A Milestone: First Voucher for New Home

Winded and giddy, his wife and children exhausted, his neighbors still mired in a maze of red tape, an out-of-work janitor on Sunday registered a milestone for this punch-drunk metropolis: Lundy Macias got a new home.

Less than a week after the quake demolished their creaking Hollywood apartment house, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros announced that Macias and his family would be the first to rent a new home under a hastily deployed federal voucher program. Despite early problems in processing the overwhelming crush of applicants, Cisneros promised that the Maciases’ success story will be the first of hundreds as Los Angeles fights its way to recovery.

To the 30-year-old handyman, who had spent the week riding back and forth to the local disaster relief center on his bicycle--the only transportation he has--the announcement was a welcome jolt in a week of aftershocks, geologic and otherwise.

“Just a few days ago, I was in tears. Now we feel like we just landed in Beverly Hills,” Macias exulted as his weary wife, Linda, rocked their 4-month-old infant on her hip.

“I told the senator or secretary or whatever-he-is-Cisneros, ‘Man, thanks for coming through, and don’t forget to tell Mr. Clinton I said hi!’ ”

The federal emergency housing program under which Macias and his family got their new apartment is aimed at allowing low-income quake victims to rent replacement homes quickly. Cisneros said HUD has been authorized to distribute as many as 10,000 vouchers if the need arises--and from initial statistics, it appears that it will. By Sunday morning in the city of Los Angeles alone, building and safety inspectors had declared nearly 11,000 units at least temporarily uninhabitable.

But the voucher program was a touchy subject along the long lines for aid, as the waiting list for a processing appointment began to stretch into the middle of next month.

Even before the quake, more than 80,000 poor residents had been waiting for a year or longer to qualify for similar housing assistance. The new voucher program has pushed needy quake victims to the head of the line, but the help has not been as immediate as some of the dispossessed had hoped.

“I don’t know how much more I can take. I’ve been living in my car. I washed up at a McDonald’s this morning,” said Lois Stroud, a 38-year-old nurse’s aide at a Downtown area group home.

Stroud said she is afraid to go either to her quake-damaged apartment or a public shelter because both places have roofs that she fears could cave in. She cannot wait to find a new home.

On Sunday morning, it was unclear how long that process would take. She had an appointment, she said, but it could take days or weeks for federal officials to verify that she was indeed left homeless by the quake and not among the thousands of otherwise needy families in Los Angeles.

And so she sat patiently, her application in triplicate on her lap, along with her pocketbook, which contained a towel, soap and deodorant.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Macias was as good a personification as any for Los Angeles’ resilient side. He laughed and jammed his hands into his jeans pockets as he talked about the wild ride that has been his week.

When the quake hit, he said, he and his family were asleep in their $475-a-month apartment, No. 307, in a rickety, four-story apartment house on Kenmore Avenue.

“The ceiling dropped in and all we could think about were the kids,” he recalled. “We didn’t know if we were going to live or die. We just stood there with the whole place shaking, with my wife holding the baby and me trying not to lose our 4-year-old. When we finally went out (into the hallway), all the lights were out and all the fire doors were shut.”

Edging forward in the inky dark, their feet crunching on cracked plaster and shards of glass, Macias and his wife managed to locate a stub of candle, which they split in half and used to light their way down two flights of stairs to the street. The minute they were clear of the building, they said, they ran across the street and sat down on the curb--a handyman and a housewife with a baby daughter and a toddler son, “wondering what we were gonna do next.”

At first, Macias said, he was simply elated to be alive. By afternoon, his sister had offered his family shelter in her apartment nearby. But a day later, reality was setting in, Macias said; his sister’s apartment manager had informed her that if her guests stayed more than 15 days, the landlord would raise her rent. Meanwhile, his apartment manager was arguing with him over his security deposit.

“He told me that my money had gone to the people who had moved out when we moved in,” Macias said. “He told me I’d have to take him to court.”

It was a setback he could ill afford, Macias said. The family has been on Aid to Families With Dependent Children since last year, when he lost his janitorial job. Although he has looked daily for work, he said, he has been unable to find any opening that pays enough in salary and benefits to support his family, and the small odd jobs he has done in the interim have only worked to lower his welfare grant. Without an address, there was no place for the state to forward his welfare check. Without a check, there was no hope of obtaining a new apartment.

“I had 15 days and then I was going to be on the street,” he said. “I broke down and cried.”

Then, he said, he collected himself. It occurred to him that he may have lost his home, but his hustle was still intact. He left his wife and children at his sister’s home and balanced his short, thick body on his bike and rode down to the carnival-like collection of tents and card tables on the grounds of the Hollywood Recreation Center.

He got in line and got an appointment to meet with an assistance worker the next day, and when that day came, he showed up two hours early and got in line again. He was prepared to be dogged, he said, but as it turned out, he was called early, which was a good thing--the paperwork, he said, took four hours.

The program operates under the rules that traditionally govern Section 8 housing, with the exception that in addition to being poor the applicants must also have lost their homes to the quake. The Section 8 voucher program requires the applicants to spend up to 30% of their income on rent, with the federal government making up the difference between that amount and the fair market rent. It is up to the applicant to find a landlord willing to accept the federal subsidies.

Macias said assistance workers demanded proof that his building had been rendered uninhabitable. They would not take his word, he said, that the floors now tilted crazily and the ceiling had caved in.

“They sent inspectors to the building. We had to give the full information,” he said. “But the (voucher) paperwork was just one sheet. It wasn’t bad. I was more than surprised.”

The processing, he said, took more time. But by the arrival of the weekend, he had a housing voucher good for a new Section 8 apartment. Then, when he found an apartment, he had more snafus--the HUD inspector told him that the unit lacked a working smoke alarm, that if it wasn’t replaced, the unit would not qualify, and that Macias had 25 minutes to get the job done because the inspector’s shift was about to end.

“I got back on that bike,” he laughed, “and I rode till my legs hurt.” But in short order, the alarm was replaced and the apartment was his. It is on the first floor of a newer building less than a mile from the disaster relief tents, a two-bedroom unit that normally rents for $750 a month. With the Section 8 voucher, Macias will be able to stay for 18 months at the much-reduced rent of $193.

Thus was Macias counting himself among the lucky on Sunday, standing in the middle of a crush of reporters and cameramen in an otherwise empty living room with an empty kitchen and two empty bedrooms behind him and not a stick of furniture to interrupt the brown wall-to-wall carpeting. All of his family’s possessions, he said, are in a condemned building now, and he is afraid to go in and carry them out.

His new home is across the street from a pawnshop, on the route of a produce vendor whose truck horn plays “La Cucaracha” when he beeps.

“But I ain’t crying,” Macias said. “I got a roof over my head. God shined on me. And once I got my family settled in, and my gas and electricity turned on, I’m gonna go back to that assistance center and give ‘em a hand. As I understand it, they’re pretty overwhelmed.”