HealthyCal.org

Foreclosed and vacant homes draw illegal dumping

By Julia Landau

They come in trucks, on foot, in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, slipping into the alleyway running behind 7th St. in the Iron Triangle section of Richmond, and leaving behind bags of garbage, construction debris, and just about anything too big to fit into an average trash can. Nineteen-year-old Gabriela Delfina lives with her family on this block, one of the city’s hotspots for illegal garbage dumping. If Richmond Code Enforcement makes a pick up, residents say, the trash is replaced—sometimes within the hour.

Vacant, unsecured houses transform the blocks into informal garbage drop-off sites for people don’t want to pay to unloading at the city dump. And the illegal dumpers usually get away with it.

Neighbors living along this alley say the fact of garbage staining their view is nothing new, but the housing crisis in the last five years has intensified the blight. Richmond residents and advocates say foreclosed homes make it open season on alleyways like Delfina’s. “There are three abandoned homes connected to this alleyway,” said Delfina, pointing to a small, burned out house—and a sea of garbage up to chest-level that sits in the back driveway.

“If you’d see the tonnage of trash we pick up every day, you’d be amazed,” said Tim Higares, Code Enforcement Manager for the Richmond Police Department.

The city’s Code Enforcement unit is responsible for controlling the nuisance of neighborhood garbage pileup, and other safety and health hazards. But consensus has built that cleaning up the garbage is not enough, because pick-ups can’t keep pace with the frequency of dumping.

“The first time I visited one of these hotspots,” said Higares, who started working on illegal dumping two years ago, “the abatement crew had cleared this street at 8 a.m. and by the time we returned at 10, there were fresh piles of trash.”

John Adams, an organizer with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, said foreclosures have played a role in the unsightly decline of some neighborhoods. “The banks have not been good community partners,” said Adams, saying that houses fallen into disrepair, or without proper fencing, are magnets for illegal dumping.

In 2008, the California legislature enacted Senate Bill 1137 as a measure to “address adverse effects of the state’s high foreclosure rate.” Among other things, the bill requires that buyers of vacant, foreclosed homes maintain the exteriors, under penalty of $1,000 a day for up to 30 days.

If the owner of a property doesn’t pay the fine, it becomes a lien attached to the property—and the next buyer has pick up the tab. But the work of keeping the garbage at bay and tracking down violators has overwhelmed city agencies.

Eunice Booker, 74, has lived in her Iron Triangle home for 23 years. She says she's been trying for years to get Code Enforcement to fence off the alley to keep people from bringing their trash to her backyard.

Residents, meanwhile, do their best to monitor the alley and shoo away interlopers.

Eunice Booker has lived in the house that borders the alley’s entrance for 20 years. “It’s worse now than it used to be,” said the 74-year-old community activist. “I been telling them just close the alley—they say they need the alley in case the fire department needs it, but it’s just people running from the police cutting through here.”

Residents whose homes adjoin the alley, said Gabriela Delfina, are tired of having to step in trash every time they go out their back doors. So they push the trash that scattered through the alley into a pile, consolidating it into a yard or driveway of an abandoned house.

“I see all kinds of people doing it, people who you wouldn’t think would be dumping,” said Delfina. “I saw an old lady cutting through the alley with a trash bag over her shoulder and—plop—she just dropped it. Didn’t stop.”

Delfina says she plays with her four year-old nephew out front, avoiding whatever garbage might have landed that day.

“We pretty much don’t go to the backyard,” Gabriela says. “The trash, we don’t know what’s in it. It could be chemicals or drugs in there, so it’s pretty much just the dogs back there.”

The Delfinas and their neighbors have gotten used to living with other people’s waste. About three years ago, someone ditched several oilcans in the alley behind the Delfina home. Some of the cans tipped over, spilling barrels of oil into their backyard. A laborious family cleanup effort and an entirely new soil foundation have rid the trace of oil, but Mr. Delfina won’t grow vegetables there like he used to.

Code Enforcement teams can pick up street trash, but to clean out a property, they need the titleholder’s permission or a warrant from the court. The paperwork slows the process down significantly, especially with the housing market in brutal stagnation.

A preventive approach would require community effort, funds, and inter-agency coordination. Currently, Higares says, “the role of abatement crew is reactive; they just pick up,” he said.

That’s why Higares wants to train the abatement crew—a staff that picks up illegal dumping—to help target the violators. “At the moment, the abatement crew is a reactive unit,” said Higares. “What we’re trying to do is train the crews to think about it from an enforcement perspective,” by looking for evidence in the rubble to track down culprits.

The waste he picks up ranges from daily household trash to old furniture and appliances, but the amount of landscaping and construction debris suggests a petty profit scheme—that people hired to clean out houses will skip the fines at the city dump, unload the waste in a residential alley, and pocket the extra money.

