It is one month short of three years since Carol Gross, one of the plainest speaking City Council/Redevelopment Agency members in recent history, left City Hall to return, quietly, to private life. But she reads the newspapers as fervently as she did during her two terms of eight years on the Council, and, happily, she has retained her sense of candor.
What does Ms. Gross make of the sort of roundabout, kind of wrist-slapping scolding by an obscure Sacramento office of Culver City’s Redevelopment Agency for not building a sufficient amount of affordable housing in recent years?
“I have found the reactions of people most interesting,” she said, “the community.
“We sat there for the better part of eight years, and I was not the only one who said over the dais, ‘Hey, Sacramento is telling us, we have got to build housing, something like 658 units in the next four years.’ How many times did you hear me say that?
“How many times did developments, including housing, come before us, and how many times did the community say ‘No way in hell!’ And then they are going to be up in arms that we did not spend our housing money?”
Question: Does that mean the arrow should point toward Community Rejection as the reason the state-mandated affordable housing units were not constructed?
“Well, a) they weren’t listening. We kept saying it, talking about it. We kept bringing forward projects that included housing, and everybody said, ‘Not in my backward. We don’t want it.’
“Pretty much the best we could do was to keep trying to find a project that could be accepted. We did a little bit here and there. We did something with Studio Royale. As we built two or four additional units, I don’t remember, the number was covenanted for low-income. We purchased a building on Jackson. We were refurbishing and upgrading all of the units. Then someone who lived in this building owned by the Redevelopment Agency applied for the Landlord Mediation Board, and I was called a racist for not choosing that person.”
Steve Rose, one of your former colleagues, said that one reason Culver City did not meet its affordable housing commitment was because home prices are higher on the Westside than in most of the state.
“That is true, but I still want to know where and how you can build 658 units in this city, according to the state Housing Authority. That is not reality. I don’t remember how that number was reached, but there is an arcane formula that looks at how much housing you build, at income levels and a bunch of other things.
“It is kind of like, the more housing you build, the more affordable housing they are going to demand you build, which, of course, does not make sense, either.
“The last time I heard about this, when I was still in office, at least one-third, possibly 40 percent of cities in the entire state, had not met their demand.
“We were trying to comply, or at least work toward that goal, and to find appropriate uses for the housing fund. We raised many questions about ‘Can we use housing funds for this? or ‘Can we use housing funds for that?’ The subject was on our minds, But, again, there were arcane laws that say to what extent they could be deferred an to what extent you can borrow from the housing fund.”
(To be continued)
