apartment in Los Angeles for three years,” he said. “Now I’ll be able to walk to work.”
Half of the 29 Cypress homes will be offered at market rates--a deliberately low $180,000, according to Morris. The rest will be subsidized with city funds. Home buyers who qualify--a family of four can earn no more than $56,300 annually--get the houses at $140,000, with the city holding a second deed of trust of $40,000, payable in 30 years.
The silent second, as housing officials refer to it, comes from city redevelopment funds. It is a non-interest-bearing loan, but homeowners whose financial status improves may be required to begin payments in five years. The city verified the eligibility of applicants, most of whom responded to a newspaper advertisement, housing officials said.
Other in-fill projects in the area are for low-income or very-low-income renters, earning no more than $37,500 or $23,450, respectively, for a family of four. Some were built on vacant, city-owned parcels such as the Cypress lot, which was cleared when the freeway was built.
Most are indistinguishable from more expensive housing, and all of them have touched off a spirit of improvement in the surrounding neighborhoods, city officials say.
Things are definitely looking better along Cypress Avenue in front of the new development, residents say. “It’s about time for the neighborhood to improve,” said Rosalba Estrada, whose house was painted a bright canary yellow last spring in a massive volunteer effort called “Christmas in April” led by the Pasadena Junior League.
Estrada has lived on Cypress Avenue for 38 years. “When I came here, it was a sort of good neighborhood,” she said. “Then it went all the way down. It was pretty bad for a while. There was a lot of violence around here. Now it’s on the way up.”
Part of the problem, residents say, was the uncertainty about the Cypress parcel, which lay vacant for more than four years before Morris acquired it from the city. “There was a cloud over the neighborhood,” said Paul Duffy, who owns several houses on the block. “There was talk of putting a massive foreign car center there, then it was some other commercial project. A lot of people were deferring maintenance on their property.”
Morris, who had already completed a four-unit project in the neighborhood, offered to buy the land from the city to build a more modest development, with 10 affordable units. But the city offered to give him the site in return for agreeing to build five extra affordable units, said city Housing Administrator Phyllis Mueller.
With Morris’ persuasive presence on the block, other owners are reinvesting in their homes again, city officials say, and it shows. The developer is a familiar figure in the neighborhood, chatting with neighbors and prodding landlords to clean junk out of their back yards. “He’s unusual in that he’s involved with the community beyond just his project,” Mueller said.
It takes that kind of dedication to make affordable housing successful, Reynolds says. “A lot of developers overlook the small projects. Jim has found a niche where he can develop affordable housing for profit.”
There’s money to be made in the field now, housing experts say. “Right now, it’s one of the few things that you can get financing for,” Reynolds said. Because of the federal Community Reinvestment Act, which ranks lending institutions on the basis of community-oriented lending programs, banks are often eager to prove to federal regulators that they are not just reaping profits from their customers.
“Banks like to make the loans,” Reynolds said.
Not all the city’s affordable housing programs are in-fill projects. The $54-million, 374-unit Civic Center West, which will soon go up on land surrounding the old police headquarters on North Arroyo Parkway, will include 74 affordable apartments.
Those units are benefits of the state Rental Housing Construction Program and of city redevelopment requirements. Because the project is using redevelopment funds, both the state and the city require that it set aside 20% of its units for affordable housing.
The 313-unit King’s Villages project in Northwest Pasadena remains Pasadena’s largest housing development--and, because of difficulties in administering it, an example the city does not want to repeat. The 23-year-old project has been plagued by crime and charges of discrimination. The city has initiated a federal lawsuit against King’s Villages owner Thomas Pottmeyer, alleging discrimination and other violations.
“The council still lives with that failure,” Reynolds said. “There’s the feeling that we don’t want any more massive housing projects. We want to do it right this time.”
But even with the best of intentions, city officials say, the need continues to be far greater than the city’s resources. The city closed its list of applicants for rental subsidy through the federal Section 8 program in April, 1990, after more than 1,000 low-income families signed up in a three-hour period.
“We expect to reopen the list again sometime next year,” Mueller said. “But we’ll probably get another 1,000 applicants in a few hours.”
According to the most recent figures available, almost a quarter of all families in the city devote more than 30% of their resources to housing, exceeding the federal standard for affordability. A recent survey conducted by the city found 1,017 homeless people in Pasadena.
City Councilman Isaac Richard, one of the Housing and Development Department’s prime critics, says that, considering the pressing need, the city’s affordable housing program is moving at a snail’s pace. “It takes forever to build something,” Richard said. “It’s not enough of a priority.”
But even Richard concedes that the city is “head and shoulders above other municipalities.”
For the lucky new homeowners on Cypress Avenue, there’s often a sense that they have been beneficiaries of a miracle. Mauricio Mejia, after getting the news from Morris that he was in, strolled down the Cypress driveway to behold his new home.
He pondered the townhouse with a mixture of pride and disbelief. “Without the help of the city,” he said, “I couldn’t buy something like this.”
