Waitlist for affordable housing reaches into the thousands
By LAUREN BONIFACIO Special to the Daily Press
More than 1,000 people last month looked to City Hall to find an affordable apartment. But if history repeats itself, they may be waiting a while.
Within two weeks, hundreds of people from Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Venice and other surrounding cities signed on to a waiting list that was recently opened by the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Division. After City Hall closed the list to the public on April 17, the list grew to 1,700 people.
“The list is open to anyone who applies and meets our income criteria,” said Steve Goldmaker, an administrative analyst at the housing division who oversees the waiting list. Applicants qualify if their household incomes are less than the median income in L.A. County — $55,100 for a family of four. The income limit varied with household size.
But getting on the list is the easy part.
City Hall last opened the list in 1999. Five years later, only 300 of the original applicants have yet to find affordable apartments.
“I don’t know anyone that affordable housing has worked for,” said Pat Hendricks, who added she is skeptical of the process but is hopeful she will find an affordable place to live now that she put her name on the list. “I guess even if just a handful get into the housing, it’s a good thing.”
The problem is in City Hall’s limited housing inventory. The waiting list feeds into about 600 affordable housing units — many of them already occupied — in privately owned developments throughout the city. Housing officials couldn’t provide details on how frequently apartments become available.
By comparison, the Community Corp. of Santa Monica — a nonprofit group that manages 78 buildings throughout the city — has nearly twice as many units as City Hall. But its waitlist has 3,000 people and only 1,182 units. About 100 apartments become vacant each year.
And while some people might think affordable housing is only available to large households earning very low wages, most of City Hall’s housing inventory is reserved for smaller households with moderate incomes. Nearly three-fourths of the apartments are earmarked for moderate-income applicants. About 60 percent of the units are studios and one-bedroom apartments, while only 3 percent of the apartments have three bedrooms.
At CCSM, smaller apartments become available more often because it’s easier for single people to increase their incomes and get back on their feet, said Joan Ling, executive director.
Low-income households, then, may be getting the short end of the stick. While about 43 percent of applicants at City Hall have low incomes, slightly more than 25 percent of the apartments have rent levels that can accommodate them.
By the housing division’s definitions — which are based partly from LA County standards set by the state — a family of four qualifies as low income if their total income is less than $33,850 annually. Moderate income households earn between $33,850 and $55,100 for a family of four.
Despite the disproportionate number of units for moderate-income households, the image of a large, low-income family packed into a tiny apartment is still a reality, Ling said.
“They live in overcrowded conditions,” Ling said. “The worst part is that if you make very little money and you pay 50 to 60 percent of your gross income in rent, your base is so low... that you just have problems making ends meet.”
Hendricks said Santa Monica’s high rent prices are pushing residents and workers like her out of the city. Hendricks is a housing coordinator at Turning Point, an Ocean Park-based transitional housing facility for homeless men and women.
“The average working person... can’t afford to live here,” Hendricks said. “People are commuting from Lancaster, from Northridge. And it’s not like they’re commuting for some $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 job either, they’re commuting for just pennies.”
When she starts looking for a home to purchase soon, Hendricks will not be looking in Santa Monica, she said.
But for many people all over Southern California, applying for Santa Monica’s affordable housing waiting list is a chance to live at the “center of a lot of good things,” said Christina Perez, associate planner at Willdan, the city of Industry-based company Santa Monica hired to process the applications.
With about 600 applications, current Santa Monica residents were the most represented on the list. But almost as many Los Angelenos applied. Applicants also came from Venice, West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
People applied for various reasons, Perez said. Some were retirees, students or former residents of Santa Monica who wanted to move back. A large number of applicants called because they were being pushed out of their current situations by the planned LAX expansion and because of canceled Section 8 housing vouchers — Federal government subsidies for extremely low-income households, Perez said.
While affordable housing in Santa Monica is created by developer fees and redevelopment money, some city officials say it’s not enough.
“It’s certainly not enough. But we’re doing everything we can do,” said City Councilman Ken Genser. “For a city of our size, the inventory of affordable housing we have is pretty remarkable, but it’s nowhere near what we need. We’re doing everything we can do — everything we know about.”
For some of applicants, affordable housing in Santa Monica is their only option.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Ana Ortiz, 21, a Santa Monica College student who said she needs an affordable apartment so she can live in the city with her children.
Apartments on the open market were too expensive, said Sonya Yankoviet, 80, who lives with her husband and her daughter’s family in LA. A retirement home would cost more than $2,000 per month for a small bedroom, Yankoviet said.
“When we were younger, it had been much easier,” Yankoviet said. “We could go out, we could go to the ocean.”
Now that she and her husband are sick, and without health insurance, Yankoviet said she will wait as long she needs to for an affordable unit.
“Even if it will be 10 years we will wait,” Yankoviet said. “We must be lucky.”
“Even if it will be 10 years we will wait. We must be lucky.” — – SONYA YANKOVIET Housing applicant
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 4, 2004. Read the original PDF.