(Photo: POOR Magazine family (With Vivian fighting for the rights of all of us poor families in Amerikkka)
In 2006 after nearly four years being homeless and living five years in public housing in Oakland, CA, I moved with my children from East Oakland to the University Avenue Cooperative Homes (UACH) in Berkeley, CA, a non-profit affordable housing cooperative that was founded by low-income Berkeley residents in 1982 with a tenant-run Board of Directors. UACH was an affordable housing cooperative with HUD funding that requires only 30% rent cost. This allowed me to have the sole ability to afford a place to live with my children, even at times when I may be unemployed. I felt secure with this housing and although I was not crazy about The John Stewart Company managing UACH, the on-site manager has always been good with all of us tenants at UACH.
In addition, UACH was a cooperative that we were supposed to be paying into with ‘shares’ as part-owner of the co-op, however this program is no longer in existence as of July 1st, 2012. Why? UACH had quietly been ‘sold’ to a Berkeley-based non-profit organization called ‘Resources for Community Development’ (RCD), who has already began to change everything in a very arbitrary way. At the end of the day, it is really not in the best interest of the tenants at UACH at all.
In October 2011, when I received a formal letter from The John Stewart Company, saying that UACH’s 20-year HUD funding was going to expire and that they would be offering us tenants the option of being given a Section-8 voucher. Me and the other tenants didn’t know nor hear anything about RCD purchasing our housing cooperative until the transaction was already done. RCD quietly bought UACH in January 2012. All of us UACH tenants would not find out about the RCD buy-out until RCD sent us a letter around June 1st, inviting us to attend a ‘meet and greet’ meeting with them at our housing site on June 16th.
At the June 16th meeting, (which was not much of a ‘greet’), representatives from RCD addressed us tenants with a very passive-aggressive approach, telling everyone who was in attendance that they (RCD) had to make a very quick decision by both July 1st and 25th to get ‘tax credits’ from the Government/HUD to rehabilitate all of the housing infrastructure at UACH. They also told us that our original lease is no longer valid, that UACH, who obviously went defunct, as University Homes Incorporated went belly-up after they were unable to come up with money to pay back a 1.8 million dollar balloon loan that UACH had since 1982. A representative from the City of Berkeley was in attendance, doing his best to convince us that this transition was a great opportunity for us. What he didn’t tell us is that the City of Berkeley only pays $1.00 a year for the parcel our housing cooperative sets on. RCD also told us that we would have to deal with UACH to get back any of our ‘shares’.
How can any of the UACH tenants get back their ‘shares’ (money that tenants invested into UACH, as everyone was told that they were ‘part owners’ when they moved in, including me…) when UACH no longer exists? We also were told that we would have to pay a ‘new deposit’ as well. We were also told that there would be a lot of construction done on all of the UACH units with some units needing more work, so we would be temporarily displaced out of our units for any amount of time from 15 days to 4 months. However, I heard that it would be more like 6 months. Also, all of us tenants, who would be temporarily displaced would be required to live in semi-sleezy hotels along San Pablo Avenue and still have to pay full rent costs, which my rent is nearly market-rate these days. In addition, our tenant-run Board of Directors was forced to dissolve. We have lost all of our cooperative tenant rights now. We were also told by RCD that we are no longer a ‘cooperative’ any more. We are now just ‘tenants’.
This has become a nightmare for me and many other tenants at UACH. We feel disenfranchised and disrespected, not being given due process in a timely manner, so that we would be more informed on this issue. I feel like I have been hit in the face with hot oil. I am also very concerned about some of the other tenants; very elderly communities who have lived here for many years and the severely disabled communities who are unable to physically hold and/or read the letters and continuous 72-hour notices RCD keep taping to our door knobs. Many of us tenants find RCD’s continuous ‘visits’ to our units invasive. I suspect that RCD might be violating ADA laws, as many tenants were not present on that Saturday morning on June 16th, with only ten of us present at that meeting. There are over 140 tenants living at UACH in Berkeley.
RCD, UACH, The John Stewart Company and the City of Berkeley are keeping everything secret from the media. RCD claims that the dissolution of UACH in Berkeley is not connected to the recent issue with Berkeley Housing Authority’s co-ops being bought out. RCD is one of the local Bay Area-based non-profit housing development companies that is setting a new trend in the way affordable housing is defined. I work in Berkeley as an Advocate, helping very low-income communities with housing resources and I can truly say that RCD, along with The John Stewart Company and Affordable Housing Associates make it very difficult to house very low-income communities.
RCD has set a ‘minimum income’ requirement at nearly all of their housing sites with rent costs starting out at over $750.00 a month. This excludes most poor communities, who are unable to afford that type of rent cost on very limited income. This is not affordable housing. I do not know what other rabbits RCD will pull out of their hat next, as they have shown disregard for us tenants at UACH, many who have lived here since it was built in 1982. Berkeley is definitely on a trend of GENTRIFICATION and CLASS GENOCIDE, making all of their so-called affordable housing ‘unaffordable’, inadvertently discriminating on low-income communities of color with forced displacement through draconian policies to profiteer on, such as the recently proposed ‘Sit & Lie’ law in a so-called liberal city (Berkeley). I do not feel welcomed here anymore… Affordable housing in Berkeley is nothing but a myth of ‘lies in disguise’.