Members to work on simplifying approach to affordable housing fund
The Santa Barbara City Council’s consideration of a proposed affordable housing fund took two different turns than expected Tuesday.
Staff had presented council members with a draft ordinance to create a Housing Opportunities, Preservation and Equity (HOPE) Fund for their review. And staff had asked for any suggestions before staff returned to council with a revised ordinance for approval.
Instead, the council voted unanimously to send the proposal to its Ordinance Committee so its members could distill the draft ordinance down from its lengthy, complex, multi-faceted approach to a simplified approach the full council can consider and approve.
In addition, council members strongly agreed with members of the public and the Santa Barbara Housing Authority that too much emphasis was being placed on housing programs and administrative services rather than the bottom line: building more affordable housing.
Councilmember Mike Jordan, an Ordinance Committee member, put it bluntly: “We just need more units. Period. We can discuss what kinds of units later.”
Councilmember Meagan Harmon, who helped set the affordable housing trust fund in motion, said the fund was not meant to provide housing programs and administrative services.
“This fund is really about the production of housing,” she said. “That’s what’s guided my thinking from the very beginning.”
Before the council listened to a staff presentation on the ordinance followed by several speakers on the subject, they heard several residents talk about their being evicted by their landlords.
The residents said their landlords claimed they needed to make renovations, but the residents said that was just an excuse to oust them, then raise the rent for new tenants moving in.
Tuesday’s session was a repeat of last week’s council meeting when residents — many of them long-time Santa Barbarans — pleaded with the council to help them stay in their homes and not have to move out of town just to afford a place to live.
Organizers of the group vowed last week that they’d return weekly to voice their concerns.
They made good on their promise on Tuesday.
One woman, cradling her infant in her arms, said she was evicted when eight months pregnant because of bogus “renovations.”
“It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever had to experience,” she said, noting she received a payout to move, “but not for peace of mind.”
She, like speakers who followed, urged the council to put an end to rent evictions “just to hike up the rent and make people who grew up here not afford to live here anymore.”
Wendy Santamaria, a community organizer with the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, confided that, like the people she works with, she, too, is facing eviction.
“I’m going through the same thing,” she said. “They’re trying to raise the rent, and I can’t afford it anymore. I’m seeing these people pushed and harassed, and now it’s happening to me, too.”
When it came time to talk about the affordable housing fund, Mayor Randy Rowse cautioned that, aside from the staff presentation and hearing from public speakers, the council would not take action on the ordinance other than to forward it to the council’s Ordinance Committee “to distill this down for discussion.”
As it stands, “there’s too many options to consider,” he said. “It’s like being given ‘Moby Dick’ and being asked to write a one-page synopsis.”
In her presentation, Laura Dubbels, the city’s Housing and Human Services manager, outlined the draft ordinance’s major components, but the main thing speakers who followed her seemed to agree with was her assessment that the need for affordable housing in Santa Barbara is critical.
Council members, while thanking staff for its hard work putting the ordinance together with little guidance from the council, endorsed the Santa Barbara Housing Authority’s emphasis on buying and building more housing units as opposed to increasing housing services.
Skip Szymanski, the Housing Authority’s deputy executive director, pointed directly at the embattled renters who spoke earlier as the very people who need help.
“Those are the people we want to be housing,” he said. “We can provide housing for the workforce and people in need who have been in Santa Barbara.”
He warned about prioritizing housing services at the expense of providing actual units where people can live.
“If you are to be all things to all people, that doesn’t work,” he said. “We already have those programs and have money for those programs. This is an opportunity to actually build and purchase affordable housing today.”
He noted that the Housing Authority has an opportunity right now to purchase 60 units where city workers and unhoused people could live.
“If the city had the money today, I could do the deal and bring the project to you,” he said.
Councilmember Eric Friedman immediately responded, suggesting that if a certain amount of money were available for such a purchase, and the Housing Authority needed a bit more just to clinch the deal, the council should be able to make that extra money available for a one-time purchase.
Speaker after speaker stressed that new affordable housing that is built or purchased should go for people with very low, or low, or moderate income at most, people who fall within 160% of the area median income, which includes the city’s workforce — including teachers and sheriff’s deputies — forced to live elsewhere and commute here to their jobs.
Others argued that any ordinance that’s crafted be kept as simple as possible so that it provides a straightforward approach to increase deed-restricted permanent housing with 90-year covenants, essentially ensuring the units would remain affordable forever.
“This does promise to be a truly landmark program,” said Stanley Tzankov, co-founder of the Santa Barbara Tenants Union, as long as the focus remains on the program being a source of funding to “our low and moderate neighbors in this town.”
He also praised the inclusion of up to $250,000 for legal-aid groups or attorneys to defend tenants’ rights “and give them a fighting chance in court” to avoid being evicted.
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