The Battle of Ft. Ord

Abrams Park is a subdivision of low-rise duplexes overlooking sparkling Monterey Bay. Its streets are a tangle of loopy cul-de-sacs, embracing playgrounds and islands of overgrown shrubs. The city of Monterey, with its famous aquarium, museums, parks, golf courses and Fisherman’s Wharf, lies 10 minutes away, and the beach is reachable by bike. As a place to raise a family, Abrams Park would be hard to beat. Yet it is largely deserted. Weeds grow waist high in lawns and the houses’ windows are either broken or blinded by plywood. The silence is absolute.

I’m on my bicycle, and in the course of an afternoon I’ve ridden for miles through one abandoned neighborhood after another, each filled with residences ranging from boxy cinder-block duplexes to enviable ranch houses. It’s like being in one of those creepy end-of-the-world movies. A door creaks in the breeze; pushing it open, I find myself in a sunny living room with a spotless white carpet and clean paint. The stove and refrigerator appear new. A water heater--its labels still fresh--stands in a closet.

This ghost city is the corpse of Ft. Ord, one of the largest installations ever built by the United States Army. Stretching from the beach to the foothills of the coastal range, it is the size of San Francisco. In addition to houses, I pass soaring auditoriums, baseball diamonds, gymnasiums, an airfield, office buildings, steepled chapels, a hospital and enormous tank hangars encircling 10-acre parking lots--a skateboarder’s dream. There are regimental rows of wooden barracks by the hundreds, and dormitories stenciled with the names of the rifle companies that occupied them--”Recon: Quick Silent Deadly.” Just about everything is painted a dreary Army beige and surrounded by wind-whipped palm grass, untouched for nearly a decade.

Ft. Ord was the largest base to be shut down in a wave of military installation downsizing after the Cold War ended. When it closed in 1994, its 45 square miles of extraordinary beaches, parkland and wildlife habitat--along with more than 10,000 buildings--were to revert to civilian use. For surrounding Monterey County, that gift amounted to a miracle in a region that has the greatest need for affordable housing in the United States. The National Assn. of Home Builders surveyed 190 places last year, comparing housing prices with local wages, and found that Salinas--the Monterey County seat, 16 miles from here--is the least affordable in the country, followed by Santa Cruz, 25 miles to the north, and Watsonville, which lies smack in the middle of the bay’s coastline 11 miles away.

Housing is expensive because of the peerless climate and scenery, which draws trustafarians, and their checkbooks, by the swarms. At the same time, the primary local industries are agriculture and tourism, both of which pay rock-bottom wages. Almost half the residents of Monterey County rent, but a full-time worker has to earn $16.23 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment--about twice the average working wage. As for a chambermaid or strawberry picker being able to buy a house, forget it. Even one-bedroom shacks are listed for almost a quarter-million dollars.

Not surprisingly, people here talk about real estate prices the way people in 1930s Oklahoma talked about drought. That is, constantly, anxiously and often in the context of who’s been pushed out. “Gone to Hollister,” “Gone to Tulare,” “Gone to Modesto” are the modern, local equivalents of “dusted out.” People either move inland and commute an hour or more to their low-wage jobs, or pack two or three families into a one-bathroom bungalow and hope their landlords will look the other way. “On the east side of Salinas,” says Fritz Conle, who organizes salad packers for Teamsters Local 890, “I’m willing to bet you money you can’t find a garage with a car in it.”

So when Ft. Ord shut down, its thousands of perfectly serviceable houses were a godsend. Here was an opportunity to remedy Monterey Bay’s excruciating housing imbalance, to give thousands of working families a chance at home ownership, to help businesses keep their workers nearby, to reduce commuter traffic, to relieve local governments of the social pathologies associated with families crammed into garages and, most of all, to bestow a measure of comfort on the lives of the dishwashers and artichoke pickers on whom the economy depends.

As my 10-year-old daughter would say, with a sarcastic roll of the eyes: Yeah, right.

Today, after nearly a decade, Ft. Ord sits largely dormant, its surrounding communities unable to decide if it should become a playground of the mansioned wealthy or a workers’ utopia. Until this emotional standoff is resolved, the area’s congressman, Democrat Sam Farr, is threatening to hold up final transfer of the land.

