wildcard
4th July 2010, 02:53 AM
link (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/us/04bchousing.html?pagewanted=1&ref=us)
Public Housing Residents Await Urgent Transfers
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/07/04/us/04BCHOUSING/04BCHOUSING-articleInline.jpg
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 2, 2010
After her apartment was repeatedly broken into, Georgina Jenkins thought she had found a ticket out of Alemany, the public housing project known to residents as the Black Hole. The San Francisco Housing Authority had placed her on its priority transfer list, reserved for tenants facing immediate danger or urgent medical need, according to Ms. Jenkins and her attorney.
Ms. Jenkins, a 25-year-old aspiring medical technician, said she was offered a unit at North Beach Place, a renovated project on the other side of the city. She was preparing to move when she was informed in March that her security problem, dire as it was, could not be resolved until she paid thousands of dollars in back rent.
Sitting in her darkened apartment, with holes in the wall and a boarded-up bathroom window, Ms. Jenkins said she was tired of waiting — the last break-in was in February.
“Anybody that has an emergency transfer needs to be moved in a nice amount of time,†she said. “I’m trying to get out of here.â€
There are 246 people on the Housing Authority’s little-known priority transfer list, according to the agency. Ms. Jenkins’s still-unresolved case underscores the complicated issues that arise as San Francisco tries to overhaul its crime-plagued public housing buildings, which has about 6,000 units.
According to documents released in late May under a public records request by Bay Area Legal Aid, which represents low-income communities, 233 people — or 95 percent of those on the list — have waited more than three months to be relocated, and 176 have waited more than a year. The list, which is compiled by the Housing Authority in consultation with the police, includes people seeking protection from hate crimes, violence, repeated robberies, domestic abuse and medical conditions that may be worsened by their surroundings.
Tenants rights advocates say the statistics show that the Housing Authority is failing in its most basic function: keeping low-income residents safe.
“If 95 percent of your emergency cases are three months out and still waiting, it doesn’t seem much like an emergency,†said Minouche Kandel, a lawyer at Bay Area Legal Aid.
Housing officials acknowledge that the delays are a serious problem. But they say they are the result of a lack of space — 28,000 people are awaiting public housing in San Francisco — and other factors that have little to do with security. As the city renovates public housing units across the city, it is turning over management of some facilities to private companies that, by most accounts, have made them cleaner and safer — but they have also made it much harder to gain admittance.
North Beach Place, a gated, clean community near Fisherman’s Wharf, is one of them.
“We don’t have the inventory of units where people want to go; that’s really the dilemma on the transfer list,†Henry A. Alvarez III, executive director of the Housing Authority, said in an interview.
As a result, some residents whom city officials and the police have deemed to be in immediate need of protection have been unable to gain admittance to the buildings where they would be safest.
In March 2008, for example, Alejandro Aguilar, a 40-year-old day laborer, severely beat a woman in her apartment at Valencia Gardens, a public housing development in the Mission district, according to police records and an account by the victim. After being taken into custody, Mr. Aguilar said twice that “next time†he intended to kill the woman, according to the police.
Mr. Aguilar was charged with assault after the woman accused him of attempted rape.
Terrified by the threats and by the prospect of testifying against Mr. Aguilar, the woman was placed on the priority transfer list. But after she was shown an apartment at North Beach Place, the facility’s manager, the John Stewart Company, denied her an apartment because of bad credit, according to e-mail messages between the Housing Authority, the company, and the woman’s advocates at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.
Justine Minnis, an official with the John Stewart Company, wrote in an e-mail message in July 2008 that the woman “did not meet the resident selection criteria,†because her “credit history has changed since she was originally screened at Valencia Gardens.â€
Loren Sanborn, a senior vice president with the management company, said screening criteria were important to the success of North Beach Place.
“We believe that everyone should be treated the same,†Ms. Sanborn said.
Eventually, the Housing Authority, which is strapped because of budget cuts, agreed to intervene to guarantee any unpaid rent owed to the management company and cover the woman’s moving expenses up to $50,000. She finally moved in September 2008.
“Under normal general circumstances, that’s not something we want to be doing, but this was one of those extreme cases,†said Mr. Alvarez, the executive director.
