In years past, Santa Ana has led the charge to reduce occupancy limits in homes, but the laws have been struck down in court. In its fight, the city has been accused of being insensitve to Hispanic and Asian immigrants in an expensive housing market. A county-funded housing study last year found that high rents and home prices have left a third of county residents living in crowded or substandard housing, or paying more than 30 percent of their family income for housing.
Manuel Ballestero, a Pio Pico Elementary School teacher, stressed that families don't want to live in those conditions — they are forced to because of low wages and high rents.
"It's an issue that can polarize Latinos and Anglos. They hear these stories about the Latino culture, about extended families, and they think that's the way they want to live, but it isn't," he said. "It's an economic necessity. Ask a family who lives with another family if they want to, and they will say, 'Of course not.' We need to put a human face on overcrowding," Ballestero said.

The city is about 70 percent Hispanic and has the youngest population in the county, with a median age of 26. And 35 percent of Santa Ana's households have families with five or more members (Costa Mesa has 10 percent and Anaheim 17 percent), according to statistics presented at the meeting.
Elizabeth Cabrera, who lives in a mobile-home park with her two children, understood other residents' concerns about crowding.
"It's not right. I see how they live all together like that. But the rent is so high, and that's why they do it. They raised our rent twice this year," Cabrera said in Spanish.

State housing officials have recommended that Santa Ana build 1,300 more housing units over the next five years to accommodate needs, but it's not a requirement and is unlikely to happen. The general plan's housing element and the consolidated plan should be drafted by February or March. Final reports, which will include five-year housing plans for the city, should go to the City Council in May. The city is also conducting a survey of housing and community-development needs. For more information, call (714) 667-2260.

The move by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday to raise interest rates to fight inflation only compounds the problem, housing analysts said. "With the Fed raising interest rates, it tacks on $200 a month to a mortgage payment," said Bose of the Greenlining Institute.

Council agrees to help displaced find housing
The move is in response to an outcry over Anaheim's motel crackdown
2.2.00   Felix Sanchez Orange County Register

A barrage of critics lashed out after the council last week imposed the restrictions on the Lincoln Inn formerly known as the Seville Inn. Tuesday, the council instructed the city staff and City Manager Jim Ruth to work with existing social advocates to assist any families looking for affordable housing. "Cracking down on these motels is leading to the displacement of 70 families" in the next few weeks, said the Rev. Jimmy Gaston, whose Church of Christ assists motel families.

Ethnic Cleansing
genocide by gentrification: "Anaheim redevelops away the poor"

---

Pauper Chase
Rancho Cucamonga nonprofit SCHDC CEO Seymour switches sides
from predator landlords to predator developers & still gets paid
by taxes from the working class he evicts


Let's Nail Down O.C.'s Role in Sloppy Repairs
2.13.00   Shirley L. Grindle LA Times

The task of identifying qualified homeowners, writing contracts, conducting the bidding and contract award process and overseeing work was far beyond their qualifications. They were not trained. They were not contract administrators. They never had been licensed contractors and were not trained building inspectors. But they acted in all of those capacities.
Most of the rehabilitation work required state and county building permits. The records now reveal the HCD project managers were aware that permits were nonexistent for practically all of the projects. Not only were he contractors allowed to continue without permits, but without permits there were no inspections, which gave the contractors carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, with obvious cost savings.
More than just shoddy work resulted. In many instances, the homeowners were left with health and safety hazards such as water heaters plumbed with plastic pipe, improperly wired outlets and garbage disposals connected with lamp cords. Replacement windows were never sealed, which allowed winter rains to destroy mobile home particle- board floors. Double-wide mobile homes were left uncoupled.

In the two-year period that produced most of the shoddy and illegal work, four contractors were responsible for more than 50% of the projects. A report for the county in 1996 found:

1) a pattern of inflated pricing over original bids;
2) a failure to itemize;
3) billing that almost always equaled to the exact penny the approved funding for grants or loans.

In April 1998, 33 of the dissatisfied homeowners filed a federal lawsuit against the county and eight contractors. In late December 1999, the county agreed to a settlement requiring it to repair more than 250 contractor-damaged homes, and pay for ancillary damages such as pain and suffering, inconvenience and loss of use.
The eventual costs to county taxpayers could amount to several million dollars. Furthermore, the settlement does not provide punitive action against any county employees or the contractors for their inexcusable performance. And it does not order barring the unscrupulous contractors from the county's "Qualified Bidders List," where all but one (who relocated out of state) remain today.
According to the current director of HCD, the county retains these contractors on its qualified bidders list because nothing warrants their removal. But if there are not grounds for removal from the list in the failure to obtain permits, in the avoidance of safety inspections and in unacceptable work, where would it be?