For Monterey County, the dispute has meaning at every Motel 6, school, fast-food outlet and golf course. For the rest of the state, it may be even more significant. The battle for Ft. Ord is exposing trends that are quietly transforming California. By long tradition, communities along the West Coast, from Mexico to Canada, were dedicated to the ideals of public access, preservation and equality--a determined response to failures along the Eastern seaboard. The coast of California was for generations a working region like any other. But the grim, impoverished Monterey of John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” is a far cry from the gussied-up town it is today. Until relatively recently, ordinary people could live near their work. (Think ocean-view trailer parks in Malibu.)

But in the past two decades or so, the rich have moved to California’s coast like a conquering army, planting their greenbacked flag on every ocean view and driving ordinary folks inland. Where the new rich settle, the demand for low-paid laborers--gardeners, maids, busboys and the like--skyrockets, even as the housing for them disappears. Nobody ever talks about this, of course, in part because it happens incrementally--one house at a time. The newly arrived wealthy assume that living on the coast is their privilege. The laborers believe that being pushed elsewhere is their lot.

At Ft. Ord, however, the grinding dynamics of California land politics are no longer a dirty little secret. Here for all to see are the naked forces of economic power arrayed against ideals of social equality, all playing out in a loud and nasty debate. A century from now, if the California coast is the exclusive domain of the wealthy, if laborers are making hours-long round-trips to tend to the rich, historians can look back at the fight over Ft. Ord as perhaps the one occasion when this unspoken inequity rose to the level of public discussion.

At any one time during the thick of World War II and Vietnam, about 50,000 soldiers trained at Ft. Ord, drinking and whoring and getting tattooed in the squalid little towns of Seaside and Marina that clung to the fort’s south and north sides. The boom of cannon fire provided a steady backbeat to life for generations, and anyone driving down Highway 1 could look seaward and watch soldiers firing rifles into the dunes along the beach. When the Army pulled out, it was as though one of its artillery barrages had gone off course and landed on the civilian economy. A third of the county’s tax base was annihilated. Seaside and Marina, always the poor stepsisters to the tony Monterey Peninsula towns of Carmel, Pacific Grove and Monterey, were driven into penury. Not only had they come to depend on the buying power of 7,500 military families, but the base also had provided 10% of their civilian jobs.

At the time, nobody suggested renting out or selling base housing. “The last thing anybody was thinking about then was affordable housing,” says Bradley Zeve, executive editor and CEO of the Monterey County Coast Weekly. After the soldiers left, a third of the rentals in Seaside and Marina stood vacant and half the houses went on the market simultaneously. The 6,500 units of Ft. Ord being offered for conversion to civilian use seemed like rain in a flood.

Every conceivable interest had an idea about what to do. Seaside and Marina inherited those portions of the fort with the most buildings, followed by Monterey County. The federal Bureau of Land Management got the big, wild inland swatches.

Marina and Seaside saw a chance, finally, to shed their honky-tonk past and go upscale with spreads of 5-acre ranchettes and million-dollar bay-view mansions. Developers saw pricey subdivisions. Environmentalists saw priceless habitat. The county dreamed of new industry and jobs. Farmers, hotel keepers, labor leaders, immigrant rights activists, the highway department, water commissioners and more--each had a vision for the fort. The arguing was cacophonous. So the state created a “reuse authority” that forced everybody to sit down at one table and decide things by consensus; every party at the table had to agree on everything.

It was like throwing two dozen cats into a burlap bag.

To its credit, the group was able to come up with a master plan. Already in the works was a new college, California State University at Monterey Bay, opened in 1995, using some of the Army’s old buildings for dorms and classrooms. The old airfield was converted into a civilian airport, adjacent to which the reuse authority has developed a research park with the University of California. Seaside inherited two golf courses and began trying to develop a four-star golf resort. Almost two-thirds of the fort’s 28,000 acres were set aside as open space and wildlife habitat.

But by the mid-1990s, the region’s housing glut was a memory. Students and faculty at the new college needed places to live, and the Silicon Valley money machine was revving just 90 minutes up the road. People priced out of San Jose and its environs began spreading down the coast like a spruce budworm infestation, snapping up “bargains” and sending prices soaring by about 10% a year. The phenomenal wealth of the new Internet barons also radiated outward in the form of high demand for hotels, restaurants and golf courses on the Monterey Peninsula. “Hospitality” jobs abounded--albeit low-paid ones--and people streamed in to take them. The housing crunch was on.

