Tenants to Buy Home of Their Own : Real estate: Under 1990 federal law known as Title 6, renters raise $8 million in financing to purchase their HUD-subsidized apartment building.

For 14 years, Dorissa Gomes has lived at the Astoria Gardens Apartments. And in that time, she’s had virtually no say over anything that’s happened there.

That’s about to change as she and the other Astoria Gardens renters prepare to become homeowners.

“We’re going to take good care of it,” Gomes said of her building. “We’re going to make sure all the apartments are up to par.”

In the first purchase of its kind in Los Angeles, tenants of the low-income Sylmar apartment complex at 14009 Astoria St. have raised nearly $8 million in financing and are on their way to buying and managing their 136-unit building.

The pending purchase began last year when residents learned that their apartments were up for sale--and that a new landlord potentially could raise rents. They mobilized, eventually deciding that the only way to have a say at the federally subsidized complex was to control it themselves.

“We think we can do it ourselves and feel more responsible,” said Gomes, who serves as secretary of the Astoria Gardens Tenants Assn.

In less than two months, the group--most of whose members have never owned their own home--organized a development team that includes a manager and four attorneys working on a pro bono basis. They also secured the purchase money through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Los Angeles Housing Department.

The current owners of the complex verbally agreed to the sale early this month, according to Tony Morales of the Los Angeles Center for Affordable Tenant Housing, and the residents at Astoria Gardens should gain control of it in about a year.

Morales, who spearheaded the deal, said this is the first area purchase of a HUD-subsidized complex by tenants under a 1990 law known as Title 6.

That law, he said, requires that tenants in HUD-subsidized buildings be given first option to buy when their homes are put up for sale.

Mona Tawatao, one of two attorneys from San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services working with the Astoria Gardens group, described the law as a sort of rent-control device for low-income housing complexes.

Many mortgage agreements on privately owned, HUD-subsidized buildings allow rent increases after 20 years, Tawatao said. Title 6 not only encourages tenants to purchase the properties and set their own rents, it also offers the owner incentives to sell to the tenants, she said.

Another similar tenant purchase in San Gabriel has recently received preliminary approval from the owner, Morales said, adding that another 104 such buyouts of HUD buildings were expected to be in place by the end of the year.

If the primary idea behind Title 6 is to make sure that low-income buildings don’t wind up with sky-high rents, there is a side benefit for Gomes.

“You feel like, hey, this is ours,” she said. “We’re going to take good care of it.”