An Emerald City Rises --and It’s Affordable

From the street, there is little to distinguish the upscale Vinas La Campana townhouses from the ubiquitous beige stucco complexes that dot the Southern California landscape.

Unless, like Diana Santana, you remember life in a one-room converted garage. Or fighting with your sisters in a single cramped bedroom, like Rosa, Christina and Claudia Flores.

To the keepers of those memories, the 104-unit complex next to the high-voltage wires on Gage Avenue in Bell Gardens shines like the Emerald City.

Only this city is for real, and nearly filled to capacity.

Just eight months after opening, all but nine of the townhouses in the privately funded affordable-housing complex have been sold to families that never would have been able to afford a home on their own. A two-bedroom, two-bath townhouse sells for less than $100,000 and carries monthly payments.

“It shows there’s a demand for this,” said Louis Negrete, vice president of Nehemiah West Housing Corp., a Santa Monica-based, church-affiliated nonprofit organization that built the homes.

Negrete’s blithe assessment understates the phenomenon. Like the very name Nehemiah--an Old Testament prophet who helped rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in the 5th century B.C.--there have been near-biblical proportions to this project.

*

It might not be the largest housing complex, or even the first of its kind in the Los Angeles Basin. But for housing-starved Bell Gardens, which consistently ranks among the worst in the state for overcrowded lodging, it is well-cherished.

When Nehemiah West began the qualification process, residents lined up by the hundreds the day before, sleeping on the sidewalks of Bell Gardens Park for a chance at owning a home.

“We went at 2 a.m. and people were sleeping out,” said Ernestina Flores, the mother of teenagers Rosa, Christina and Claudia. “There were 80 people there. I got No. 81.”

No. 81 translated into a three-bedroom townhouse for less than $500 a month for Ernestina Flores, her husband, Enrique, and their daughters.

Nehemiah Housing is one of many nonprofit groups that cobble together private and government funding to give a leg up to the region’s poorest.

Nonprofit groups “are providing the majority of subsidized or affordable housing in the county--in fact, they are building just about all of it,” said Jan Breidenbach, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Nonprofit Housing, a trade group for nonprofit builders.

What sets Nehemiah apart, however, is the magnitude of the group’s undertakings and its history. Just over a decade ago, Nehemiah transformed 92 blocks of Brooklyn’s blighted East New York section with a massive project of low-rise, attached homes. The group has since built similar complexes in the South Bronx, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Nehemiah West, which gets most of its funds from the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches, has similar plans for Los Angeles, though it has yet to find enough open land for mega-projects like those in East New York and the South Bronx, according to Negrete.

“We could build 10 houses here, 20 houses there, but it doesn’t make a difference,” Negrete said. “Our idea is if you put a lot of homeowners together, you can make an impact.”

For the Flores family, the impact has propelled them to the threshold of a middle-class lifestyle, the one Enrique and Ernestina dreamed of when they came from Mexico nearly two decades ago. Although Enrique Flores has labored for 17 years as a fabric cutter in Gardena, his weekly salary never exceeded $450, and got him no closer to home ownership than he was in his home state of Michoacan. “We always had a dream to buy a house, but how could we?” Flores said.

*

Nearby, Santana still keeps the small table that was the only furniture gracing a living room in a converted garage. That room also doubled as a bedroom for her, her young son, husband and mother.

The aging wooden table is relegated to an outdoor patio, though, and new furniture has slowly accrued in the rest of the house over the few months the family has lived here.

“This is so beautiful,” she said, her eyes welling with tears. “We can’t believe we live here. So much time I spent saying, ‘When are we going to have a house?’ and now, we have it. We still tell ourselves to wake up, wake up, it’s a dream.” A Chicano studies professor at Cal State L.A., Negrete is not without his own bigger dreams.

“These homeowners will have pride,” he said. “Our idea is to take that pride and turn it into political power. . . . One of the lessons we’ve learned from American politics is people who have roots in the ground have more participation in politics.”