Renters Applaud Move to Preserve Subsidies : Funding: A Sylmar group hopes to use the federal program to purchase units in their retirement village.

Low-cost housing advocates said Friday that a grass-roots lobbying campaign waged by thousands of low-income renters from Los Angeles and other areas of the country helped save part of a federal housing program slated for elimination by Congress.

A decision this week by a congressional conference committee--although not the last word--has assured that the Low Income Housing Preservation and Resident Home Ownership Act would be funded for one more year, they said. The act provides subsidies to landlords who keep rents low for the elderly on fixed incomes, single mothers, and the disabled, among others.

If approved--and there is the threat of a presidential veto--the agreement would also set aside money so that tenant groups, such as the one at Valley Pride Retirement Village in Sylmar, can buy their homes from landlords who want to get out of the low-income housing business.

“If we get to stay in the preservation program, that’s great!” said Don Henkel, president of Valley Pride Tenants’ Assn., referring to the decision this week. “Without it, our landlord could pay off the mortgage and raise rents. And finding something half as nice as what we’ve got here would be really difficult.”

About 20 Valley Pride tenants joined thousands of other low-income renters from Los Angeles in lobbying lawmakers to save the program. Valley Pride residents sent photographs of themselves and their tidy, comfortable Bromont Avenue apartment complex along with letters asking Congress to provide funds to continue the program.

But housing advocates warn that the $624 million Congress would provide to fund the program next year will not be enough to provide subsidies for all preservation program buildings across the country.

“For Los Angeles, which has the largest stock of this kind of housing, the limited funding means that some building owners will opt out of the program and raise their rents,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, which supports local low-income tenant groups.

Los Angeles has 10,653 apartment units in the program, administered by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, with 2,667 located in the San Fernando Valley, housing officials said. More than 7,000 units may be lost locally because landlords can now decide to quit the program, Los Angeles city housing officials said.

One of the provisions of the decision made by the conference committee this week is that landlords wanting to get out of the program are no longer required to offer their properties for sale to tenants groups, housing advocates and housing officials said.

“Landlords can just prepay their mortgages and get out, and raise the rents to market rates,” said Luz Morillo, management analyst in the city Housing Department. “It’s ironic. Before, we had a good law but no money. Now, we have some money, but the law isn’t good.”

And because the committee’s decision this week authorizes funding for only one more year, many building owners would have no incentives to stay in the preservation program after 1996, said Buck Bagot, a board member of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Still, Bagot said, “the negatives don’t subsume the fact that people whose homes were on the line stood up and fought a very savvy, strategic battle.”

Next week, the House of Representatives and Senate are expected to approve the conference committee’s decision and send the bill--called the Department of Veterans Affairs/HUD/Independent Agencies Appropriations bill--to President Clinton.

But because the bill is unlikely to include funding for some of Clinton’s favorite programs, such as the AmeriCorp national service program, a veto is probable, housing officials say.

“The veto isn’t really that big a deal,” Bagot said. “We think the stuff that’s in there will stay there. There’s a commitment to include some preservation funds. That’s a start.”