One of the lucky ones: With the help of the Petaluma Ecumenical Project, 72-year-old Arlene Morgan has found a one-bedroom apartment that costs just 30 percent of her gross annual income in rent.

(Not So) Golden

How the local housing market shortchanges seniors

By Yosha Bourgea

ARLENE MORGAN is one of the lucky ones, as she herself is the first to admit. Although her only source of income is a monthly Social Security check averaging $800, the 72-year-old grandmother and former university professor is still able to afford a roof over her head with enough left over for food, clothing, and an occasional trip to the Shodakai Casino north of Ukiah.

In Sonoma County, that’s no small trick.

With the help of the Petaluma Ecumenical Project, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable housing for the elderly, Morgan was able to obtain a one-bedroom apartment in a complex located a few blocks from Highway 101.

For the last three years she has paid 30 percent of her gross annual income in rent, and despite the close quarters she’s happy with where she lives.

“Senior low-income housing, a place like this, is ideal for people who don’t have many things,” she says, glancing around her simply furnished living room. “It’s a very small space.”

Fortunately, Morgan is used to packing light. In the 1970s, she left Mountain View to teach psychology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She returned to California in 1993, after her grandchildren were born, and discovered that housing costs had risen dramatically while she’d been away.

“When I was in Australia, I wasn’t thinking about getting a backlog of funds. That has never interested me,” Morgan says.

“I had no investments, no real estate.

“I was just staggered when I came here. It was going to take all of my Social Security just to pay the rent! I took one look at the cities [in the lower Bay Area] and I knew that wasn’t an option.”

While she looked for a place to live, Morgan stayed with her daughter-in-law in Tomales. It was clear that the only affordable long-term option was subsidized housing. “I might have been able to afford to rent if I didn’t live too long, ” she says dryly, “but you can’t count on that.”

When Morgan discovered PEP, the waiting list for apartments was more than 200 names long. Managers told her it would be two or three years before she could expect to hear anything. She signed up anyway.

Then came a stroke of luck. An opportunity arose to return to Brisbane to teach for a few more years, and she took it. While her name inched up the waiting list in Petaluma, Morgan was traveling around Australia doing research for a book on the status of aborigines in prison. When she returned to California in April of 1996, PEP officials told her the wait was down to about half a year.

Though it took all the money she had, Morgan rented for two months while she waited. Then she got lucky again. An unusually high turnover rate led to several vacancies, and that June, with nothing more than a couple of suitcases, Morgan finally moved into a PEP apartment. And for the foreseeable future, that’s where she plans to stay. “I’m very fortunate,” she says. “There’s a real spirit of community here in Petaluma.

“I don’t know how we’ve been able to maintain it.”

Is Help on the Way? Yes, if President Bill Clinton’s proposal to provide 120,000 affordable-housing units is approved by Congress.

THE POPULATION of Sonoma County, like that of the rest of the country, is growing older as it grows larger. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration on Aging shows that over the next 30 years, as an escalating population in general and the baby-boom generation in particular reaps the benefits of advances in medical science, the number of elderly people nationwide is projected to double.

“The rapid growth of the elderly represents in part a triumph of the efforts to extend human life,” says Jacob Siegel of the Administration on Aging, “but these age groups also require a disproportionately large share of special services and public support. There will be large increases by 2030 in the numbers requiring special services in housing.”

The 1999 annual report from the Association of Bay Area Governments brings the numbers closer to home. According to the report, in the next 20 years the number of people in the Bay Area over age 65 will increase by 719,000, or 90 percent, to a total of more than 1.5 million.

And in Sonoma County, seniors searching for a place to live are up against a housing market that a study by the National Association of Home Builders says is the fourth least affordable in the country.

There are now more than 11,000 seniors in the county who, like Arlene Morgan, are living on Social Security or low fixed incomes: think $700 a month, or less. With low-income housing already scarce and waiting lists for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 subsidy program often as long as two years, the elderly in Sonoma County are caught in the middle of a housing crisis that is just beginning to get a lot worse.

