Priced out of paradise
With over a thousand homeless and Section 8 under fire, affordable housing isn’t a priority in affluent Marin

BY JILL KRAMER

Rivore has always worked at caretaking jobs—tending to disabled people in their homes, cleaning their houses, preparing their meals. It suits her maternal nature and she’s not trained for anything else. But her earning power is limited. She’s tried living in areas she can afford—in Sacramento, Oakland, even Tacoma, Washington—and has decided she needs to find a way to bring up her children back home in Marin. “Even though Marin City is really, really deprived, it’s still so much better than other places I’ve lived,” she says. “It’s safe and it’s clean—there’s not urine all over the streets and trash everywhere.”

Yet the poverty is real. While the county of Marin is one of the most affluent in the nation, family incomes in the community of Marin City are 24 percent lower than the national median. A short stroll down the road into Sausalito, multimillion-dollar mansions perch on the hillside with views of white-sailed yachts bobbing in the sparkling bay, while Marin City is home to a 296-unit public housing project. That’s where Rivore grew up and where her mother still lives, along with Rivore’s three oldest children. But Rivore can’t move back. There’s a waiting list for public housing in Marin County with more than 2,200 names on it. Another waiting list, for Section 8 subsidized housing, is 1,200 names long. Rivore has been on that wait list for five years.

So, for now, Rivore and her three youngest are staying in a homeless shelter. The Family Resource Center, run by Homeward Bound of Marin, is in a big old wood-shingled house near the freeway in San Rafael. Rivore is 31, tall and chunky, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, hair pulled straight back off her face. She leaves her 6-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son in the community room watching television with another adult resident and, carrying 1-year-old Jaylen in her arms, leads me up the stairs to her room. He’s quite a handful. Nine pounds, 10 ounces at birth, he’s now about the size of a 2-year-old. And teething. Still, except for occasional outbursts, he’s a cheerful little boy.

Knowing that Rivore’s been living for weeks in one room with her three kids, I expect the kind of mess children usually make. But the room is neat and spotless. The walls are painted orange and an orange-colored flap of fabric covers the window. The room is just wide enough for a double-sized mattress on a platform, where Rivore sleeps with the baby, and a bunk bed for Kaylonie and Mack, with a narrow space in between. There’s a highboy, a closet and a chest of drawers with a mirror, much of which is covered with Rivore’s family photos. A large painted photo portrait of her father as a little boy takes up the right-hand corner of the mirror, even though he was absent for most of Rivore’s childhood and she refused to go to his funeral last year. “My dad was a bigamist. He had like five wives,” she says. “The last time I talked to him was when I was 19 and I was pregnant with my oldest kid and we had the biggest falling out ever. He said I was the devil. What a thing to say to your own daughter! I told him, If I’m the devil, I’ll see you in hell.”

Jaylen crawls around the mattress as Rivore and I talk. “My whole family is kind of weird,” she says. “I guess every family has its own dysfunctions. But we don’t have a close bond at all. My mom doesn’t show emotion. She’s kind of a hard person. We don’t hug, we don’t say ‘I love you.’ That’s one cycle I’m definitely breaking when it comes to my kids. I always needed closeness, I craved it. That’s one of the reasons I stayed in an abusive relationship so long, because he always said he loved me and told me things were going to be OK and stuff like that. I was just needy for that.”

RIVORE HAS BEEN up since 6:15 this morning so she could pack the kids up, get them all on a bus over to the east side of San Rafael, drop off the boys at Head Start, then catch another bus to take Kaylonie to day camp a few miles south in Corte Madera. The county In-Home Support Services program that employs Rivore had no work for her today, so she came back to the shelter, did her chores and spent her spare time filling out job applications and looking for housing before she had to get back on the bus and get the kids. Now it’s time to round them up again and take a bus down to Marin City to spend the evening with her three oldest while her mother is out at a church meeting. Instead, I offer to drive them over there and Rivore gratefully accepts.

“I hate the bus,” she says. “A lot of times they’re full so the kids and I have to stand up and I have to hold the baby and the stroller. And the stroller doesn’t fit down the aisle. I spend most of my time on the bus because it takes so long to get anyplace; by the time I get there, I have to go to the next place.” But she can’t even think about buying a car just yet. “Right now I have to save for housing and stuff like that and I can barely do that. So I know I’m going to be on the bus for a long time.” We stand up to go and Jaylen starts crying. Rivore picks him up and coos at him and his tears turn to smiles. “He makes me feel so important,” she says.

