On August 12, Sacramento City Councilmember Phil Pluckebaum attended a community meeting at the region’s two largest housing projects, some 751 units in all. There, local officials said it would cost a staggering $1 billion or more to fix the 80-year-old public housing complex of brick buildings off Broadway. That’s right. A billion.
This complex that has gone by many names over the years — Seavey Circle, Alder Grove and Marina Vista.
If the billion-dollar price tag to fix it is accurate, this has to be the first public housing project in the Sacramento region, or perhaps anywhere in California, where the renovation cost would top $1 million per unit. Following the meeting, Pluckebaum reached out and asked the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, overseer of this project, one basic question — why?
“I’ve gotten no responses to any of my inquiries about cost,” Pluckebaum said in a recent interview.
One of the buildings in the Alder Grove public housing complex off Broadway on Thursday. A recent report by SHRA estimates renovations to Marina Vista and Alder Grove could exceed $1 billion.
Sacramento-area governments have long been focused on the ongoing homeless crisis, and rightly so, with an estimated 4,000 souls on the streets on any given night. But with only so much capacity for attention and action, less has centered on the condition of existing public housing that keeps residents living on the financial edge from falling into homelessness.
Some of Sacramento’s public housing has decayed to the point of costing an astronomical figure to fix. The solution, for now, appears to be to ignore the problem for as long as possible.
“It is kind of hard to breathe in these units,” said Angel Thomas, a 36-year-old hospice worker and mother of three. She has to remove the vent screen on the floor outlet of her second-story bedroom to get any circulation of air to her family. Most of the wooden cabinets in the kitchen have no knobs. Her bathroom walls have small holes from a mold test by maintenance two years ago, the results never disclosed.
The complex is part of the city’s New Helvetia historic district. Tucked off Broadway near Interstate 5, it feels like a land that time forgot. Garbage bags spill from full dumpsters. In Thomas’ unit, stains show how the upstairs bathroom has leaked through to the ceiling below. “I replaced my own toilet by myself,” she said.
Broken kitchen cabinet doors are among the repairs that Angel Thomas, a resident at the Alder Grove complex off Broadway, said need attention on Thursday. A recent report by SHRA estimates renovations to Marina Vista and Alder Grove could exceed $1 billion.
SHRA is governed by two different political bodies, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and the Sacramento City Council. This sounds like a lot of oversight. But in practice, the reality is precisely the opposite.
For decades, supervisors and council members have not met together to jointly oversee SHRA. Instead, they have tried to manage the agency separately. That has been a recipe for failure. And it helps to explain why, month after month, a slow-moving disaster like Marina Vista/Alder Grove never gets the public attention it deserves.
“I think if you saw how folks were living there, the community would be pretty disappointed that that’s the condition that we’re asking folks to accept in exchange for public housing,” Pluckebaum said.
This complex has a storied history embedded in what can only be described as some institutional Sacramento racism.
What was then called Seavey Circle was built predominantly for retiring white members of the military at the successful conclusion of the second world war. But Sacramento’s first Black attorney, Nathaniel Colley, filed a successful court challenge to integrate the complex. This historic victory for the city’s Black community has long since devolved into one of the most downtrodden neighborhoods in all of Sacramento.
“They aren’t going to fix anything here,” Thomas said.
Angel Thomas, a resident at the Alder Grove complex off Broadway, on Thursday said her bath tub has been leaking and has created black mold on the floor without being replaced. A recent report by SHRA estimates renovations to Marina Vista and Alder Grove could exceed $1 billion.
SHRA did not respond to a request by the Bee to interview the interim executive director, James Shield. But the agency did respond to a request for records about the billion-dollar cost estimate. Basically, SHRA spit-balled this figure based on the cost of other projects recently completed in the city. “Those numbers were not based off an official study or estimate,” SHRA housing manager Mark Hamilton said in an internal email on Oct. 1.
There has been talk over the years of a complete rebuild of Alder Grove and Marina Vista. Pluckebaum remembers an idea nearly a decade ago to build new structures between the existing ones. But it went nowhere.
“SHRA staff told me that there was a time they had as many as six full-time maintenance workers,” Pluckebaum said. “And now they’re down to two.”
The city and county created SHRA in 1982 in an era of far more abundant funds for both redevelopment and housing. State redevelopment funds have all but evaporated, a legislative cutback mandated by then-governor Jerry Brown. Funds to build and maintain complexes such as this haven’t kept pace with inflation either.
Yet now SHRA, fortunately, is under the microscope. Supervisors have commissioned an independent review of the agency. Long-time Executive Director La Shelle Dozier has retired rather than stick around to see what this audit finds. And on Tuesday, supervisors and city mayors hold the rarest of joint meetings to discuss next steps on homelessness and if there are better ways to govern together.
“Even though we are housed,” said Thomas, “we need a little more help.”
The latest SHRA annual budget has the word “accomplishment” in it 20 times, as if the state of public housing in Sacramento were something other than a humanitarian and financial crisis. On any given day, the true state of public housing in Sacramento is now obscured by a homeless crisis.
It would take a united front by the city and the county, in repeated meetings together, to slowly turn things around at SHRA. That seems as likely to happen as a billion dollars falling from the sky.
Angel Thomas, a resident at the Alder Grove public housing complex off Broadway, on Thursday moved her bed, where she says a broken vent is located that hasn’t been fixed. A recent report by SHRA estimates renovations to Marina Vista and Alder Grove could exceed $1 billion.