“Seniors are coming to us on an almost weekly basis with evictions,” says Shirlee Zane, executive director of the Council on Aging. “It’s very typical to see a client [who has] a reduction in their SSI, their utilities are going to be turned off, and they simply can’t meet their rent.”

Pam Wallace, director of the Interfaith Shelter Network, estimates that 12 to 15 percent of her clients are seniors, though not always in the legal sense. The Department of Housing and Urban Development defines a senior as anyone past the age of 62, but Wallace sets the bar considerably lower.

“Our generation, the baby boomers, are coming up on 50,” Wallace says. “Many of the people we see who are over 50 are really frail and at risk. The other factor is that many of the men are Vietnam veterans, and we see a large percentage of them who are homeless. Rather than waiting until people decompensate even more, we think that establishing a lower age for seniors is a good idea.”

Susan*, a 53-year-old woman who had been living out of her truck following an eviction, found not only a room but employment through IFSN. She works part-time as an administrative assistant at the transitional housing facility where she now lives.

“I can set my own hours,” Susan says. “Pam trusts me to get the job done. Nobody’s had that kind of faith in me, or me in myself, for a long time.”

Still, both the job and the living space–which she shares with a roommate–are temporary. Tenants at the housing facility take part in a six- to 12-month program that includes regular meetings with a credit counselor. When the program is over, they are expected to make way for others.

Susan is feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time, but she knows that her financial difficulties are far from over. “Resources for people between 50 and 62 are real limited,” she says.

“[Advocacy] groups tend to focus on families with kids. The potential for gainful employment is limited when you’re my age. I have no retirement, nothing in savings. It’s scary.”

AT A TIME when the need for low-income housing is greater than ever, many landlords are opting out of renewing their subsidized-housing contracts with HUD. And in Santa Rosa, tax-exempt mortgage revenue bonds issued by the city in the 1980s are reaching the end of their 10-year affordability requirement.

Landlords who have paid off the bonds are no longer required to maintain low-income rental units. Many are now charging market rates, effectively displacing residents who cannot afford to pay more.

At Apple Creek Apartments on Third Street and Dutton Avenue, one of the properties to take advantage of the city’s bond agreement, the units that for more than a decade were affordable to low-income families are now priced at the market rate.

Some 48 residents, many of whom are senior citizens, have had to find housing elsewhere.

Property manager Martha Jared didn’t want to force her low-income tenants to move; in fact, she voluntarily extended the agreement for two years to help them. But with the market skyrocketing, she was losing money. For a one-bedroom apartment, Section 8 funds have a cap of $684 per month. The market rate for that apartment now starts at $925. Apple Creek’s loss on its low-income apartments thus ran close to $14,000 a month, or $168,000 a year.

JARED IS PROUD that she has been able to help all her former tenants find new residences. When she heard through a contact in the housing department that a new complex was about to open up, she leaked the information to her residents before it went on the market. “When a new place opens up, it gets filled up so quickly,” Jared says.

Few developers are now willing to take a chance on low-income housing. John Lowry, executive director of Burbank Housing Development Corp., points out that a development marketed at $500 a month per apartment would lose money on every unit.

“There’s quite a bit of market-rate senior housing [being] developed by private developers,” Lowry observes.

“But the closer you get to market rate, the less demand there is. As far as we can see, the demand for subsidized senior housing is huge out there, because they all fill up.”

Gale Brownell of the Santa Rosa Housing Authority says that 270 low-income housing units in the city were converted to market rate between 1990 and 1998. During the same period, she says, 843 low-income housing units were conserved.

“Santa Rosa has more affordable housing now than at any time in the 1990s,” Brownell says. “I think the city is doing a good job in a very difficult market.”

Not everyone is convinced of that. Affordable-housing advocates such as Shirlee Zane say that the city discourages high-density, low-income housing with fees, restrictive building codes, and a convoluted permit process.

“Builders of affordable housing have to jump through these hoops and obstacles that the city gives them, and they can’t profit,” Zane says.

“If you’re a developer, you have to profit.”

Profitability may be the bottom line, but it’s not the end of the story. As landlords, developers, advocacy groups, and government officials struggle with the logistics of our housing crisis, the number of elderly, low-income people in Sonoma County continues to climb.