Higares wants to start getting aggressive in prosecuting the dumping, partnering with police and city prosecutors to send a strong deterrent. Beyond a fine for illegal dumping, violators are charged with community service. “[Violators] come out with me on trash pick ups,” said Higares, “and if they don’t show, there will be a warrant for arrest, and then they’ll do jail time.”

The city has purchased three specialized surveillance cameras, hoping to install them in hotspots to intimidate dumpers. The portable camera units react to motion with bright lights and loud sounds. Higares thinks the commotions caused by the cameras will act as a deterrent.

The problem, Higares said, is bigger than trash. “If we deal with the blight, it will curtail the other illegal things going on,” Higares said. “We need to find a way to turn these alleys back over to the homeowners.”

A newly purchased Oakland Community Land Trust Home

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

“Hello!” Anne Griffith called out as she unlocked the front door of a recently purchased home in the Elmhurst neighborhood of East Oakland. Though the house was purchased in foreclosure, and has stood empty for months, Griffith expected an answer to her call. She got one.

“Hello, who’s there!” a man’s voice demanded from a back bedroom as Griffith swung open the door. “The owner,” Griffith shot back.

The man left sheepishly, though evidence of his stay remained in the thick cigarette smoke that hung in the air. The squatter is just one of the challenges involved in purchasing and renovating foreclosed homes in the neighborhood, said Griffith. She’s the executive director of the Oakland Community Land Trust, or OakCLT, which owns the home. There’s also graffiti, stolen copper and years of neglect to overcome before putting the houses back on the market. Once renovations are finished, there’s also the challenge of selling it: finding owners who’d like to live in the East Oakland neighborhood.

Land trusts have been around for decades, Griffith said, but are often unfamiliar to prospective homebuyers in Oakland. Trusts purchase homes, usually homes abandoned by their owners, in an effort to revive low-income areas and provide low-income people with stable housing. After buying and rehabilitating the houses, land trusts sell the homes—but not the land beneath the house—to low-income buyers.

The land continues to belong to the trust, and the homeowner pays a lease fee. The house belongs to the owners like any other home, and can be passed onto children or sold. When the home is sold, owners make a profit based on formula connected to the rate of inflation, but are guaranteed a return of at least two percent. The land trust will then sell the home to another low-income buyer.

OakCLT formed in 2009 to deal with the increasing number of foreclosures in Oakland that followed the financial crisis of 2008.

Fireplace in a newly renovated land trust home.

The house in Elmhurst is one of ten that the land trust owns in the neighborhood. Shortly after the trust formed, they got a grant from HUD, and started purchasing foreclosed homes in targeted areas called neighborhood stabilization zones. So far the trust has purchased 17 houses, six of which have been rehabbed and are ready for purchase.

They’ll sell for prices about 20 to 30 percent below market price, and the total monthly costs rival the rent on a comparable two-bedroom apartment, at about $1,127 a month.

No homes have sold yet, however, and only two are in contract with sellers. “Our big push is connecting with potential homebuyers,” Griffith said. That has been a challenge, because the land trust wants to make sure that buyers can afford the house, and many people interested in living in East Oakland don’t qualify for a mortgage.

Would-be buyers can’t make more that $45,100 for an individual or $64,000 for a family of four. But purchasers also need to show that they’ve been employed for at least two years, supply a down payment of around $4,500 and have good credit with no history of foreclosures.

“It’s a hard time for folks,” Griffith said. “It’s been an issue trying to qualify people. The folks who come to us with strong interest may not be ready to buy a house.” The OakCLT will work with families who don’t meet the requirements for purchase to improve their credit and save a down payment. In the meantime, however, the trust must carry the houses, which is expensive, Griffith said.

The expense of rehabilitating the homes is also daunting for the land trust. “The amount of work we do on houses is significantly more than market prices will bear,” Griffith said, “we do everything up to code.” The houses are rehabbed with an eye to future maintenance costs, and using energy effective materials like double-paned windows, but that increases renovation costs. The land trust, Griffith said, improves the houses to a standard not required of other investors and homeowners.

Attention to these details makes the difference between recently purchased and rehabbed homes dramatic. The smell of smoke was the least of the troubles at the land trust’s newly purchased home in Elmhurst. Missing windows, water damage, odd paint colors and a patina of dirt masked the home’s potential, and that list doesn’t count the problems that contractors will likely discover as they start renovations.

A land trust house nearby, however, one ready for new owners, has been returned to a better-than-original-state. The craftsman-style house would fit in well in Oakland’s tonier neighborhoods. The original floors have been carefully restored, the fireplace is flanked by original built-ins, and the kitchen is completely renovated. There’s no new paint smell, because no-VOC materials are the standard for land trust houses. Several locks and an alarm keep the house secure.