Marina is little more than a strip of Filipino markets and discount stores surrounded by what Edith Johnsen, former mayor and current county supervisor, calls “teeny-tiny scrunchie-wunchie houses.” Of all the jurisdictions absorbing Ft. Ord, Marina has done the most for low-income residents. Without fully understanding the precedent it was setting, Marina got approval from the reuse authority to renovate some of the Army residences it inherited, which resulted in a low-income rental community of 353 units called Preston Park.

After roaming through acres of abandoned subdivisions, finding Preston Park is disorienting. Houses are brightly painted, the playgrounds colorful, the lawns manicured. I stop two young mothers pushing strollers; they each pay about $1,000 a month for three-bedroom condos, which is cheap considering that they have a view of the bay and are minutes from downtown Monterey. Preston Park, in other words, is a tiny taste of what could happen with the other 5,500 houses and condos on the fort. Marina also has arranged for a consortium of homeless and veterans’ organizations to use about 100 units as transitional housing. And it has contracted with a developer to renovate 400 more Army duplexes as a low-income “continuum of care community” for the elderly.

But that’s as far as anyone went because the three horsemen of the political apocalypse--race, class and money--came riding into Ft. Ord with vexing questions: Who is responsible for housing low-wage workers? Who should be expected to forgo more lucrative forms of development--fancy homes, big-box stores, industrial parks--to accommodate dense neighborhoods of needy but essential people? How much more should Marina have to do? Which of the jurisdictions inheriting Ft. Ord’s beachfront splendor should pass up the chance to create another Carmel or Pebble Beach, and accept instead a teeming barrio of Mexican laborers?

Welcome to the bag of cats.

LeVonne Stone is broad-shouldered, round-faced and black, with long hair in cornrows. She moved to Ft. Ord from Chicago with her soldier husband in the 1980s and now lives in Preston Park. For a time she worked as secretary to the fort’s property manager, and it’s easy to picture her running the place with a master sergeant’s gruff authority. When the fort closed and Stone lost her job, she founded the Fort Ord Environmental Justice Network to make sure the interests of wealthy developers didn’t overrun those of working people. She gained title to an old barracks as her headquarters and painted it grape-bubblegum purple, much to the annoyance of the reuse authority, which wants her to make it conform with the 10,000 other tediously beige buildings on the fort.

We sit in her tumbledown office eating hard candy. The towns inheriting the fort are getting free land, Stone says. “And then they have these developers coming from I don’t know where, and all they want to do is make their money, money, money.” She has spent years trying to get the reuse authority either to let people move into the old Army housing or require new development to include many houses for low-income workers. “If they can do it in Preston Park, they can do it everywhere,” she insists.

Stone is not a sophisticated politico. She can’t keep developers’ names straight or quote the relevant laws. What she brings to the fight is a hot beacon of righteous, if inchoate, working-class anger. To watch her bullyrag the mostly white officials and developers is to be reminded that where most low-wage jobs are held by people of color, there’s a racial aspect to excluding them from the coast. Stone never lets the reuse board forget it either. Responding at a recent meeting to the authority’s demand that she repaint her purple building, Stone lowered her voice and growled into the microphone, “Color is important to me and my constituency.”

This attitude alone makes her something of a figurehead. Stone bird-dogs every meeting of the reuse authority and never fails to speak up. At one session, board members discussed the California law that requires at least 15% of houses in any new development to be “affordable,” a notoriously slippery term. “What do you mean $300,000 is affordable?” she boomed. “Affordable to whom?”

To Stone and her allies, the primary villains in this drama are developers, who are happier building homes than watching people move into existing ones, and the towns of Seaside and Marina, which are inheriting the portions of the fort with the most existing housing. Seaside already has razed 400 of its windfall housing units to make room for 380 “market rate” (read: breathtakingly expensive) houses with as many as six bedrooms apiece. Marina now wants to knock down 900 cinder-block duplexes and let developers build more than 1,000 houses, 80% of which will sell at “market rates.”

“The problem with Seaside and Marina is they don’t want to become the affordable-housing ghettos of the Central Coast,” Stone says.

Leaving her office, I cycle down to Seaside to run her allegation past its city manager. Dan Keen is the mild yin to Stone’s fiery yang. He meets me in his big office in Seaside’s airy City Hall. I expect him to explode at Stone’s characterization of Seaside’s ghetto phobia. Instead he shrugs and says, “She’s right.”

He patiently walks me through the economics of running a city in California. Houses, it turns out--even expensive ones--suck up more in services than they contribute in property taxes in the post-Proposition 13 era. What little revenue that homes generate goes mostly to school boards. City governments get only about one-eighth, he says. It’s businesses that carry the burden. In Seaside, hotel bed and sales taxes fund half the budget.

