Housing Firm Builds Success on Unusual Methods : Development: Santa Ana-based group gives tenants unorthodox powers and rights. Its formula for affordable housing has generated projects statewide.
Two decades ago, the sharp teeth of a bulldozer swallowed the wood-frame homes of a Santa Ana barrio, forcing the exodus of hundreds of Mexican immigrant families.
In response, the immigrants banded together in crisis and created what they now call el sueno imposible, the impossible dream: They pooled their money from city relocation checks and a legal settlement fund to create a nonprofit housing organization that today is unleashing its own bulldozers across California.
Originally, the founders of Civic Center Barrio Corp. planned to rehabilitate or build a few dozen apartments each year. But in the last five years, the Santa Ana-based group and its partners have been cutting a relentless swath across the state. They are building affordable apartments and a day-care center in the border town of Chula Vista, pushing north with apartment complexes and swimming pools in Palmdale, remodeling apartments in Costa Mesa, and launching developments in the San Francisco Bay Area and the upper reaches of the state in Butte County.
Today, real estate and land deals; tomorrow, taquerias and tortilla factories, strawberry fields and landscaping firms, fitness centers and auto body shops, vows the corporation’s director, Helen Brown, a blunt-spoken former welfare case worker who presides over corporate headquarters in her makeshift power uniform of faded jeans, air-brushed T-shirt and a crumpled pack of Kools.
The organization has managed to parlay its organizing skills and unconventional formulas into a $5-million corporation with partnerships and interests in more than 1,200 apartments and houses statewide. With the backing of a 4-year-old consortium of the state’s largest banks--the California Community Reinvestment Corp.--the Santa Ana group has received more than $18 million targeted for low-income housing.
This infusion of money and support figured in the burst of growth of the corporation, which until 1989 had built or helped develop only a few dozen apartments and houses.
Despite some misgivings about Civic Center Barrio’s style, the bankers decided that they needed organizers more comfortable with work boots than pin-stripes.
“We believed in them early on while other people thought they were taking a risk with them,” said Dan Lopez, president and chief executive officer of the bank consortium. “They had the right formula.”
Along with providing financing, the bank consortium also introduced the housing group to for-profit developers and Boston investors who were interested in forming partnerships to build low-cost housing. That eventually led to joint ventures in Antioch, Banning, Beaumont, Salinas, Roseville, and Palmdale.
“It was my idea to bring in someone who had community organizing talents,” said Michael Heaman, one of the group’s partners and a developer who heads Affordable Housing Group Inc. “If they could run the housing well, then we could cut down on our operating expenses.”
Civic Center Barrio’s corporate office is a spare two-story complex in Santa Ana. Inside, Brown presides over a staff of seven who consider her a “kind and gentle boss” who is so thrifty that correction fluid is considered a precious office commodity.
Her board of directors includes a recreation supervisor, an office worker and a part-time factory worker, Ricarda Gonzalez, who communicates with Brown in English, Spanish and much gesturing. Some directors and employees, such as administrative aide Lydia Casamina, not only work for the corporation but also call the group’s apartments home.
“If it wasn’t for Civic Center Barrio, I would not be the person I (am) today,” said Casamina, whose mother-in-law, Jennie Casamina, was one of its founding members. “I never finished high school, so I always felt like I wasn’t smart enough, that I wasn’t going to be nobody. Now I have a position. We have a budget.”
For Gonzalez, the group’s reasonable rent has made it possible for her to afford a spotless, three-bedroom Santa Ana apartment with new curtains, carpets, stove and freshly painted walls on a factory worker’s wage.
“I never pictured that this could happen,” said Gonzalez, seated at her kitchen table on a recent morning. She was not just talking about her apartment but the rise of her nonprofit group.
The roots of Civic Center Barrio are in the soil of a 14-acre section of downtown, two blocks from City Hall. The area was once home to nearly 400 families and renters who were displaced by a 1977 redevelopment project. In the protests and the lawsuits that followed, the developers agreed to pay $1.4 million to Civic Center Barrio in lieu of 58 low-income apartments that they had promised to build. Some of the dislocated families also contributed their city relocation checks, which amounted to about $9,600 each.
As important as the money were the street-level organizing techniques that the group’s leaders mastered in the 1970s, applied to their tenants, and later started promoting to potential investors as a savvy business strategy.
The group’s formula is to form tenant associations with unorthodox powers and rights that range from interviewing potential tenants to engineering evictions of troublesome residents. Their goal is to promote stability; instead of treating residents like tenants, they try to respect them like homeowners.
“This power structure doesn’t make a lot of sense to good business-minded people,” Brown said. “But our philosophy is that power should be vested in the residents that we serve.”
Some landlords are drawn to the idea because it may reduce the costly turnover of tenants and the expense of refurbishing vacant apartments. The theory is that tenants who have a stake in their developments will not move. But landlords are also leery of the notion because residents may also learn to challenge authority.
“There’s a great big suspicion about the social mission,” said Heaman. “Maybe in conventional times (landlords) can feel that way, but if they’re going to survive, they’re going to have to address turnover.”
Heaman, who has worked on projects with Civic Center Barrio in Palmdale, Salinas and Santa Maria, said tenant groups have worked to install speed bumps, launch Neighborhood Watches and quell drug dealing.
They also have wackier ideas, he said, such as opening the community pool at 3 a.m. In that case, the landlord exercised veto rights.
“So much of that kind of thing sounds like small potatoes, but it’s really how you get people empowered,” Heaman said. “Once they have a vested interest in their homes, then they try to keep interlopers out; they try to reduce crime.”
Eventually, Civic Center Barrio may try to apply the same grass-roots organizing approach and its resources to budding businesses.
The group is seeking grants to fund an economic development corporation that could launch small businesses such as taquerias or landscaping firms, Brown said.
“I really believe that the strength of our organization is our residents,” Brown said. “Without their participation we couldn’t have come so far.”
