GILROY
– Three women, assisted by legal advocacy firms, celebrated
Cinco de Mayo by filing a lawsuit against the city demanding more
affordable housing and claiming racial discrimination against
Latinos.
GILROY – Three women, assisted by legal advocacy firms, celebrated Cinco de Mayo by filing a lawsuit against the city demanding more affordable housing and claiming racial discrimination against Latinos.
The women and their lawyers say the city’s housing policies make it too difficult for developers to build units that are affordable to low-income people. By doing this, the plaintiffs claim the city leads lower-income people to overpay for rent and live in overcrowded conditions.
“The city sets down the railroad tracks that the particular developers have to run on. These railroad tracks take you to high-end, single-family developments,” said Richard Marcantonio, a lawyer with Public Advocates Inc. of San Francisco.
The city’s largest affordable housing provider defends the city, however.
“The city, in our view, has done a great job in expediting affordable housing projects, and the Sobrato affordable housing complex is a great example of that,” Jan Lindenthal, South County Housing’s director of housing, said this morning.
“The city doesn’t have a lot of revenue, so in our experience they have done a lot of non-monetary things to expedite.”
The suit says the city’s roadblocks for affordable housing disproportionately affect Latinos.
“The lack of affordable housing in Gilroy is a matter of basic human dignity, but it’s also a civil rights issue,” Norma Fonseca, the lead plaintiff in the suit, said in a prepared statement. “All low-income families are suffering, but Latino families are suffering the most.”
Latinos make up 70 percent of the city’s low-income residents as well as 70 percent of renters paying “more rent than they can afford,” according to the suit. Latinos made up 45 percent of Gilroy’s residents in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Little city response
“Those are pretty strong statements,” said Bill Faus, the city’s planning director, when told of the suit. He declined to comment further.
City Administrator Jay Baksa said city officials could not give much response until they thoroughly review the lawsuit.
“We are now in a mode of having our city attorneys read it, analyze it and prepare a closed briefing session with the City Council,” Baksa said. “Anything anyone says on this topic is fair game in (court).”
While Baksa declined to comment on the litigation, he did briefly defend the city’s track record on affordable housing.
“Past Councils over the years have been very sensitive to affordable housing and to excellent affordable housing providers like South County Housing,” Baksa said. “There has been a lot of affordable housing built in this community.”
South County Housing, a non-profit, Gilroy-based housing developer, has built 499 affordable units in this city since 1997. Of these, 392 were single-family homes. In addition, the city has approved 60 units for construction in 2005.
South County Housing also questioned the suit’s racial discrimination claim. Lindenthal’s initial reaction was that she thought low-income Latinos have resources they can use.
“I think it’s very safe to say that the majority of our clients are Latino and from Gilroy,” Lindenthal said.
Gilroy not the first city sued
Gilroy is not the first city these law firms have sued over affordable housing practices. Others in the Bay Area include Fremont, Alameda, Napa, Pittsburg in Contra Costa County, Corte Madera in Marin County and several places in Sonoma County, Marcantonio said.
Such cases rarely make it to trial; most of those named above resulted in settlements, he said.
These types of racial discrimination suits often don’t go to trial, either, but Marcantonio wouldn’t speculate on this case.
“As land-use discrimination cases go, this is a very strong one,” he said.
Under federal and state fair housing laws, Marcantonio said he and his fellow advocate lawyers do not have to prove that city officials intended to discriminate against Latinos – only that unfair racial treatment was an effect of the city’s policies.
Breaking the law knowingly?
The suit claims Gilroy knowingly is violating state law with its current policies. It says the state Department of Housing and Community Development told the city in March 2002 that the housing element of its general plan failed to meet state requirements for affordable housing, but the City Council approved the housing element in June 2002 without making the requested changes.
Faus said this is inaccurate. The state did not respond before the Council approved the housing element, but Council approved it with the condition that it could be changed for future state comment. The state has sent two letters requesting revisions, and Faus said the city is complying.
The legal advocates say they gave city officials plenty of chances to fix the perceived problem months ago. They sent several letters, they said, the last one 90 days ago, saying they would consider a lawsuit if remedies hadn’t begun in 60 days. Zahradka said he and other lawyers also met in person with Faus and two other city planners on Feb. 13.
The alleged problems
First, the suit says the city has not zoned enough land for new rental housing yet have zoned large tracts for expensive homes. With the average home price hovering around $500,000, many Gilroyans can only afford to rent.
The first thing the city should do, according to lawyer James Zahradka of the Public Interest Law Firm, is identify sites appropriate for affordable rental housing and zone them that way.
“Typically, these suits are settled when the city says, ‘OK, we’ll rezone sites,’ ” Marcantonio said.
Second, the city’s growth-control ordinance requires too many hoops for developers of affordable homes to jump through, Marcantonio and Zahradka said. The many procedural steps, including architectural reviews, require time and money many developers don’t have.
The lawyers aren’t saying Gilroy should do away with a growth ordinance – rather that city officials should make sure it doesn’t adversely impact affordable housing. In fact, Zahradka said, the anti-sprawl Greenbelt Alliance is “one of our partners in this.”
“Of course we’re not in favor of uncontrolled sprawl,” Zahradka said.
While for-profit developers have reserved many of the city’s housing permits for the next 10 years, 530 allowances, all dedicated to affordable units, remain unclaimed.
South County Housing wants to build these at some point, but it may take a couple of years to raise the money, Lindenthal said.
“It requires a lot of subsidies to make affordable housing, and in any community it takes a lot of time to do it,” Lindenthal said.
Zahradka said that if the reason the city can’t get enough affordable housing is that non-profits don’t have the money, then the city should start “pounding the pavement” looking for federal and state funding.
“They don’t have to fund it themselves, but they do have to facilitate it,” Zahradka said.
Another part of the problem, Marcantonio said, is that no city land is zoned for more than 16 units per acre, and only eight acres are zoned that dense. Furthermore, Zahradka said, Gilroy does not offer developers as many high-density bonuses as the state requires. Higher-density zoning is needed to allow more affordable units, he said.