“More housing?” asks Keen, planting an exasperated hand on his forehead. “We already have too much.” If Seaside must have more houses, he says, it deserves the big fancy ones because there isn’t another high-end house in the city. “Seaside has a history that has not always been, uh, positive,” he says, referring to its bawdy past. “And, yes, the City Council did recognize that [Ft. Ord] was an opportunity to change this community and raise it up.”

Seaside’s residents--those who make beds, man stores, cook meals in the posh tourist towns of Monterey, Pebble Beach, Pacific Grove and Carmel--generate sales and bed taxes for those communities. Then they come home, Keen says, and require services. “We frankly don’t think we should bear the burden of all the affordable housing on the Monterey Peninsula when we don’t get the tax revenues those workers support.”

After a while, Keen excuses himself so he can beat the traffic heading home. He lives 25 minutes inland because he can’t afford to buy a house in the city he manages.

The Ft. Ord Reuse Authority is meeting in an old barrack across the road from LeVonne Stone’s purple palace, and I buttonhole Jim Nakashima as he hurries inside. Nakashima, who gestures operatically as he talks, used to manage housing on Ft. Ord for the Army, and he now runs the county group that tries to provide low-cost housing to workers at the bottom of the economic food chain. He had come to the reuse authority meeting to hammer home the need for low-cost housing. “These towns want Ft. Ord to buy them instant respectability,” he says of Marina and Seaside. “We have a housing crisis in this part of California, and they’re talking about half-million-dollar houses.”

Democratic Rep. Farr, who still lives in his boyhood home in Carmel, arrives straight from the airport and sits through the meeting with his chin thrust out as though inviting someone to take a swing. Farr represented this region in the statehouse before being elected to Congress in 1993, and has argued from the start that Ft. Ord should go largely to the region’s majority, its low-wage and other working-class residents. Of everybody in the room, Farr is the only one with a trump card: The government hasn’t completed the transfer of fort land to the local jurisdictions, and Farr has threatened to hold it up unless the cities agree to a high percentage of affordable housing.

Munching bridge mix during a break, he looks around at the collection of city and county officials and smiles ruefully. “There isn’t a single person in this room who could afford to buy the house he’s living in,” he says, “including me.”

To a large extent, the widening gap can be traced to the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Among the richest 5% of Americans, incomes have risen a reported 22% since 1989, while middle- and low-income Americans barely treaded water. More importantly, changes in U.S. tax policies discouraged investors from putting money into construction of affordable housing--defined as costing no more than 30% of a family’s gross income--while encouraging spending for single-family homes. The number of affordable housing units built in California fell from 1 million a year in the mid-1980s to about 300,000, says Sam Mistrano, acting executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing. “There has been a lot of building, but it’s all high-end single-family homes,” Mistrano says.

In coastal areas, the wealthy bid up housing prices, leaving almost everyone else unable to qualify for mortgages.

One of Farr’s ideas for Ft. Ord is to sell businesses on the idea that affordable housing is in their best interest. Workers who can live near their jobs are less stressed, easier to retain and less often late to work. A promise of affordable housing could draw new businesses to the fort. “Work force housing is the No. 1 business lure in California,” Farr says. “Businesses all over California say, ‘We can’t have our workers getting caught in traffic and being late.’ ”

Up the road, the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group recently ponied up $20 million to leverage a trust fund 10 times that big to build affordable housing for 4,800 families. As Carl Guardino, president of the group, explains, they aren’t building the housing for their own work force. They’re building for the people their workers depend on: firefighters, police and teachers. The idea is sustainable development--a stable population of laborers, service workers and professionals living close to their places of work.

At the meeting, Farr suggests that Monterey Bay businesses follow the lead of Silicon Valley to ease the dreadful traffic that crisscrosses the region every morning as low-wage workers try to get to jobs in high-roller towns. The suggestion seems to throw the room into confusion, as officials wonder who might play the role of the Silicon Valley manufacturers.

“Is there such a group around here?” someone asks.

“A bunch of business guys have breakfast once a week at some place out on Highway 68, I think,” another says.

“We could try to get some of them to the table, I suppose,” says Monterey County Supervisor Lou Calcagno.

Farr rolls his eyes at me as though to say: 10 years.

