The Cupertino Courier

Cover Story

Photograph by Daniel Sato

Some low- and very low income people who live alone are spared homelessness thanks to facilities such as Borregas Court, a privately-owned complex of furnished studio apartments. For others, an affordable roof overhead remains a distant dream.

Affordable? Housing

Many wait in vain for homes and apartments they can afford in expensive Cupertino

By Jason Goldman-Hall

When the affordable apartment complex Esther Desantiago lived in was converted into condominiums, she thought it meant she and her daughter Charissa Lopez would have to move out of Cupertino.

That would have meant leaving the community she grew up in and pulling her daughter out of Eton Elementary School.

But thanks to Cupertino Community Services' own affordable apartments, Desantiago and her daughter are still Cupertino residents, enjoying all the city has to offer.

"The whole reason why I'm living in Cupertino is for the school district for my daughter," Desantiago said.

Desantiago--a Santa Clara leasing consultant who makes around $40,000 annually--lives in one of the 24 affordable housing units in Vista Village, adjacent to and run by Cupertino Community Services.

She and her daughter are among the lucky ones.

"Because I'm in the industry, I see a lot of people having to leave the area because of housing," she said.

For thousands of other Santa Clara County residents, rent--even for many "affordable" housing units--can be out of reach. The growing need for shelter is rapidly outpacing the supply.

"Housing is very important," said Cupertino Community Services Housing Services program director Jacquey Carey. "It's critical in fact for the people who work in supermarkets or hardware stores, the places that provide services that our community needs."

When the federal minimum wage was created in 1938, the goal was to make sure that even the lowest-paid employees could make enough to live on.

In Santa Clara County, a minimum wage employee makes $14,040 a year. That's barely two-thirds of what is considered "extremely low income," and not enough to afford a single-bedroom apartment in an area where the average rent on those units is around $1,200 a month, according to CCS' counterpart Sunnyvale Community Services.

As a result, county homeless shelters are full, affordable housing is missing its funding mark by $2.4 billion dollars, and an estimated 50,000 people are playing what could be a decades-long waiting game for subsidized housing.

Cupertino, like San Jose and the rest of Santa Clara County, is caught in a tug-of-war between demand for low-cost housing for needy families and the potential profits developers can make by selling full-price homes in a high-demand area.

Section 8 hopefuls

During the week of April 24, hundreds of local residents turned out at the NOVA

CONNECT! office in Sunnyvale to get Section 8 applications or sign up online to get on the waiting list for subsidized housing.

Victoria Bell was already standing in line at 8 a.m. with more than 25 other people when the office opened its doors.

Bell--a recovering addict proud of four clean years--is hoping to use part of her $549.05 monthly earnings for rent, but in an area where the average rent is more than $1,000, she won't be able to do it without generous government help. A Section 8 voucher, she said, "would help me in a lot of ways. It would help me get stable and get custody of my kids."

Section 8 is one of the best chances for low-income residents. After accepted participants pay one-third of their monthly income as rent, the county pays the rest using federal Housing and Urban Development funds. The waiting list has not been open since 1999.

"I think it's a good thing that they opened the list back up, because it gives people a chance to get themselves stable, to get off the streets, and people really need that," Bell said. "I'm just praying that I get picked."

But without enough funding and houses, Section 8 and the myriad other affordable housing and subsidy programs can't hope to match the present demand.

According to Housing Authority executive director Alex Sanchez, 59,644 people signed up online by the April 28 deadline, and another 15,000 mail-in applications were received by May 1. More applications postmarked by the deadline were expected to come in, raising the total to more than 75,000 applicants in Santa Clara County alone.

The Housing Authority estimates 100 vouchers turn over every month, so it can help about 1,200 new families every year. At that rate, it will take more than 62 years to serve the people who signed up.

The stiff housing market and general lack of funding in Santa Clara County has left the poor and homeless with precious few housing units. And until political and social priorities change, those close to the problem say it's unlikely that trend will change.

Dissecting a dilemma

Carey said one of the problems is the huge gap between the income of a minimum wage worker--as many of her clients are--and the median income in the area.

For a person making the federal minimum wage of $6.75 an hour for 2080 hours of work--40-hour weeks for 52 weeks--that's just $14,040 before taxes.

Even for trained, experienced workers who make more than minimum wage, the high cost of housing--$600,000 or more for most homes in the area--makes "affordable" housing unaffordable.

Even the affordable housing offered by Cupertino Community Services is $825 a month for a single bedroom home, and $975 for a two-bedroom unit.

Carey said the high cost of housing is a problem for Cupertino because the very things that make the city attractive to business--quality schools, strong communities, access to services--rely on working people to provide, and as housing gets unaffordable, those people leave the area.

"We're all in this together; we're all dependent on each other," Carey said.

Carey said CCS is lucky it's able to provide 12,000 square feet of affordable housing for the community, because it puts people in direct contact with their services.

"It's helped me get on my feet," Desantiago said. "As soon as I get all my bills paid off, I'm going to start saving, and maybe buy my own place."

Searching for solutions

In addition to providing its own affordable housing, Cupertino Community Services also works with the city to administer the below-market rate housing program.

Cupertino requires 15 percent of the homes built in new developments to be sold below market rate, which can help families with moderate income--80 percent to 120 percent of the area median income--purchase homes.

The waiting list to get BMR units is contained in a two-inch thick binder on one of Carey's office desks. The binder--packed with blue and pink applications--is filled with applications from people who hope to get one of the 60 new BMR units being built in the next year in Cupertino.

But with Cupertino and Santa Clara County's continued growth, those homes--which do not serve the low, very low or extremely low income brackets, are not enough to meet the demand.

To meet that demand, Carey said the many groups working on the housing problem need to come together.

"I'd like to see more partnerships between nonprofits to provide more home ownership opportunities," she said.

There are a number of hurdles that must be overcome for affordable housing to be built anywhere in Santa Clara County; money is just the biggest.

But in addition to serving a needy population, more affordable housing can save money for cash-strapped cities.

Marjorie Matthews, director of the Santa Clara County Office of Affordable Housing, said it costs approximately $16,000 a year to house a homeless person, but it can cost a city more than $60,000 to provide the medical and incarceration fees someone can accumulate living on the streets.

"If we can't appeal to people on the basis of ending human suffering, we try to appeal to them on the basis of not wasting taxpayer dollars," Matthews said.

In addition to money, Matthews says adequate affordable housing would require high-density construction in urban areas because of the close proximity to health services, transportation and jobs. But many local governments avoid high-density buildings in deference to constituents who dislike the idea of crowded city centers.

"It's going to take political courage on the part of elected officials who have power over zoning," Matthews said.

Matthews said she is hopeful things can change for the better, given enough time, city participation and political pressure. Agencies around Santa Clara County are watching the process as anxiously as she is.

"In any crisis--and I would call housing a crisis in the state of California--you need to keep working at the problem and keep plugging away," Carey said.