Heads in Sand on Housing
Only a discerning eye could pick out the differences between the Mendocino apartments in San Clemente and the “luxury apartment living” Pinnacle across the street. The Mendocino lacks the decorative molding around its windows and arched passageways. It doesn’t have a fence around it or security gates. It’s just a tidy, 186-unit complex with a beautiful open-hills vista out toward the Cleveland National Forest. In the stairways, two young girls sit with textbooks open on their laps. Children laugh in the community swimming pool.
People whose images of affordable housing have been shaped by giant, crime-breeding public housing projects in Chicago and New York should take a field trip to the Mendocino and similar regional projects.
Residents and elected officials in Mission Viejo should be first in line. Some residents not only reviled their city staff’s plans for an affordable-housing project but did it in the language of decades ago: “Increased propensity for litter, disease, graffiti and crime” is the way one flier described the proposal for a 168-unit affordable apartment complex. The lower-income residents would crowd the schools with “non-English-speaking students.”
One woman attending a Planning Commission meeting tried to sound a more loving note about people who couldn’t afford Infinitis: They should be scattered among more affluent residents to learn the “good habits” of the middle class.
Would those in need of such education include the teacher at the local elementary school? A newly credentialed teacher, at a salary of just over $38,000 a year, qualifies easily for housing assistance, the blistering market rates in most of Orange County being out of reach.
Mission Viejo needs 154 more units of affordable housing to meet its 2005 target set by the state, based on estimated numbers of the city’s residents in need. Instead, the city Planning Commission is running in the opposite direction. Mission Viejo now seeks Assemblyman Todd Spitzer’s (R-Orange) help in allowing existing group homes for the elderly to count as affordable housing. And where are the $12-an-hour aides who work there supposed to live? Somewhere past Yucaipa?
Overall, Southern California’s affluent suburban residents have been reluctant to realize that the workers who prop up their lives -- the teachers and dogcatchers, the latte pourers and caregivers -- need a nearby place to live. It’s a rare affordable-housing project that whizzes through planning without a storm of protest from neighbors. But it’s up to city leaders to exert some leadership. The state can pressure recalcitrant cities but has no real disciplinary powers. It falls to community housing groups to sue the cities involved, a long and costly trudge.
The latest proposal from the developer in Mission Viejo is to reduce the number of affordable units to 108. Spitzer should tell the city to stop whining and grab it. And the state Legislature should consider writing an affordable-housing measure with the teeth to get the job done. Local officials might actually like being off the hook (Sorry, it’s state law!) when the NIMBYs come pounding on their doors.