While the county denies any wrongdoing, the agreement to settle is tantamount to admitting its culpability. To determine if kickbacks or any other personal benefits were provided to any county employees or private contractors, an independent investigation by someone outside county government is called for.

But I am here to see the folk that people these hotels and listen to their stories and their demands. I hope to glimpse the human face for which something as bureaucratic as a "sprinkler ordinance" could mean the difference between life or death. According to the housing advocacy group Mission Agenda, 15,000 to 20,000 San Franciscans reside in the 520 SRO hotels scattered around the city. The first thing that strikes me about this group is that they are extremely diverse. Like male-to-female transsexual Bo Derek, each individual seems to represent a world of his or her own. They are young and old, black and white, but also Vietnamese, East Indian, El Salvadoran, Chinese. They are thin and fat, strapping strong and carrying canes, dressed in shamanic garb and business suits. They are clean-cut, scruffy, dreadlocked; eloquent, rambling, understated.
Still, this motley array of souls do have something in common: They live in conditions most of us have only seen in two dimensions from the comfy recline of a movie theater armchair. They make their homes in small single rooms with bathrooms down the hall, in run-down buildings where fires frequently erupt, where visitors pay fees as much as $20 to enter residents' rooms, where rats often outnumber humans, and where the residents feel like they have to fight for their rights every step of the way. And for such privilege, they pay royally: usually between $600 and $1,000 a month but sometimes as much as $1,400. If that sounds relatively inexpensive by SF standards (though far too much for the poor), remember that this is for a 12-by-10-foot room and then do the math. This means $5 to $11.66 a square foot, much more per square foot than an immaculate 250-square-foot, $1,100 a month studio I recently saw on Macondrie Lane, one of the most exclusive and fabled streets in the nation. And like the rest of SF rental rates in the past three years, the fees at residential hotels have also skyrocketed -- going up anywhere from 100 to 400 percent.

So if these characters seem just a tad unhinged, just a little stressed out, don't assume it's because they are crazy. Some of them are mentally ill, and plenty of them have substance abuse problems. But whether they are junkies or drunks or just regular guys who are down on their luck, the fact is that they are living in the most surreal situation that our city of oh-so-surreal estate provides. What strikes me as so bizarre is that today in SF, one of the most progressive cities in the world, and an urban center at the end of a massive economic boom, these people must still be fighting for basic rights like living in buildings that meet basic health codes and being able to have a friend spend the night. Now that SRO activist Chris Daly, who birthed his political career over the issue of "musical rooms," a practice whereby hotel landlords evict tenants after 29 days before they are entitled to rent-control protections, has become Supervisor Chris Daly, it's easy to imagine that finally the tables have started to turn, and that SRO residents will be afforded the protections and rights they deserve.
But if the tales and testimonials from the residents offer any indication of the hugeness of their problems, it's not something you can wave progressive wand at and hope will all go away. "This city does not have a coherent response to a fire," says Paul Heaney, a towering Vietnam vet and former resident of the Raymond Hotel (which was destroyed by fire on April 15), to an assiduously serious, well-tanned Newsom. "There were no fire extinguishers in the building. There were sprinklers but they didn't work. And the fire department did a great job, but there was no water on the fire for 20 minutes. Luckily, there were a lot of vets like me who broke doors down so that nobody died and we had no injuries ... We were very lucky. But one day it's going to kill a bunch of people. ..." Heaney goes on to explain that, in his opinion, the city failed the residents further -- not only through the absence of fire suppression but the fact that now, two months later, very few residents have been able to find permanent homes because of what he referred to mysteriously as "a cartel."