The Army has been gone for nearly a decade, and the reuse authority is only now thinking of including local businesses in the housing discussion. It reminds me of something that Keen, the Seaside city manager, said about what it would take for his mayor to accept a high amount of low-income housing: “When other cities step forward and help us bear these costs, we’ll do it.” The reuse authority needs to arm-twist the Chambers of Commerce, the three dozen hotels and the big commercial farmers to share the burden, but 10 years of talking hasn’t yet made them do it. I catch Farr as he hurries from the meeting.

“Ft. Ord is the single biggest giveaway of military land since the Homestead Act” of 1862, he says. “But these are small towns. They don’t have the skills to deal with something as big and complex as this.”

Jeff Dack is the head of Marina’s tiny planning department. A young man of gelid composure, he is wedged into a cluttered office in the back of Marina’s prefab City Hall, dwarfed by a wall-sized multicolored development map of the fort. Dack’s dream is to knock down about 1,000 old Army buildings and create an entirely new city. “It will be a finely grained range of community, incorporating a lot of concepts of the New Urbanism,” he says. “Apartments over stores, mixed-use zoning so that homes are close to commercial centers, everything walkable, light rail . . .”

We stare at the map for a moment, imagining a project that would take an army of planners to create. He sighs. “Of course, the first problem is taking down all the old buildings, which, because of the lead-based paint and asbestos they contain, will cost about $70 million. This is the cost of the land; no matter what anybody tells you, the land is not free.”

Dack is justifiably proud of Preston Park, which has the kind of housing for which Stone, Nakashima, Farr and others are clamoring. Like other buildings on the fort, the houses contained lead-based paint and asbestos that had to be removed or sealed. Marina found a way to get it done. “The city just up and decided to rehab Preston Park,” Dack says. “There’s no book on doing this. We’re writing the book as we go along.”

Had he known in 1994 what he knows now, Dack says he would have pushed to rehabilitate more of Marina’s share of the housing. “This whole process has taken way more time than we thought.” There are more than 60 different agencies to coordinate with, from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense and Fish and Wildlife Service to the state Department of Toxic Substances Control and the regional water quality control board. “There were lawsuits. The whole fort is a Superfund site,” which means it contains contamination that the federal government will help clean up.

Preston Park, he says, was always seen as a stopgap measure because no one thought a city should own and operate housing the way Marina does there. “But in 20-20 hindsight we might have done things differently. Yes, it might have been better for Marina to have just done [with all its inherited Army housing] what it did with Preston Park.”

The long delays may, in the end, serve only developers. The thousands of houses the Army left behind have sat unoccupied so long that mold is growing in their walls, arguably making them unsalvageable. Hardly anyone talks about using them anymore; the debate now is only over how expensive new housing will be.

Going round and round with the myriad agencies involved in the redevelopment of Ft. Ord can induce a queasy longing for monarchy. Democracy here has a mixed scorecard. It has yielded an impressive new university campus, a research park and two golf courses, acres of wildlife habitat and a couple of fancy subdivisions.

But it has produced precious little of what the region needs most: decent homes that the work force can afford. And because the decision-making within the reuse authority is polyglot, with dozens of agencies and jurisdictions involved, each has been able to point to another as the reason why the donated Army housing languishes. As Keen puts it, “The problem with the housing crisis is no one entity has the incentive to solve it. It’s a crisis easily passed off to others.”

Which is, when you think about it, a pretty depressing epitaph for what should have been a sensational stroke of good fortune for the Monterey Bay region. The main problem at Ford Ord is that the neediest people--the low-wage majority--aren’t organized in a way that makes their demands unignorable. The city and county governments get heard. The developers get heard. The federal agencies get heard. But aside from LeVonne Stone endlessly shouting into her microphone, the people whose low-paid labor supports the local economy don’t get heard. Or, rather, they get heard, thanked for their comments and then disregarded.

Unions aren’t strong here, and in any case they think no more broadly than their individual shops or individual industries. It’s been a long time since American working people thought of themselves as a class, with a sense of struggle against the owners and the financiers. To speak in such terms nowadays is to be accused of waging “class warfare.”

The upshot is that at Ft. Ord, no mechanism exists for chambermaids to join hands with golf course mowers, lettuce packers with busboys, so there’s no way for any of them to threaten serious consequences--say, a region-wide general strike--if their housing demands aren’t met. As Frederick Douglass put it 150 years ago, “Power cedes nothing without a demand.” As in most of America, Monterey Bay’s working poor lack effective means to make such a demand. Here, though, the squandered bounty of Ft. Ord throws that lack into sharp relief and makes it unusually visible.