Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Doris Sinclair moved from Cedar Village last Friday. Her daughter, Faun Clark, came from
Washington state to help her.

Eviction of seniors on hold

By Anne Gelhaus

Last week's scheduled eviction of the elderly tenants of Cedar Village has been postponed until a municipal court judge rules on a claim of possession filed by one resident.

The approximately 50 tenants of the low-cost housing development on Parr Avenue received five-day eviction notices on Jan. 25. Orrin Grover, an attorney for Cedar Village Inc., went to court on Jan. 30--the day the tenants were due to be removed--to ask for a stay of eviction.

Santa Clara County Municipal Court Judge Virginia Mae Days agreed to grant the stay on the condition that the management company pay $5,000 in back rent owed to Cedar Village's owners, Capri Associates of Castro Valley, by noon the next day.

Although this rent wasn't paid, Grover said, the eviction is still on hold because one tenant filed a claim of possession, asserting that Cedar Village residents have the right to remain in their homes. Grover said the claim is due to be heard in municipal court later this week. By the time this claim was filed, however, Grover said about half of Cedar Village's 50 residents had already made arrangements to relocate.

Despite the fact that Cedar Villages management is taking steps toward closing down the facility, officials at the state Department of Social Services have said the department will continue to seek the revocation of the residential care home's licence, if only to get it on the record. The department is taking this action in light of numerous resident care issues, including serious medication errors.

"The people with families are the ones who've already moved," Grover said. "They don't want to wait around and see what happens."

Other tenants, however, were trying to find similar low-cost housing in the area, without much success.

"My mom's on SSI [Supplemental Security Income], and every place that would take her is filled up," said Starr Sinclair, whose 92-year-old mother, Doris, has lived at Cedar Village for three years. "She's been ill for days because this is so upsetting to her."

Sinclair is particularly upset that Cedar Village's management waited until the last minute before starting eviction proceedings.

Dan Davini, manager of Capri Associates, said he sat down with the managers immediately after his firm bought the property at a foreclosure sale last June, and they agreed to close down the facility. Davini said his firm filed an official eviction notice in October.

"They refused to pass that on [to the tenants] and have since done some obscene legal maneuvering to keep possession and to keep collecting rent without paying us any," Davini said, adding that there was rent past due when Capri Associates bought the property.

Sinclair said that when she asked Cedar Village's management why they waited to tell tenants about the eviction notice, they told her that they did not want to upset the tenants.

"We could have been prepared," she said. "I think they were afraid of losing money because everyone would have bailed out."

Grover countered that the managers were caught in a three-way dispute over who actually held title to the land and that Davini refused to provide proof of ownership.

"They say we're the bad guys because we didn't kick them out months ago," Grover added.

But Davini said it was never his intention to evict the tenants if they had nowhere else to go.

"We've said the whole time that we're not going to have the operators forcibly removed if they continue to make progress toward closing the place down," he added.

While Davini said constructing luxury condominiums at the Cedar Villages site is an option, he added that town code requires that whatever is built there must provide senior housing and that a certain percentage of the units must be priced at below-market rates.

"Whatever's done," he added, "a substantial amount of money is going to have to be spent on renovations."