OAKLAND — People in the industry call it “housing of last resort.”
East Bay Times
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/04/05/housing-of-last-resort-stuck-between-a-firetrap-and-the-streets/
Scattered throughout Alameda County, there are perhaps 200 to 300 such facilities — some in the form of single-family homes tucked into quiet residential neighborhoods or single-room occupancy hotels dotting downtown Oakland, Hayward, Berkeley and Alameda. Still others are nondescript apartment buildings lining main streets in East and West Oakland. The one thing most have in common is the people living there have few other options.
When a four-alarm fire ripped through a transitional living facility in West Oakland last week, killing four people and displacing more than 80 others, it exposed the difficult position in which many city and county regulators and homeless advocates find themselves when it comes to this type of housing: a choice between safety or the streets.
Elissa Dennis, an affordable housing finance consultant with Community Economics, called it a “catastrophe.”
“We are in an impossible situation of deciding whether the most vulnerable among us are more safe and secure in a tent or are more safe and secure in a firetrap,” she said. “That’s not a good choice to make.”
Like Urojas Community Services, which operated the transitional residential facility at the San Pablo Avenue building that burned on Mar. 27, many of these types of facilities are not licensed by the state because they don’t provide direct care or supervision for tenants, though they often provide meals. The independent living facilities, as they often are called, frequently advertise with a label: sober living residences, substance abuse recovery homes, housing for formerly homeless, for people coming out of incarceration, for indigent women with children, for veterans or people with mental health conditions, said Robert Ratner, the housing services director for Alameda County’s Health Care Services agency. .
“The labels are more about targeting specific populations,” he said. “People are renting out rooms with varying levels of support on site.”
And they are often located in parts of the county where it is difficult for the property owner to rent rooms to higher-paying tenants, Ratner said. So it’s no surprise that most of these facilities are concentrated in neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty and blight. Nor do many of the operators receive public dollars — whether from the county or the federal government in the form of Section 8. Rather, they take in clients who receive Social Security income, or are able to get their rent paid by the probation department or other service agencies. Ratner described it as “a step above homelessness.”
But for Charles Hutson, at least, it’s been a godsend. Hutson moved into an East Oakland home run by Tower of Faith Ministry roughly one month ago. The two-story building houses between 10 to 12 people at any given time, said Pastor Roosevelt Taylor, who oversees the home. The kitchens and bathrooms are clean and well-maintained, and there is fresh paint on the outside walls.
“When I keep the house decent, then (the residents) will take care of it,” Taylor said. “If they see things hanging off the walls and all this stuff, then they won’t do anything, and who can blame them?”
Before he moved into the home, Hutson had been homeless for five years, he said, bouncing between shelters, couch-surfing and sleeping on the bus when he could find no other place to stay. A 2010 drug conviction for possession with the intent to sell marijuana made it extremely difficult to find a landlord willing to rent to him when he was released in 2011. He was not eligible for public housing.
Moving from shelter to shelter every 30 to 120 days made it hard for him to get or keep a job, he said, and sleeping in the shelter was like sleeping at a “circus.”
“It was just wild. It’s just dealing with other people and their problems and their drug habits,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s hard to go to sleep because there would be like people talking and off their drugs and stuff.”
Tower of Faith’s home stands in stark contrast to the burned building at 2551 San Pablo Ave., which had dozens of complaints filed against it over the past five years for all sorts of issues, from bugs, garbage and water leaks to critical fire safety concerns. Gail Harbin, a tenant in the building, described cockroaches and rodents constantly scuttling through the halls, holes in the walls and a leaking roof. She credited Pastor Jasper Lowery, the Urojas founder, with trying to do the best he could to repair what he could afford to fix, but she said it was difficult to live in those conditions.
“It feels like you’re being put on the lowest level of the human ladder,” she said in an interview a week before the fire. “You’re nothing. You’re nobody. It makes you feel like they don’t care about you and how you live.”
As the housing market tightens, Jung Pham, an attorney and investigator with Disability Rights California, said he is seeing more and more people squeezed into independent living facilities because they can’t find affordable housing anywhere else. For people with disabilities, that can be especially challenging, he said.
“A low-income person with a disability who may have a hard time pulling together resources for rents, they are disincentivized to report these facilities because they are afraid of getting kicked out,” Pham said.
At the same time, the number of adult residential facilities, which are licensed by the state and provide 24-hour services for residents, is declining, in part because of legislation that made it more onerous for licensed facilities to operate in the state, Pham and Ratner said. They pointed to an incident at Valley Springs Manor in Castro Valley three and half years ago when more than a dozen bedridden residents were left alone for two days to fend for themselves after the state shut the facility down, but failed to implement a relocation plan for the residents.
The public outcry spurred legislators to introduce new laws heightening the requirements for licensed facilities and increasing the fines for violating those requirements, among other changes, Pham said.
“It became more onerous for folks running these licensed homes,” Pham said. “(The operators) can, in effect, do the same thing in unlicensed homes as long as nobody complains.”
It’s unclear how many service providers have transitioned from licensed residential facilities to unlicensed ones, because the state does not keep that data. But county and state officials, along with advocates, are working on ways to curb unsafe living conditions for the region’s most vulnerable residents. Ratner said county officials are drawing on a model San Diego implemented in 2012, called the Independent Living Association (ILA), to bring greater transparency and accountability to unlicensed residential homes.
Faced with many of the same challenges as the Bay Area, independent living service providers began banding together, said May Devera, a founding member of the ILA who operates her own facility. A few years later the county provided a three-year, $1.5 million grant to formalize the program, said ILA Executive Director Melanie Briones.
To join the association, operators agree to certain housing quality standards, along with annual inspections, Briones said. Once they are certified to join, members are added to a database the county uses for referrals, and they get extra points when applying for public funds. Operators also receive training from the ILA and other perks. So far, Briones said it’s working.
“We are in a housing crisis like you all are, and we are doing the best we can to augment the high quality housing stock for this incredibly vulnerable population,” she said.
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/04/05/housing-of-last-resort-stuck-between-a-firetrap-and-the-streets/