Later, when I ask Heaney what he meant by the "cartel," he says that because the Raymond residents were very organized and a tight-knit community the private SRO landlords saw them as potential troublemakers. Heaney claims he overheard a phone call in which one hotel manager warned another manager to avoid giving housing to people from the Raymond Hotel. Whether Heaney's precise claims are true, his suspicion about a private landlord cartel is a common one. And since 70 percent of the SROs are run by people named Patel -- many of whom are related -- such facts fuel the notion than there is a concerted lobby of SRO owners who stick together. The most common charge against the landlords is that they help through neglect or outright arson to set fire to their buildings, although the vast number of fire investigations are inconclusive, and in no way end up pointing fingers at landlords. SROs have always had a high incidence of fires, but the past few years have been especially bad. Since 1997, 840 SRO units have been destroyed by fire. Such numbers, coupled with the precipitous rise in rental rates and the financial motivation for landlords to get rid of tenants with rent control, has led some residents and their advocates to coin the term "eviction by fire." While this phrase doesn't actually accuse the owners of arson, it does subtly point out the financial advantages of fire. As Ron Grossheart, resident at Mission Hotel and staff member of Mission Agenda, tells me over a soft drink: "With capitalism, landlords have a lot of motivation to burn down their buildings. Eviction by fire is not just a progressive slogan but a reality."

Are vermin, the threat of fires and unfair laws like visiting fees the only grievances? Unfortunately, no. Like many institutions that mix an unseemly cocktail of city bureaucracy, capitalism and poor people, the most complicated issues seem to be organizational ones. "Please, I beg of you, *please*," says one tearful woman to Chris Daly. "Don't let the master-leasing program end." Like many of the speakers at the hearing, the woman objects to the mayor's cuts in funding for a program wherein nonprofits like City Housing lease and manage privately owned SROs. She claims that City Housing, under the leadership of Randy Shaw, has done a remarkable job in transforming vile and infested "dens of iniquity" into decent, respectable places to live. The residents and nonprofits were petitioning the board to fight the mayor on this issue.
But not all the residents are sanguine about the City Housing program. "We need a tenant oversight committee," proclaims the monumental George Tirado, a spoken word poet, housing advocate at the Homeless Coalition and resident at the Mission Hotel. "Randy Shaw (director of City Housing) is promising us things like cable television when there are roaches and rats in all the rooms, and the plumbing and electricity is second-rate." For Tirado, and others who feel that the residents have been left out of the process, the current program doesn't protect against corruption. "One of the staff at City Housing hired her mother to manage one of the hotels," Tirado tells me after the meeting. "And that's not right."
This is what's so difficult about the SRO struggles, the politics are a nest of internecine warfare. Beyond the black and white issue of dirty toilets and well-fed roaches, there's a complex of personalities all waging the good fight on behalf of the city's needy. And so getting to the bottom of a story is a little like peeling an onion. By the end, you're crying but you still feel like you haven't gotten to the core of the issue. …

Blacks hit by housing costs leave San Francisco behind
8.2.01   Evelyn Nieves NY Times

Other cities have had notable declines in their black populations over the last decade, Washington, for example. But blacks in other cities appear to be migrating to the suburbs in a pattern of upward mobility. In San Francisco, many are leaving because they have no choice. Gentrification during the dot-com boom gave the city the distinction as the most expensive in the country. Landlords in black neighborhoods, much like others, cashed in, raising rents and evicting long-term tenants. The recent technology bust has had little effect in lowering housing prices, real estate experts say. And since blacks have always been a relatively small minority here (13 % of the population at its height in 1970) the consequences are striking.
The result, in one of the few major cities with a black mayor and a liberal political sensibility in sync with a majority of African-Americans, is a San Francisco with whole neighborhoods where it is rare to see a black person. It is a city where blacks have little clout, few cultural institutions and only one remaining neighborhood, the homely, lonely Bayview-Hunters Point, best known for a sewage treatment plant and radioactive Superfund site.

For many blacks here, San Francisco is the sweetheart who loved 'em and left 'em, who promised the moon and stars only to forget them when new blood came to town. In the Fillmore, there has been much talk over the years of establishing a jazz district in honor of the jazz scene that emerged in the neighborhood from 1940 to 1950. It was the heyday of the community, when the black population of the city grew tenfold as thousands of blacks came to San Francisco looking for war jobs, many of them at the Navy shipyard at Hunters Point. But the jazz project has been in the planning stages for years with little action. In 1997, Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. promised to bring Bayview-Hunters Point thousands of jobs, a new stadium for the San Francisco 49ers and a megamall to go along with it. Voters approved the project in 1997, agreeing to finance it with $100 million in bonds. But the project was stalled when the 49ers owner, Eddie De Bartolo Jr., became embroiled in legal troubles and lost the team to his sister and her husband. The mall project is still in the talking stages.