Despite the transformation, and the commitment to creating a stable community, few people attend the informational sessions for prospective homebuyers. A recent evening session drew just one family to meeting room at Eastmont Town Center in East Oakland. They listened attentively and asked a few questions that Griffith said were typical, about the leasing costs and whether or not they’d be able to pass their home onto their children.

Like most prospective buyers, they were unfamiliar with the land trust model. Yet their reasons wanting to buy a home would be familiar to anyone. “Ideally, we are looking to buy a home for stability,” said Claudia Mauricio, 37, holding her toddler-aged daughter on her lap as she watched the presentation for prospective buyers.

Stability is what the community wants for their neighborhood, too. “They want to turn the houses into homes,” Griffith said.

This video podcast from Public Health Law and Policy features local residents recalling the controversial history of redevelopment in west Oakland, where eminent domain abuse by public agencies in the 1950s and 60s resulted in the demolition of entire neighborhoods. The podcast also showcases a recent effort in Oakland in which the local redevelopment agency supported a community-led project to bring healthy food to the neighborhood.

Toody Maher outside of Pogo Park's Richmond office.

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

Toody Maher’s charge to renovate the Elm play lot in Richmond is a testament to perseverance. The small park sits on a corner in the Iron Triangle neighborhood, a low-income area that sees much of Richmond’s street violence. The play structure is a primary-colored island surrounded by grass and sidewalks with no pedestrians. On a recent sunny fall afternoon, the yellow and blue slide, built to beckon children, stood empty, the swings hung still. The only sign of life was an ice cream truck that drove by slowly, with a song playing hopefully from its loudspeaker.

Maher has fought for two years to change this small corner of a poor city’s poorest neighborhood through an organization she founded, Pogo Park. She’s learned to embrace the series of never-ending challenges involved in making a play space for the youngest residents of Richmond’s Iron Triangle.

“I call it a slow park,” Maher said. “You know, like slow food.” Maher spent two years securing money to renovate the park. Initially, Pogo Park won a city grant, money that was quickly lost when redevelopment funds dried up during the state budget crisis. Recently Maher’s perseverance was rewarded when the park won $2 million from the state for renovations in November.

Scale model of Elm play lot built by the Pogo Park team.

A detail of the scale model of Elm play lot.

Despite the infusion of money, however, Maher plans to stick with what she calls her slow park philosophy, developed over the two years she spent collaborating with residents to develop a vision of the park that worked for them.

Initially, Maher had a hard time adjusting to the slow pace. She lives in one of Richmond’s more affluent neighborhoods, sixteen blocks and a world away from the Elm play lot. Maher made her mark in business with knack her for spotting innovation, bringing Swatches to the United States in the 1980s and the clear telephone to the market in the 1990s. She was dismayed that Richmond parks didn’t encourage that kind of innovation in the low-income kids who are least likely to see their individuality and creativity fostered at school.

“They learn how to do testing in kindergarten,” Maher said. Better-off parents have the money and know how to supplement their children’s education if they feel it’s too rote or test-oriented, but low-income families don’t have these choices.

Parks can fill in this gap, Maher said. She wants Elm park to become a model for what she calls “super play,” a phrase that Pogo Park has trademarked. Rather than building more static play structures with slides and swings, Pogo Park has developed equipment that allows kids to experiment and imagine. The plastic slide will be replaced by multiple slides built into a huge hill of dirt. A tepee and a grizzly bear are just two of the play elements that will be placed around the new play lot, designed by the Pogo Park team of five Richmond residents.

A sketch of Elm play lot's new slide.

Resident involvement will make the Elm lot different from Richmond’s other parks, Maher said. The city has about 50 of them, mostly underused. Nevin Park, also in the Iron Triangle neighborhood, underwent a $3.7 million renovation in 2009 but is frequently empty. “Renovations don’t increase use,” Maher said.

The delays proved invaluable to understanding why renovations don’t translate into more people in the park, Maher said. She initially underestimated the depth of the problems facing the Iron Triangle. That’s a mistake would-be reformers sometimes make in Richmond, Maher said, describing residents as understandably cynical when she approached them with her ideas. This is how she describes residents’ initial response to her: “Nothing here has ever worked. You are a person selling dreams.”

Trust slowly accumulated, as Maher started working with residents on problems around the park. One of their first challenges seemed simple at first, removing the tennis shoes that hung from utility lines. The shoes told would-be buyers that drugs were for sale around the park. To residents, they were a reminder of the bleak underside of the neighborhood, a symbol of menace. Maher thought getting the shoes down would take a phone call to the city, so she made it. The city told her to call the utilities, and the utilities directed her back to the city.

