More Than Shelter: Home, Help, Hope : Casa Loma goes beyond affordable housing offering residents English literacy classes, job training and child care.
Beatriz Olvera Stotzer, a manager with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, recalls plenty of bunk beds in the one-bedroom Boyle Heights house that she and her sisters and brother shared with their parents, who for a long time slept on the kitchen floor.
Esther Valadez, an attorney and developer whose father earned minimum wage, came from a family of eight and often shared her bed with a sister. She never had a bedroom of her own.
Sandra Serrano Sewell, a preschool administrator, had her own room. But as the daughter of a labor organizer in the Ohio steel mills, she was weaned on the idea that power means little unless it is shared.
In 1984 the three Latino feminists met with several others at a preschool in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. With more theory than track record, they organized a nonprofit real estate development corporation called New Economics for Women (NEW).
And with an attitude that didn’t take “no” for an answer, they undertook the development of Casa Loma, an $18-million, 110-unit apartment complex on an acre of land a mile west of downtown Los Angeles.
Last May, their years of work culminated when their four-story, peach-stuccoed vision opened its doors to the community’s largely Latino working poor.
More than just affordable housing, Casa Loma also offers English literacy classes, job training and child care.
“It’s really unique,” said Carrie Sutkin, planning deputy for Supervisor Gloria Molina. “It goes beyond the traditional residential housing needs--not just the design of the units but the underground child-care center, the computer learning center and the community center.”
(Molina, who was then the city councilwoman for the district, helped NEW get the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) seed money needed to attract other public funding for the Casa Loma project.)
News of the pioneering venture has spread. In May, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros hailed Casa Loma as “a model for the nation.” More recently, NEW received special recognition for Casa Loma from Compact, a nationwide organization of financial institutions.
NEW grew out of a Latina feminist organization called Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Most of its members carried memories of childhoods spent in overcrowded or substandard housing. All were disenchanted with the white middle-class activism of the 1970s, which they felt assumed that someone else would make the difference.
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The women also shared a fascination with the vision expressed in a Ms. magazine article by Yale urbanism professor Delores Hayden. Her idea of responding to the needs of working mothers by reinventing housing concepts excited them; it also dovetailed nicely with their interest in empowering women through economic initiatives.
But there weren’t any models for the activists’ goal of using housing as a base to stabilize the family. That suited them just fine. “NEW is very careful not to impose preconceived ideas on the families and the community that they are building in,” Valadez said.
Focus groups made up of working mothers from the neighborhood were asked about their needs. From such gatherings Casa Loma planners learned what was imperative: lots of security, combination kitchen-dining rooms and plenty of open yet sequestered spaces where mothers could relax on benches and yet still watch their children.
Architect Pedro Birba responded with one entrance leading in and out of the building; a round-the-clock security guard sits in a glassed-in office at the entrance to the garage and security cameras ring the structure’s perimeter.
Rents at Casa Loma range from $89 a month for a studio apartment to $450 a month for a four-bedroom unit.
Birba said the biggest challenge in designing Casa Loma was the task of “massaging” a very dense site for every square foot of added open space.
Like everyone involved in the project, Birba calls it a learning experience.
There was his surprise, for example, when walk-in closets were rejected by the focus groups. “We found that people might decide to use those closets as additional living space,” Birba said.
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His notion of townhome-style units was also “blown out of the water” by women who did not want to face climbing stairs after a long work day.
“We broke some planning rules in terms of (the) conventional way people look at apartments,” Birba said. “They taught me that as an architect you don’t always have all the answers.”
Designing the kitchens was also educational. The apartments’ dining and cooking areas are blended, to allow the mothers to supervise their children while they cook. “It took us six to eight months to convince (the CRA) that it was a design that was going to be conducive to this atmosphere,” Stotzer said. “I don’t think they really felt that we had it together.”
John McCoy, CRA director of housing, disagrees. “I think these are some pretty extraordinary women (with) a combination of having a dream and having the practical business orientation and technical expertise to realize that dream. It is tough to find that combination in people.”
And, in fact, from the very beginning NEW understood where it was going.
Their search for an affordable site for the Casa Loma project received a jump-start in 1986 with an allocation of $97,000 in seed money from the United Way. Two years later the appearance of a “For Sale” sign in front of the child-care center where they held their meetings signaled the end of their site search. The large piece of property owned by the Cancer Detection Center in the community they wanted to serve was the perfect location, Valadez said.
