‘If we didn’t have this, we’d be homeless.’ Two Sacramento communities wonder about their future

Residents at Alder Grove and Marina Vista, Sacramento’s largest, oldest, and most concentrated public housing sites, have long expected change. They have just never been certain of what kind.

The Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, the sites’ owner, has recently given them a better idea of what’s to come.

Instead of the demolition that has loomed on the horizon, the agency shifted plans recently and announced that it will rehabilitate, leaving standing two of Sacramento’s antiquated public housing communities with the promise of something many residents see as better.

For a decade prior, residents of Alder Grove, bordering on Broadway, and nearby Marina Vista, often heard their communities were to perish, that they were targets for demolition and redevelopment.

Now with a reprieve, they alternately feel gratitude and confusion. And still a measure of unease.

“People are just nervous,” said Jasmine Singh, 47, a Marina Vista resident of more than three decades. She knows and approves of plans for renovation in her community but said many neighbors are still confused about what’s next.

Ashlei Hurst, Director of Leataata Floyd Community Center adjacent to Marina Vista, said many residents are overwhelmed by rumors of what could happen and aren’t aware that the SHRA has shifted its focus from redevelopment to renovation.

Hurst has worked with residents of Alder Grove and Marina Vista for a decade. She said residents have grown skeptical after constantly hearing changing plans. Now, she said, many residents are unaware of the latest developments.

“Not many residents attend the (planning) meetings,” she said “Not because they’re not interested in the meetings but because the meetings could happen during work hours or times inconvenient for people with children.”

Singh said she prefers site renovation because she has heard such a project wouldn’t require the long-term dispersal of community members.

“If we didn’t have this we’d be homeless or living with someone else,” she said.

What are the new plans?

According to SHRA officials, the agency has secured the funding for building renovations through the Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, better known as RAD.

RAD, the SHRA website says, began in 2012 to help public housing authorities provide more viable housing programs.

“RAD allows PHAs to convert public housing to long-term, Project-based Section 8 rental assistance developments,” according to the website.

They are able to do this, according to the HUD site, by allowing “public housing agencies to leverage public and private debt and equity in order to reinvest in the public housing stock. “ The units remain affordable and have more stable funding, according to HUD and SHRA.

The SHRA has not provided a cost for the project.

Tyrone Roderick WIlliams, Deputy Executive Director for the SHRA, said the SHRA has assessed the changing landscape in choosing between rehabilitation or demolition and that construction costs have grown while funding sources have become more scarce. Rehabbing the project is now seen as the cost-effective choice over removing.

This month, the SHRA plans to begin renovating its public housing sites one-by-one through the RAD program. Renovations of Alder Grove and Marina Vista would come last due to the high number of units, residents and the higher associated costs.

Williams said improvements to buildings are designed to last 15 years. RAD is also likely to delay demolition on the site and decrease residents being displaced through redevelopment.

“It would be very unusual for us to put in that effort and then tear them down,” Williams said.

The two contain 750 units and house almost 2,000 combined, according to inspections records acquired by The Bee.

With the current tentative timeline, renovations at Marina Vista are scheduled for 2023 to 2025 and those at Alder Grove are scheduled from 2030 to 2031.

Renovations would only result in short-term relocation, not long-term displacement, Williams said.

Williams said construction crews would renovate most units in less than two months. Residents would be relocated onsite or to local hotels.

Residents’ history of mistrust

The program would also offer Section 8 vouchers to residents as an option, though not a requirement, in contrast to Twin Rivers Housing Project north of downtown in 2017. It was torn down to make way for redevelopment.

Some residents simply don’t trust the SHRA. This has also influenced how residents have interpreted the larger changes in the past half-decade, such as a development boom introducing middle-income housing and restaurants to the once quiet western edge of Broadway.

This area has long sectioned off a segment of the city’s poor. An industrial zone and freeways to the west and north, the city historic cemetery to the east, and a mostly disconnected street system to the south have closed off the public housing sites’ connections to adjacent neighborhoods.

The sites’ barrack-style brick buildings and pastoral landscape, built for a previous era, have remained the same.

Use of RAD in other public housing communities has received mixed reviews. Doug Shoemaker, president of Mercy Housing of California, a nonprofit housing provider, said the the program has often led to privatization of sites, with ownership transferring from a housing authority to a for-profit or non-profit housing ownership group.

