Grimness over the lack of appealing options is the prevailing mood going into this evening’s 7 o’clock City Council meeting – at the Vets Auditorium — to wrestle with ways to breathe life, financially, into the city’s rental assistance programs.
Faced with the prospect of the housing program going broke, shelter for dozens of Culver City households is at stake.
“We never would have had this problem,” says Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells, “if a previous City Council had built affordable housing when they had more than enough money to do it. They decided not to.”
She was referring to the not-so-long-ago days prior to 2011, the year Gov. Brown killed the state’s Redevelopment Agencies. Previously in Culver City, the Redevelopment Agency had created a giant footprint in the community, the mayor noted, while accenting economic development over building affordable housing.
With at least 77 households holding their breaths, the mayor is thinking ambitiously.
“I am hoping we will continue the (rental assistance) program,” she said, “not put people out on the street, that we find really good ways to build more affordable housing and that we prioritize the people in the Rental Assistance program so that when new units are built, we can house them there.”
Meet the Step-Child
For this moment, however, Ms. Sahli-Wells is hoping she can convince two of her colleagues that reaching into the General Fund is the most practical short-term plan for subsidizing the various dimensions of rental assistance.
Affordable housing/rental assistance, devoid of the glamour of business building, appears to have been a traditional step-child in the minds of City Council budget decision-makers in volleying toward the present crisis.
“The Housing Dept. came to us last year,” said the mayor. “They told us,‘We have about a year’s funding left. What do we do?’
“Importantly, people on the Rental Assistance Program came to Council. They testified to what the program means to their lives?”
Two categories of persons are in the rental assistance program. About 47 households are on a five-year plan, needing help restoring order in their lives, short-terms in the mayor’s mind. “These people are in a natural phase-out period,” she said.
“Personally, my vote (tonight) will be to keep our promise and continue funding the program.”
Elderly and disabled, spanning 30 households, constitute the second category of rental assistance. “They are indefinite types,” said Ms. Sahli-Wells. “They are not the kind of people who are going to go out and get a job tomorrow. It’s not about getting back on their feet. They have an ongoing need.”
The mayor said that “the most significant takeaway is that the staff report says Culver City is unique in having this type of program. It is like our own version of Section 8 housing.
“The (assistance) program began years ago because (the city) refused to build the affordable housing we had been mandated to build. Without providing affordable housing at the same time we made economic development the priority, we were left with an imbalance. It meant that people who work here couldn’t afford to live here.
“This,” Ms. Sahli-Wells said, “is a problem.”