These are real people, housing advocates say, not statistics or dollar signs. And they’re not going away.

* Not her real name.

From the February 3-9, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

No room at the inn: Maceo Campbell and Michal Pincus moved to the county five years ago in search of affordable housing. Instead, they found escalating rents and landlords who charged exorbitant rates for substandardshelter.

No Vacancy

Tight housing market makes local rentals a competitive game

By Janet Wells

FIVE YEARS AGO Michal Pincus and her partner, Maceo Campbell, were driven out of San Francisco by the high rents. The two headed for Sonoma County, which seemed like a perfect spot for artist Pincus and environmental activist Campbell. For $400 a month, they rented a funky trailer in Sebastopol, with a solarium and a tree growing through the roof.

The first big blow to the couple’s North Coast dreams came just a year later. It wasn’t that the trailer baked in the summer and the rain and wind came in through the leaky roof in the winter. Or that the trailer had only a small wood-burning stove for heat.

The kicker was cost.

Pincus suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, but was unable to qualify for disabilzity benefits, and Campbell’s salary couldn’t cover the trailer rent. The two soon discovered that they were priced out of the market everywhere in the county. “We were basically homeless for a couple of years, on the couch-and-floor tour. We even lived in a tent for a while,” Pincus says.

When her disability claim came through last year, Pincus figured the two would be able to afford a studio cottage at the low end of the rent spectrum. Wrong.

“Right after I got approved, I looked in the paper and, man, the carrot got moved. It’s just gone up, up, up,” she laments. “The whole thing almost has become like a comic farce. I followed up on one place that was listed for $500. It was a converted chicken coop, with no insulation. They had a line of people coming to look at this place.”

What the two could afford was an attic room, with ceilings so low that both had to stoop to move around. The landlord, says Pincus, did them a favor by giving them a month’s free rent before starting to charge $300.

“We paid it because we had to. Part of me was so beaten down and so sick, and part of me was furious,” she says. “What makes people who have money better than me so it makes it OK for me to have to live this way?”

Going Up: Sonoma County Rents.

Caught Behind the 8 Ball: Local rental market a jungle for low-income tenants.

No Kidding: Audit reveals discrimination against children.

PINCUS’ STORY isn’t all that unusual, at least in Sonoma County. Just about everyone, it seems, has a housing nightmare to share. Eviction for no good reason. Rent hikes three, even four times in one year. Three people squeezing into one room to make ends meet. A hundred prospective renters showing up for an open house and engaging in a bidding war that drives rents even higher.

These days the notion of a cute little wine-country garden cottage for $500 is quaint, if not downright laughable.

The local economy is booming. The population is growing. The job market is beckoning. The real estate market is red-hot. But there’s a price to pay for success: Welcome to the stratospheric rental market.

Almost half of the county’s renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent, an amount that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development deems “unaffordable,” resulting in tenants neglecting such necessities as medical insurance, clothing, and food.

The average rent for a studio in Sonoma County has gone up almost 13 percent in one year to $591 a month, according to RealFacts, a Novato-based company that analyzes real estate markets. A three-bedroom, two-bath apartment is going for an average of $1,227 monthly, an increase of more than 14 percent.

Vacancy rates are so low that it’s not unusual for landlords to get dozens of applications for a single apartment. One recent survey found only one vacancy in 1,118 apartment units in Petaluma, and only three vacancies in 2,298 units in Rohnert Park–approaching an almost unheard-of 0 percent vacancy rate. The overall vacancy rate in the county hovers around 2 percent. Affordable-housing advocates and real estate experts agree that a 5 percent vacancy rate is the watermark of a healthy market that benefits both renters and landlords.

“When the market is as tight as it is now, the market responds by increasing the price,” says Scott Gerber of Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real estate brokerage in San Francisco. “It’s not like landlords are trying to gouge people. There’s a long line of renters out there trying to rent. People are offering to pay more money.”

The good news, says Gerber, is that apartment construction is on the upswing. “If more housing is added, it will stabilize the rent and the vacancy rate will climb.”

