How to Stay Put When You Can't Afford Your Own Neighborhood

Photo by ColorBlind Images/Getty Images

Everywhere 66-year-old San Francisco bartender Lucille Lawrence looks, she sees a roller coaster of change in her neighborhood. That old Coca-Cola plant on the corner? It’s the site of new luxury condos. The Hunters Point naval shipyard, dormant for decades? It’s being redeveloped into a collection of home (accommodating 10,000), retail and office space, along with 300 acres of open space. Most people would see those as positive changes, but it’s not so easy to take that view when you’re looking at it from across the bay, where you were forced to move because of skyrocketing rents. “For every new building going up in the city,” says Lawrence, “I wonder who can afford to go in there.”

Many longtime city dwellers are wondering the same thing. After a lifetime spent putting down roots in their neighborhood, gentrification is forcing them out. Sure, the big news lately has been the plummeting real estate market, but housing prices in certain popular urban neighborhoods more than doubled this past decade and are still near record highs. Older residents who can no longer afford to stay in their homes are being pushed to move in with friends or family in faraway places, or into nursing homes or shelters, often outside their neighborhoods and even outside city lines.

“We’ve created a trail of tears and made people move away from where they want to live,” says William L. Minnix Jr., CEO of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA).

Fortunately, nonprofit organizations are stepping in to help stem the tide of older citizens being squeezed out of their communities. According to AAHSA, there has been a 30 percent increase of nonprofits developing low-income housing for older residents nationwide since 1993. And although there are no hard numbers on how many of the nonprofits are addressing the needs of veteran urbanites, advocates say more and more projects focus their efforts there.

For instance, Presbyterian Villages of Michigan, which for many years had been developing affordable housing for older residents of all faiths everywhere in the state except Detroit, today has more construction in the Motor City than anywhere else. Its creation of 112 one-bedroom apartments at the Village of Brush Park Paradise Valley even anticipated the commercial development of the midtown neighborhood, which now boasts the professional sports stadiums Comerica Park and Ford Field. And on Baltimore’s west side, Enterprise Community Partners, a developer of low-income housing, recently opened an energy-efficient, 80-unit apartment house on the site of an old dairy. “Without this, none of these seniors would be able to live in the neighborhood,” says Stockton Williams, an Enterprise senior vice president and chief strategy officer. “There is very little affordable housing of any kind.”

No place like home

Lucille Lawrence discovered there wasn’t much in her Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, either. Though you can hear a hint of a Louisiana drawl when she speaks, she has been a proud inhabitant of San Francisco for most of her life. She cheers on the Giants, marvels at the team’s ballpark by the water, and enjoys attending Cirque de Soleil when it passes through town. “I truly love this city,” she says. “I like the culture, all the things that are going on, and even the weather.”

Bayview-Hunters Point in southeast San Francisco was a solid working-class neighborhood, where Lawrence served drinks to many of the workers at the naval shipyard. But when the shipyard was shuttered in 1986, other jobs began to vanish as well, and the neighborhood became a tougher part of town. Lawrence didn’t mind. “It was kind of rough in a sense, downtrodden,” she says. “But I always saw people I stopped to talk to.”

Then, like many neglected urban areas throughout the country, Bayview-Hunters Point began to make a slow comeback. But along with the new condos, cafes, restaurants and parks, housing prices in the neighborhood also started to shoot up. In fact, they climbed faster than any other area of the city, with single-family homes going from an average of $129,000 in 1996 to $570,000 today, according to the real estate information firm DataQuick.

Lawrence welcomed many of her neighbors, until she received an unwelcome rent increase from her landlord that she couldn’t pay. “I had been there 15 years without a rent increase, and all of a sudden they wanted to double the rent,” she says. “I was very shocked and disappointed.”

She looked around for another place within her budget, of course, but no luck. So she moved west, over to Oakland, to rent a small room for $300 a month in her boss’s house. Aside from not having any privacy—her “roommates” included her boss’s two sons, age 15 and 2—the move disrupted her sense of well-being. “I was a long way from my train, and it wasn’t so safe over there,” she says. “But at the time, it was the only thing I could afford.”

‘Competing with high-end developers’

While keeping people like Lawrence in their neighborhoods certainly enhances the quality of life for them, it’s also better for communities, where the urban mosaic is enriched by a diversity of ages. “Part of our broader mission is not only housing needs,” says Williams. “In many communities, seniors are essential to the fabric and memory and sense of place of those neighborhoods.”

In the past, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funded most public housing, but its inflation-adjusted budget has fallen roughly 60 percent since 1979. So it is up to nonprofit organizations to fill the gap.

One such group is BRIDGE Housing. It has worked in the San Francisco area since 1983 to prevent lifelong residents from being pushed out, and has helped construct more than 13,000 homes, serving more than 35,000 low-income residents, including older people.

Succeeding in San Francisco’s hot real estate market is not easy. “There is no housing slump in San Francisco,” says BRIDGE’s CEO, Carol J. Galante. “In order to provide more options for seniors, we’re competing with high-end developers for the same land.” The only way BRIDGE can afford to do that is by creatively combining federal tax credits with a mix of city, state and private dollars to get the job done.

The Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood is a good example. BRIDGE discovered a plot of land across the street from an existing senior health care center, not far from Lawrence’s old home. The place was also along a major bus route, which is a big help for those who no longer drive.

The organization moved to buy and develop the property, naming the 54-apartment building the Geraldine Johnson Manor, after an African American trade unionist active in the city in the 1950s. “It was kind of a no-brainer,” says Philip Williams, director of development for BRIDGE. “It was such an ideal location.”

‘I kissed the floor’

No one knew how perfect the location was better than Lawrence. Across the bay, she heard about the development from a barfly and jumped at the chance to return to her old neighborhood. Federal guidelines require that affordable-housing residents contribute 30 percent of their incomes to rent. Such a deal was attractive to an exiled resident like Lawrence, who had income from her bartending job, but not much else. “As a bartender, I do pretty good in tips, but they don’t count for Social Security,” she says. “So that means I don’t have a lot of security.”

She traveled to the complex, filled out an application and a few months later received one of the coveted units with a kitchen, living room and bedroom, all for just $331 a month. By comparison, the average rent in San Francisco for a one-bedroom apartment is currently more than $2,000 per month. “I literally got down and kissed the floor,” Lawrence says. “I was so happy to get my own place.”

Today, Lawrence once again enjoys having a pharmacy close to her house, eating at her local soul food restaurant and breathing in that familiar and comfortable chilly wind that courses through the neighborhood. Her housing complex also features such amenities as a communal roof deck where she reads the paper amid fresh potted flowers. And her new home is along the bus route that takes her directly to her job, unlike West Oakland, where she had to take a subway and then walk to work or hitch a ride from others. “I no longer have to depend on anybody for rides,” she says. “And I get to visit my aunt who lives nearby.”

Lawrence got to return home, but the competition for real estate is still making it difficult for others to do so. Currently, for instance, BRIDGE is finishing a new complex across the street from Lawrence’s home. It has twice the number of apartments but it costs four times more than the Geraldine Johnson development, which opened in 1999. “We had to pay top dollar for that site,” says Galante. “Because if we did not, people won’t be able to live here affordably.”

Given the current economic situation and mortgage crisis, new and creative ideas are necessary to ease housing issues for older Americans. “We need new ways to bring public and private resources to seniors, to improve the quality of life and living conditions,” Stockton Williams says. “We have to keep the lifeblood of our neighborhoods.”

Warren Cohen, former Midwest correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.