But Mr. Alvarez, who was brought in to clean up the troubled agency two years ago, did not fault the John Stewart Company for wanting to maintain higher standards. North Beach Place, he said, has become one of the most sought-after facilities in the city.
“If we’re going to create this opportunity where people say, ‘This is what I want,’ then I think there are going to be different expectations of what is required to participate,†Mr. Alvarez said. “Whether one argues if that is too harsh or not too harsh, I have to look at the results.â€
But advocates for public housing residents said the rules got in the way of keeping people safe.
“What we can’t tolerate is when we get to that point when you finally get people out of their violent situation and then they are not be able to access it for arbitrary reasons,†said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants rights organization.
Ms. Shortt said that it was a violation of the public housing code to deny housing to people facing security risks based on factors like bad credit. Ms. Shortt and others have been trying to get the Housing Authority to make private management companies drop the screening requirements for priority transfer cases.
It took Marvella Branner two years to move from Westside Courts, in the Fillmore district, to North Beach. Living on the third floor and struggling with severe asthma, Ms. Branner had trouble climbing the stairs and was worried that paramedics who frequently took her to the hospital would someday be unable to reach her in time. She said she sought placement on the priority transfer list in 2007 and was finally moved last fall.
The Housing Authority said it now had more vacancies in older and more crime-ridden projects like Sunnydale and Alice Griffith, both in southeast San Francisco. In some cases, tenants on the priority transfer list are refusing relocations to older facilities, believing they are no more safe than where they currently live.
Carolyn Pollard, 48, was offered a transfer earlier this month after the third break-in at her apartment in Sunnydale, the city’s largest project, situated below McLaren Park. But Ms. Pollard, who lives with her daughter and a 4-year-old grandson, turned down the transfer because the offered home was in Hunters Point, which also has serious crime problems.
“My son is from the Western Addition, and if he comes down to visit me and his son, who knows what’s going to happen?†said Ms. Pollard, who pays $231 a month for her apartment.
Ms. Pollard, a cheerful woman whose nickname is Tootie, said she spent weekends with relatives to get away from Sunnydale. She leaves in place a wooden board that a repairman put over a broken window in her living room — even though the glass has been repaired.
“They’re just going to break it again, right?†she said. “I told them to leave it there.â€
Public Housing Residents Await Urgent Transfers
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/07/04/us/04BCHOUSING/04BCHOUSING-articleInline.jpg
By ZUSHA ELINSON
Published: July 2, 2010
After her apartment was repeatedly broken into, Georgina Jenkins thought she had found a ticket out of Alemany, the public housing project known to residents as the Black Hole. The San Francisco Housing Authority had placed her on its priority transfer list, reserved for tenants facing immediate danger or urgent medical need, according to Ms. Jenkins and her attorney.
Ms. Jenkins, a 25-year-old aspiring medical technician, said she was offered a unit at North Beach Place, a renovated project on the other side of the city. She was preparing to move when she was informed in March that her security problem, dire as it was, could not be resolved until she paid thousands of dollars in back rent.
Sitting in her darkened apartment, with holes in the wall and a boarded-up bathroom window, Ms. Jenkins said she was tired of waiting — the last break-in was in February.
“Anybody that has an emergency transfer needs to be moved in a nice amount of time,†she said. “I’m trying to get out of here.â€
There are 246 people on the Housing Authority’s little-known priority transfer list, according to the agency. Ms. Jenkins’s still-unresolved case underscores the complicated issues that arise as San Francisco tries to overhaul its crime-plagued public housing buildings, which has about 6,000 units.
According to documents released in late May under a public records request by Bay Area Legal Aid, which represents low-income communities, 233 people — or 95 percent of those on the list — have waited more than three months to be relocated, and 176 have waited more than a year. The list, which is compiled by the Housing Authority in consultation with the police, includes people seeking protection from hate crimes, violence, repeated robberies, domestic abuse and medical conditions that may be worsened by their surroundings.
Tenants rights advocates say the statistics show that the Housing Authority is failing in its most basic function: keeping low-income residents safe.
“If 95 percent of your emergency cases are three months out and still waiting, it doesn’t seem much like an emergency,†said Minouche Kandel, a lawyer at Bay Area Legal Aid.