The variety within private ownership has produced both cases of improved living conditions and cases of discrimination against residents. In 2018, the federal government issued a report outlining its concerns over inadequate HUD oversight of the RAD program.

Williams said the SHRA would maintain ownership and management under its proposal.

From 2008 to 2013, the SHRA spearheaded discussions for a mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhood to replace the aging residential sites, using a federal grant from the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. The organization held several meetings with residents, leading many residents to believe their communities were next up for redevelopment.

The conversation about demolition and redevelopment has never stopped in Alder Grove and Marina Vista.

“They’ve been saying they were going to knock down these buildings since I moved in here,” said nine-year Alder Grove resident Raquel Nelson, 32.

Marcheri Smith, 33, said SHRA held few meetings and the agency made no attempt to make the meetings accessible to schedules of residents.

“If they wanted us to know, we would have (known) about this,” she said.

The need for improvement

The quality of housing at both Alder Grove and Marina Vista has declined in recent years. HUD-issued inspection scores at both sites fell dramatically from 2016 to 2019 before rebounding slightly in 2020, according to SHRA files acquired by The Bee. The decline mirrored a downward trend throughout Sacramento County.

The scores assess the quality of units, the site’s landscape and the responsiveness of site maintenance crews to resident requests for improvements.

Alder Grove and Marina Vista received some of the lowest scores of public housing sites in the county. Marina Vista’s score dropped below the federal standard score for the first time in 2019, according to files acquired by The Bee.

SHRA did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the drop in scores.

The antiquated buildings – many of the units at Alder Grove date back to World War II — make them both historic and out-dated. Residents have complained about poor insulation, painted over-mold, faulty plumbing and a lack of electrical outlets. Some residents have reported accounts of their units flooding, others of several-week wait times for critical repairs.

In Alder Grove, skunks and raccoons are often seen in the gaps between the foundation and the floor in spaces, residents said.

At Marina Vista, residents are aware of the varying quality from unit to unit and building to building. During the summer months, Troy Ashwood, 39, who has lived at Marina Vista with his wife and four children for six years, has regularly experienced excessive summer heat in his apartment.

The attic at the top of his building traps heat throughout the day, creating feverish nights. He said his family struggles to sleep.

“My kids are sweating, I’m sweating, all (the) house fans are going on and it’s not helping,” Ashwood said.

To address the issue, Ashwood said he invested $200 of his own money for a window air conditioning unit in his home.

During the winter, he has faced similar problems with his heater.

“I find myself having to turn the oven on at the same time I have the heater on to heat up the house,” he said.

The change to come

While the living conditions at these sites have appeared stagnant, change has marched into western Broadway.

The Mill at Broadway housing development has brought more than 300 market rate units adjacent to Marina Vista since 2016. More than 80 will soon be added as the next step of a development that has about 700 more units planned.

Developers have submitted designs for a residential mid-rise a block west of Alder Grove to the city. A block east of Alder Grove, three new ultramodern units with striking finishes of wood and orange paneling went up in 2019. The units list for more than $500,000. The wooden outlines of similar houses now fill a lot across Broadway from Alder Grove.

The city, too, expects change along west Broadway. It has created the West Broadway Specific Plan to structure the redevelopment of the neighborhood. The plan, which is currently working its way through committees at City Hall, presents the city’s vision for the neighborhood, one it has said would be more walkable, business friendly, socio-economically diverse, and integrated into the rest of the city.

Smith said that if change around her continues to outpace her site, it will add to the long-term pressure to demolish her community. She does not trust assurances that residents will have an equitable place in west Broadway for very long.

Half a block away from Alder Grove, Marina Vista resident Sarah Silsbsy, age 35, remembered a past WIC store and Sacramento Works Job and Training Center. She used the WIC office to buy affordable fresh produce for her family when one of her children was born and the employment office to receive advice on how to update her resume.

Now, Selland’s Market offers gourmet salmon burgers and avocado-pumpkin sandwiches. Silsby said she worries the stores and resources that catered to her community will be replaced by those for newer, more affluent, residents.

“When you’re going in there for a sandwich and it’s $12, who do you think is gonna buy it?” “It feels like they’re trying to push people out.”

This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.