Urias Worries Over Poor Santa Paula Housing : Communities: Frustrated by recent defeat of low-income project, the councilman points to abundance of substandard shelter in the city.

Driving down a narrow alley in one of Santa Paula’s more prosperous neighborhoods, Councilman Alfonso C. Urias pointed to dozens of ramshackle structures used as makeshift apartments.

Constructed as garages, toolsheds or secondary units behind the large Victorian houses that line Pleasant Street, many of the out-of-sight residences are shared by several families.

“This is the Santa Paula people never see,” Urias said. “The owners live in the front houses and halfway maintain them, but the apartments that you don’t see are usually in lousy shape.”

Urias, still smarting from the City Council’s defeat of an affordable-housing project earlier in the week, was trying to show why he backed a 21-unit apartment house that the council majority criticized as too dense.

And why, in his view, the county’s poorest city needs to provide more housing for its least-privileged residents.

Less than a block away from the proposed project site in east Santa Paula, Urias stopped at a row of dilapidated single-family homes much smaller than the 810- to 890-square-foot apartments in the defeated housing project rejected as too small.

“Not so long ago, I helped a family move out of a garage just around the corner into a place that was almost as bad,” Urias said. “Sure, we can always do better, but this apartment building is doing better for the people who are living in substandard units.”

The dispute in Santa Paula over the proposed Plaza Apartments illustrates the volatile political climate for affordable housing, say housing officials.

While low-income housing is actively promoted by cities such as Ventura, which exempted affordable projects from a drought-inspired building moratorium, some cities lack the political support needed for such housing.

“Affordable housing often runs into incredible neighborhood opposition,” said Paul Kranhold of the state Department of Housing and Community Development. “Affordable housing has become more of a local political battle than anything else.”

The Plaza Apartments project passed its first test in Santa Paula with relative ease. The city’s Planning Commission approved the project in November by a 4-2 vote, granting developer David Allen a zoning change that increased the maximum allowable number of apartments from 15 to 22.

Up to half the apartments, which were to be partly financed with federal tax credits, were reserved for tenants with low or very low incomes. Under tax-credit rules, their rent would have been limited to an amount that federal housing regulations determined would be affordable for up to 55 years.

Planning Commission Chairman John Kulwiec, an architect, appreciated that its open space was designed to separate car traffic from the project’s swimming pool, play area and other amenities.

“The development was a cut above most of the projects that come before us,” Kulwiec said. “They were good-looking apartments, sensitive to the location and in the use of materials.”

But Commissioner Bob Borrego, one of the two commissioners to oppose the project, said later he was concerned about possible overcrowding in the affordable two-bedroom units.

“It troubles me greatly to see the lack of open space in these apartment houses,” Borrego said. “I see apartment houses where four or five kids stare out of their bedroom windows with nothing to do. It hurts.”

Also, Borrego said, building affordable apartments could attract renters from outside the city and increase the demand for city services.

The developer’s victory before the Planning Commission was short-lived, for when the project went before the City Council in December for the first time, opposition surfaced quickly.

Councilwoman Robin Sullivan, the president of the Santa Paula Chamber of Commerce who was elected to the council in November, pointed to the potential for overcrowding in the apartments, which were supposed to be rented to no more than three tenants.

It boiled down to a debate between Sullivan and Urias, who had regularly urged visitors to the council to support affordable housing in Santa Paula.

Sullivan questioned the need for two-bedroom apartments in the city when a number of such units were already available on the open market.

Although officials of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development view two-bedroom affordable-housing units of 800 square feet as adequate for basic needs as well as comfort, Sullivan also criticized the size of the apartments.

“I did a little arithmetic, and after subtracting closets and other unusable space, came up with a usable size of just 650 square feet. That’s barely half the size of this council chamber,” Sullivan said. “That’s a fairly confined area for three people.”

Urias, the only Latino council member in a city with a majority Latino population, defended the project as an improvement for the low-income, largely Latino east end of Santa Paula.