Many blacks have little hope of things improving anytime soon. Even the black churches, the soul of the black community, have lost their influence. The Rev. Cecil Williams, pastor of the Glide Memorial Methodist Church, perhaps the sole remaining influential church, with more than 50 social and community programs, says that as blacks have moved, the churches have lost their base. "Naturally, you're going to lose some of that vibrancy," said Mr. Williams, who blamed "economics, first and foremost, the cost of living in this city", as the reason for the black exodus. His church is thriving, with more than 1,500 members of all races, many of whom drive from as far as Sacramento, 85 miles away. It also attracts busloads of tourists, drawn by the church's popular choir and band.
The mayor, through a spokesman, P. J. Johnston, said that not all blacks were leaving because they could not afford to stay. "Those who would tell you it's simply a matter of poor people not being able to afford to live in this City obviously don't understand the black community, or the City of San Francisco,` Mr. Johnston said. Some homeowners, he said, have sold their houses to cash in on the market and moved to more affordable cities. But, he conceded, lower- income renters "have had trouble keeping pace with this rise in housing costs, and many have moved to cheaper digs around the Bay Area."

Some are moving to working-class cities like Vallejo, Richmond or Fairfield, which have significant black populations and where it is still possible to buy a house for under $300,000. But census figures suggest that blacks appear to be bypassing Oakland, where African-Americans represent over a third of the population. In the last decade, that city, too, has seen a decline in its black population, from 163,500 out of 399,500 residents in 1990 to 142,400 out of 372, 200 residents in 2000, as gentrification forced some low-income blacks to the further reaches of the area. Black-owned businesses in San Francisco have also left. Fred Jordan, a past president of the San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce, said: "There used to be 138 African-American businesses along Fillmore Street. Last I heard there were 32 left and very hard to find."
One that remains is Perry's Joint, a coffee and candy shop, on Fillmore Street. Perry Bennett opened the shop eight years ago, hoping to buy into the neighborhood's history. But now only 15-20% of his customers are black, he said. While the Fillmore has been losing blacks for decades — federal urban renewal projects in the 1960's displaced thousands of blacks to make way for a boulevard and Japan Trade Center, shops and plazas — Mr. Bennett started his business at a time when community leaders were talking revitalization. But even in the eight years that he has been around, Mr. Bennett said, he has watched dozens of businesses close and hundreds of customers move.

Like some other African-American business owners in the city, Mr. Bennett complains that blacks lack the unity and community spirit to achieve success here. "If we had that, in the Bayview-Hunters Point area," he said, "where blacks own all the homes, all the apartments and we had a black business district going all up and down Third Street, and we were a constituency that could put someone in office that is going to look out for our interests, we wouldn't be having this conversation." African-Americans do own most of the houses in Bayview-Hunters Point, but the prices of the modest starter house never kept pace with the rest of San Francisco's; homeowners who wanted to trade up were forced to leave the Bay Area to afford something better.
Sophie Maxwell, a city supervisor who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, said projects in the works should improve the neighborhood. "Economic revitalization is what we're looking at," Ms. Maxwell said. "We're losing numbers so we're trying to identify and work on the assets in this community." The neighborhood's open space, parking places, vacant lots are all assets that developers are exploring, she said. Eric Martin, a 43-year-old salesman at the Record Shop in Bayview, said Asians, whose numbers are steadily climbing here, could teach blacks how to move forward. "The Filipinos come in and they got five families living in one house," Mr. Martin said. "That's how they do it, how they can afford it. Then they buy the house, then they buy another house. They got unity. Brothers ain't like that. It used to be like that way back in the 60's and 70's."

The major obstacle to attracting new life has been the Navy shipyard, which brought so many thousands of blacks to San Francisco during the war. Since the Defense Department closed the shipyard in 1974, the neighborhood has been overshadowed by its aging hulking buildings, several of which are contaminated with radioactive waste. Some see the toxic waste that has made Bayview-Hunters Point the subject of scorn and ridicule as the one reason the black population has not been pushed out of its stronghold. "It's what's killing this community and at the same time it may be preserving what we have," said Rebecca Logue Bovee, an organizer with the Housing Rights Committee. Deborah Dean, a 41-year-old cashier at the Record Shop, sees the plans to redevelop Bayview as a plot to drive out blacks, because "blacks don't represent the white tourism image of the city." "I live where you can hear the games from the new Giants ballpark and everything and you can see the lights," she said. "And it's just a beautiful view. If it wasn't for the toxic waste, they would have taken this hill a long time ago."

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