Housing officials acknowledge that the delays are a serious problem. But they say they are the result of a lack of space — 28,000 people are awaiting public housing in San Francisco — and other factors that have little to do with security. As the city renovates public housing units across the city, it is turning over management of some facilities to private companies that, by most accounts, have made them cleaner and safer — but they have also made it much harder to gain admittance.
North Beach Place, a gated, clean community near Fisherman’s Wharf, is one of them.
“We don’t have the inventory of units where people want to go; that’s really the dilemma on the transfer list,†Henry A. Alvarez III, executive director of the Housing Authority, said in an interview.
As a result, some residents whom city officials and the police have deemed to be in immediate need of protection have been unable to gain admittance to the buildings where they would be safest.
In March 2008, for example, Alejandro Aguilar, a 40-year-old day laborer, severely beat a woman in her apartment at Valencia Gardens, a public housing development in the Mission district, according to police records and an account by the victim. After being taken into custody, Mr. Aguilar said twice that “next time†he intended to kill the woman, according to the police.
Mr. Aguilar was charged with assault after the woman accused him of attempted rape.
Terrified by the threats and by the prospect of testifying against Mr. Aguilar, the woman was placed on the priority transfer list. But after she was shown an apartment at North Beach Place, the facility’s manager, the John Stewart Company, denied her an apartment because of bad credit, according to e-mail messages between the Housing Authority, the company, and the woman’s advocates at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.
Justine Minnis, an official with the John Stewart Company, wrote in an e-mail message in July 2008 that the woman “did not meet the resident selection criteria,†because her “credit history has changed since she was originally screened at Valencia Gardens.â€
Loren Sanborn, a senior vice president with the management company, said screening criteria were important to the success of North Beach Place.
“We believe that everyone should be treated the same,†Ms. Sanborn said.
Eventually, the Housing Authority, which is strapped because of budget cuts, agreed to intervene to guarantee any unpaid rent owed to the management company and cover the woman’s moving expenses up to $50,000. She finally moved in September 2008.
“Under normal general circumstances, that’s not something we want to be doing, but this was one of those extreme cases,†said Mr. Alvarez, the executive director.
But Mr. Alvarez, who was brought in to clean up the troubled agency two years ago, did not fault the John Stewart Company for wanting to maintain higher standards. North Beach Place, he said, has become one of the most sought-after facilities in the city.
“If we’re going to create this opportunity where people say, ‘This is what I want,’ then I think there are going to be different expectations of what is required to participate,†Mr. Alvarez said. “Whether one argues if that is too harsh or not too harsh, I have to look at the results.â€
But advocates for public housing residents said the rules got in the way of keeping people safe.
“What we can’t tolerate is when we get to that point when you finally get people out of their violent situation and then they are not be able to access it for arbitrary reasons,†said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants rights organization.
Ms. Shortt said that it was a violation of the public housing code to deny housing to people facing security risks based on factors like bad credit. Ms. Shortt and others have been trying to get the Housing Authority to make private management companies drop the screening requirements for priority transfer cases.
It took Marvella Branner two years to move from Westside Courts, in the Fillmore district, to North Beach. Living on the third floor and struggling with severe asthma, Ms. Branner had trouble climbing the stairs and was worried that paramedics who frequently took her to the hospital would someday be unable to reach her in time. She said she sought placement on the priority transfer list in 2007 and was finally moved last fall.
The Housing Authority said it now had more vacancies in older and more crime-ridden projects like Sunnydale and Alice Griffith, both in southeast San Francisco. In some cases, tenants on the priority transfer list are refusing relocations to older facilities, believing they are no more safe than where they currently live.
Carolyn Pollard, 48, was offered a transfer earlier this month after the third break-in at her apartment in Sunnydale, the city’s largest project, situated below McLaren Park. But Ms. Pollard, who lives with her daughter and a 4-year-old grandson, turned down the transfer because the offered home was in Hunters Point, which also has serious crime problems.
“My son is from the Western Addition, and if he comes down to visit me and his son, who knows what’s going to happen?†said Ms. Pollard, who pays $231 a month for her apartment.
Ms. Pollard, a cheerful woman whose nickname is Tootie, said she spent weekends with relatives to get away from Sunnydale. She leaves in place a wooden board that a repairman put over a broken window in her living room — even though the glass has been repaired.
“They’re just going to break it again, right?†she said. “I told them to leave it there.â€