“The whole east end of town is high-density,” Urias said. “I think 21 units there would not overpopulate the area and would be better than renting a garage. Any housing there, even if small, would be an improvement.”

Allen, the developer, told the council that his project would be among the few options for the city’s low-income residents. He compared his request for medium-density zoning with the high-density zoning granted to the town’s showcase senior-citizen project, the 150-unit Santa Paulan.

“If we’re going to provide affordable housing, we have to work within the financial restraints of the economy we’re in,” Allen said. “We can’t do it in (low-density) zoning. Land costs too much.”

In the end, the council rejected Allen’s request, with Councilman John Melton and Mayor Margaret Ely siding with Sullivan, and Councilman Wayne Johnson voting with Urias.

Afterward, a glum Allen reacted angrily.

“Affordable-housing projects are projects non grata ,” Allen said. “Santa Paula has 500 allocation units available under its growth-management plan--but no takers.”

By many measures, the city of Santa Paula would seem an unlikely town to reject an affordable-housing project backed by its own planning staff and Planning Commission.

Census figures place the semirural town of 25,000 near or at the bottom of the county’s economic ladder, with the lowest household income and more single mothers and children living in poverty than any city in the county.

An old city where few vacant lots remain to build on, 20% of the city’s 7,664 housing units were overcrowded in 1990, twice the county average and sharply higher than the rate a decade earlier, according to the city’s General Plan.

The Santa Paula Housing Authority subsidizes the housing of 519 families with federal dollars from HUD. Commonly known as Section 8 housing, the HUD program pays a landlord the difference between what a family can afford and the rental unit’s market value.

Unfortunately, said Director Ramsey Jay of the housing authority, 600 applicants are on a waiting list and may wait for up to three years before receiving a Section 8 voucher.

“If everybody in the program moved out tomorrow, we have enough on the waiting list to fill the program immediately with some left over,” Jay said.

To encourage the construction of low-income housing, the Southern California Assn. of Governments--better known as SCAG--created “fair share” housing goals for cities and unincorporated areas within the six Southern California counties it represents.

“One of the goals of the program is that everybody takes on their fair share of affordable housing, and low-income housing isn’t concentrated in just one area,” said Nilon Seals, a SCAG planner.

Santa Paula’s fair share for the five-year period ending in 1994 is 619 units, with 221 needed for low-income and very low-income residents, according to the city’s General Plan.

A countywide building slump has weakened the ability of Santa Paula and other cities in the county to achieve their housing goals, making some housing officials envious of the project rejected by Santa Paula.

“I wish we had somebody like that who would come to us,” said Sal Gonzales, who heads the Oxnard Housing Authority.

After the decision, Santa Paula council members differed on whether the project’s defeat set back future efforts to provide affordable housing.

“I wasn’t looking at it terms of affordable housing, but in terms of the project. . . . and this was too dense,” Sullivan said.

Ely said her opposition stemmed from her own experience living in a multifamily apartment house.

“What I see happening is people are thrown together in incredibly tight quarters that creates friction, and their children sort of run together,” Ely said.

“I’m trying to send a message that people in Santa Paula deserve something good,” Ely said. “Just because someone lives in a poor part of town doesn’t mean they have to settle for less.”

Melton said he voted against the project because the developer had not presented enough evidence that the apartments would remain affordable for the 30 to 55 years required by tax-credit regulations.

“If it’s not part of the prepared report package, I’m not going to just take a developer’s word for it,” Melton said.

Johnson, who joined Urias in voting for the project, said he remains a supporter of affordable housing.

“We have a responsibility to our citizens to put the right mix of housing in the town,” said Johnson, a former member of the city’s housing authority and Planning Commission. “For a while on the commission we were approving nothing but high-end housing.”

Urias said he is upset by the outcome and disturbed by suggestions that the project would not have improved the quality of life in Santa Paula.

“A lot of people don’t have a quality of life--period,” Urias said. “I think there’s a cultural gap in Santa Paula . . . some of the people who are against low-income housing have forgotten what it’s like to be poor.”