Several hundred units of student housing are coming in Rohnert Park, which should relieve some of the demand for housing around Sonoma State University, Gerber says. And in Santa Rosa, city officials in 1998 approved permits for 600 units of housing.

“When vacancy rates are higher, people are not going to build apartments in that market, because it decreases the chance of having a successful project,” says Santa Rosa Community Development Director Wayne Goldberg. “The last time we had a huge burst of multifamily construction was in the mid-1980s, when the tax laws were favorable and vacancy rates were low, which made it profitable.”

Among the projects on the drawing board in Santa Rosa are 287 apartments on Highway 12 just east of Mission Boulevard, about 100 apartments in the downtown area, and 176 apartments at the Mountainview Villas.

But for people like Pincus, many of the apartments coming on line are hardly affordable, charging upwards of $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

When Colleen Fernald Molinari’s landlord wanted to sell the southwest Santa Rosa house she was renting with her husband, a local high-tech-industry worker, and two kids, the family was forced to settle for a smaller three-bedroom house, with almost no yard, and fixer-upper frustrations. The monthly rent? $1,475, almost 50 percent more than they were paying for a roomier, more upscale place.

Molinari, who works in production and distribution at the Independent, says they can’t afford Sonoma County rents. “People stuck in the middle like us have it the hardest. We make too much to qualify for special programs, but not enough to get out of debt,” she says. “We live really frugally. We don’t go on trips. We don’t even go out. Our routine is a video and a grocery store pizza on a Friday night.”

Indeed, Molinari was on the verge of moving to Austin, Texas, last summer, where “you can get twice the home for the price.” But the move fell through, and the couple is now struggling to keep up with the high cost of living locally.

THE TIGHT HOUSING market means more calls for Sonoma County Rental Information and Mediation Services, a publicly funded program that tries to resolve disputes between landlords and tenants. These days it’s about evictions, rent hikes, and desperate pleas for help in finding places to live.

“We get a lot more calls from people that can’t find housing,” says SCRIMS executive director Sherry Couts. “All we can do is refer them to the newspapers and property management firms.”

Tenants can’t believe that multiple rent hikes are legal, says SCRIMS operations manager John Shaw. “We’re coming up against people who think there is rent control. There isn’t. A landlord can raise the rent 2 cents or $2,000, and can raise it every month of the year.”

And if a landlord wants a tenant out, 30-day notice is the only requirement, no cause needed. “That can be really devastating,” Shaw says. “You won’t get another apartment with an eviction on your record.”

SCRIMS is a barebones operation, with one full-time and one part-time employee, aging equipment, and dwindling funding, trying to do mediation for a county of half a million. In a rental market that is increasingly hostile for tenants, SCRIMS doesn’t have the resources to keep up with demand, says David Brigode, housing director at People for Economic Opportunity.

“We have to come up with a new approach to deal with private-sector housing, a better tenant-landlord program, a better fair-housing program,” Brigode says. “People don’t know their rights, or are scared to exercise their rights. . . . There’s no outreach to other agencies or to farm workers to educate people.”

Brigode says that this spring PEO will be vying for SCRIMS’ funding contract from the county and the city of Santa Rosa. PEO, along with Fair Housing in Marin County, already received a $300,000 grant from Housing and Urban Development to do education, outreach, and fair-housing enforcement.

The need for a more aggressive approach to rental mediation is urgent, Brigode says. “Housing is nowhere near job growth,” he says. “It’s like musical chairs. The music stops and someone is left homeless.”

MICHAL PINCUS and her partner did find a way out of their attic garret. They now live in a converted garage, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with six other people. The rent is $400 a month, and the landlord is a friend. But she still dreams of finding a place of their own that’s affordable and livable.

“It’s depressing,” she says about the rental market. “We really have to look at what we’re doing here, and at the greed that’s dictating how we’re making our decisions. It’s changing the face of Sonoma County. You’re driving out people who don’t have a lot of money.

“Ever since the Reagan ’80s, it has become a privilege to have a home,” she adds. “This is wrong. Housing is not a privilege. . . . It is not just for the rich.”

From the January 27-February 2, 2000 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.