“There were a lot of developers who were interested in the land,” Stotzer recalled. “We were able to convince the owner--another nonprofit--to sell to us because it was going to be very political to try to get rid of the child-care center. We had committed to relocate Centro de Ninos nearby. (It) had been there 15 years and it was a real needed service in the community.”
“We managed to tie up a $3 million parcel with $10,000,” Valadez said. “I think we felt we were doing a good deal.” Although their offer of 50% of the asking price was turned down, Valadez said, eventually a deal was struck because of the “seller’s willingness to believe in the capability of a nonprofit to close on the land.”
Fresh hurdles, though, remained. “It was very difficult for (the CRA) to grasp what we were trying to do--to accept (housing) being combined with social services and child care on site,” Stotzer said. “We fought constantly, saying that all three elements were part of the whole.”
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One obstacle that needed to be cleared was the sheer magnitude of the venture being undertaken without a significant track record. Another was sexism.
Challenges to the women’s expertise came from representatives of building and development industries traditionally dominated by men.
“That we were a garden club that had somehow gotten together and were developers because it was a good thing to do is the kind of concept that got back to us,” Valadez said. For example, the experience of being cast by one member of a loan committee as “just a bunch of women” without any knowledge of construction was typical, she said.
Eventually, though, the women prevailed, and in 1990 the agency increased its original $3.5-million pre-development and land-acquisition loan to $5 million--enough to build an on-site child-care center.
This breakthrough enabled Valadez and Carmen Luna, a community outreach manager for American Savings Bank, to lead a drive for other funding. Money from the Century Freeway Housing Program, the State Rental Housing Construction Program, equity tax credits and a bank loan were assembled to form Casa Loma’s $18 million financing pool.
The 20-month construction of Casa Loma was dogged by adversity. “We had everything happen to us during construction that could possibly happen to us,” recalled Valdez. “The worst rains flooded our construction site twice. We had an arson fire--we lost one-third of our project. The drywallers went on strike. I think that is why we were so proud of the fact that we had come in on time and on budget.” At the same time, NEW insisted that women be represented on all the trades that worked on the building.
NEW’s idea of Casa Loma as a transitional haven has always turned on the presence of the Centro de Ninos child-care center.
While an on-site social worker and counselor are available to help residents set goals--to own a home or a business--the state-supported bilingual/bicultural preschool offers mobility to mothers preparing for better futures by working or going to school.
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Meanwhile, their children have the benefit of a preschool environment that expresses “space, safeness and tranquillity,” said Centro’s administrator, Sandy Sewell.
As a counterpoint to the congested living conditions so familiar to these preschoolers, an aquatic theme was chosen, she said. It is carried out in the child-care center, which is decorated in soothing shades of blue, green and turquoise and repeated in the sculptured fish and cloth streamers representing kelp and clouds that form the ceiling treatment.
Beneath the progressively rising classroom ceilings--an architectural element intended to parallel the children’s growing ages--are educational activity sections flowing freely into each other.
Of the large learning spaces, Sewell said, “It gives the children the opportunity to hear themselves think and for them to realize that their thoughts are worth having.”
Additionally, more than $100,000 has been raised by Centro’s parents--enough to equip the preschool with an industrial kitchen, new furniture, a washer and dryer for diapers, a science area, an art room and computer terminals.
After a delay that was caused by state budget cuts, the preschool opened in late January. With federal help, Centro de Ninos began serving 55 children. Supplementary resources are being sought by NEW to bring the center up to its 75-child capacity.
Meanwhile, budget problems have not dampened the enthusiasm of Jaime Cevallos. In fact, the smile of the Salvadoran immigrant is the only thing brighter than the sunlight in his gleaming three-bedroom, two-bath apartment, a still sparsely furnished unit on the second floor of Casa Loma.
A shipping clerk for a Culver City sock manufacturer, Cevallos, 30, says he and his wife, Blanca, had been paying $525 for a one-bedroom Pico Union apartment. Now they spend $330 in a building where his two children can play outdoors safely.
After reeling off a few other pluses--more money left in his paycheck, English classes, membership on a resident’s council--he concludes, “We are so happy here. This is like God has given to us something special.”