“It was like a comedy of errors to get those shoes down,” Maher said. The process showed her that making even the smallest changes was difficult and required a lot of time, along with nimble and persistent responses to bureaucratic stonewalling.

Maher is good at that kind of work, but she never would have figured out on her own that tennis shoes would keep people away from a carefully crafted park.
So a working partnership evolved from these early experiences, one that Maher illustrated by drawing a Venn diagram of residents and experts on a sheet of scrap paper. Experts don’t know enough about the neighborhood to make a successful park in Richmond, Maher explained, and residents don’t know enough about early childhood development. So the middle of the diagram is the sweet spot, a sacrosanct place for change.

That spot has already shaped the lives of people who are renovating the play lot. Maher’s making sure they are trained in the job skills they’ll need to build and sustain the park. Pogo Park’s team of five has learned basic skills like typing, but they’ve also built every bit of the models and prototypes of the park by hand. Pogo Park outreach worker Daniela Guadalupe says that the childhood development training she got through her job also helped her become a better parent. Guadalupe recently graduated from Richmond high school and is a mother of a three-year-old son. “I’ve become more aware,” Guadalupe said, especially of the importance of play to children.

Elm Play lot's current play structure.

The play lot will be built in two years, but Maher and the Pogo Park team have big plans for the little corner. They want to block off streets on the weekends and hold a weekly farmer’s market. And they plan to make the park a center that links residents with resources, so local moms will have a place to go the next time they want tennis shoes removed from wires.

Some of this work is already underway, like a partnership with Richmond’s Urban Tilth to create gardens for the park. Richmond resident and Pogo Park collaborator Joe Griffin said that these intermediate outcomes make Maher’s work unique. Richmond has no shortage of people who want the city to change, but Maher is bringing both resources and patience. “She provides real tangible results and points of celebration,” Griffin said “where people could say, I feel like something is happening.”

Even after Elm play lot’s renovations are finished, the benefits of Pogo Park’s work will take time to unfold, Maher said, perhaps as long as twenty years to turn this little corner of Richmond around. She’s planning to stick around in the sweet spot until the transformation is done.

Will Haynes a rising young media star in Richmond. He is posting short, snappy commentaries about his community on YouTube and working through OurStateofHealth.org to gain a wider audience. Check out his latest below on the reason he intends to give what he can to the needy during this holiday season and beyond.

Jessica W. Tsai

This year on Election Day, voters at two polling places in Santa Clara County will have the opportunity to receive flu shots.

Vote and Vax is a national program (www.voteandvax.org) that has been providing vaccines at polling places across the nation. However, November 2, 2010 will mark the first time that a Vote and Vax clinic has been organized by a medical school.

The initial idea to organize a Stanford medical student-run Vote and Vax clinic was conceived in 2008, fittingly enough, at an influenza vaccination training session for first-year medical students. Ultimately, Shah Ali, Duy Dao, and I, all Stanford medical students, partnered with Adjunct Associate Professor Walt Newman, M.D. to transform our idea into reality.

The statistics on influenza are staggering. Up to 60 million people come down with the flu each year in the United States. About 200,000 people are hospitalized each year, and unfortunately 20,000-30,000 people die as a result of the flu. The numbers speak for themselves and are reason enough to promote immunizations in the community.
Vote and Vax appealed to me for a number of reasons:

- Collaboration: The collaboration between a number of different organizations reflects an overall commitment to promoting health. The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, Stanford physicians, Stanford medical students, and the National Vote & Vax Program have been essential in making these clinics happen.

- Patient Education: The opportunity to teach voters about influenza is a unique one. The Vote and Vax clinics reflect a chance to empower people to not only receive the vaccine themselves but to encourage their family members and friends to do the same.

- Medical Student Education: From my perspective as a student, enabling medical students to have direct patient interactions, particularly in the community, is of immense value. As future physicians, it is imperative that we recognize the importance of preventive medicine and moreover, that we consider creative and innovative ways to deliver medicine. Vote and Vax does just that – it allows us to immunize people who may not otherwise receive a vaccine.

I cannot understate the value of awareness and education in promoting community health. It is my hope that in the years to come, Stanford School of Medicine continues to support the Vote and Vax clinics. As students, our collective vision is to see Vote and Vax expand to additional polling places throughout the Bay Area. We, moreover, hope to encourage medical students at other U.S. medical schools to become involved in the effort and engage their local communities.

The two Vote and Vax clinic locations are:
- Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 2020 E. San Antonio St. in San Jose
- Palo Alto Buddhist Temple, 2751 Louis Road in Palo Alto

All Santa Clara County residents are eligible to receive the vaccine. The vaccinations will be offered at $15 each, which is the whole sale vaccine cost. For those who cannot afford the vaccine, it will be administered for free.

Jessica W. Tsai is a 3rd year MD/PhD student at Stanford School of Medicine.