Rivore sits in the back of the car with the boys while pretty little Kaylonie, her hair in neatly banded bunches, entertains me up front, reciting the alphabet backwards and showing off the Spanish words she learned in school. She directs me to a parking spot outside her grandmother’s apartment building and the family piles out. With no prompting from his mom, 3-year-old Mack thanks me for the ride before running off.

Rivore is about to start her second year at College of Marin, taking prerequisites for the nursing program. “I want to be a registered nurse,” she says. “That’s the only way I can get a job that will pay enough for me and my family.”

“Enough” is relative. In Marin County, a registered nurse supporting six children—or even three children—is poor. If Rivore were certified as an R.N. today, she could expect to start out making about $35,000. And she might find a three-bedroom apartment—putting the boys in one room and the girls in another—for $1,700 a month. She’d be paying about 60 percent of her income in rent. If her three oldest continue living with their grandmother, she’ll still have a hard time.

“We call people ‘extremely low income’ if they’re 30 percent of the median and below,” says Betty Pagett, director of education and advocacy at EAH, the nonprofit affordable housing developer. In Marin, the median income for a family of four is $95,000. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers housing affordable when it accommodates people earning as much as 120 percent of the median income—$114,000 in Marin. Eighty to 120 percent of the median is defined as “moderate income,” low-income is 50-80 percent of median, and very low-income is below 50 percent. “If you’re below 30 percent of median income, you’re not even eligible for most affordable housing unless you have a Section 8,” says Pagett. HUD’s Section 8 rent subsidy program is aimed at the population below 30 percent—and misses most of them.

The already inadequate program is becoming even leaner. For years, HUD funded the vouchers that local agencies like Marin Housing Authority distribute to extremely low-income tenants. The tenants pay their landlords 30 percent of whatever their income is, and MHA makes up the difference between that and the “fair market rate.” Starting this year, instead of funding the vouchers, HUD grants to Marin are no longer tied to rental costs. MHA is getting $24.8 million—nearly $1 million less than last year.

STILL, IT COULD have been a lot worse. President Bush’s proposed budget would have slashed $1.6 billion from the Section 8 program, eliminating vouchers for 250,000 needy households nationwide. Congress defeated it. “What happened this year was really remarkable,” says Pagett. “Organizing across the country and people telling their elected officials that they don’t want those cuts has made a difference. So that was pretty much reversed. But one of the things this means is that we are continually pulled off our work to organize and focus on what’s happening in Washington and try to save some of these programs. It’s kind of a continual struggle in the water to keep from drowning.”

Marion Brady is one of the people roused through sheer terror to join the protest. A former librarian, she’s been disabled and surviving on Section 8 for the last 10 years. As a student, Brady had always been too timid even to raise her hand in class. But when she heard about the cuts that threatened her and so many others with homelessness, she soon found herself organizing and addressing a rally. With Pagett’s help, she persuaded the Marin Housing Council to send letters to all 2,040 voucher holders in the county, notifying them of the impending crisis and inviting them to a meeting in San Rafael—and 275 showed up. Brady mobilized many of them to write letters to Congress and form a lobbying group, Save Section 8 of Marin.

Leaning heavily on a cane, Brady comes to the door of her one-bedroom San Anselmo apartment and leads me through the kitchen to the cramped bedroom, where letters, files and other documents are spread over the bed. This is the Save Section 8 office. Brady is 58, but with her hunched posture and hobbled gait, she gives the appearance of someone in her 80s. The big toe of her right foot is stuck in spasm at a bizarre right angle; her other toes are contracted and curled. She has a rare disease of the autonomic nervous system, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome. “It’s the same thing Paula Abdul has,” she tells me. “That’s why she takes all those painkillers. One quarter of the people that have this disease commit suicide eventually because of the pain.”

Back when Brady originally applied for Section 8, vouchers were more readily available. While folks like Kwateca Rivore languish on the wait list now for years, Brady only had to wait five months. She was able to hang on to the same apartment she’d lived in for the previous 15 years. “My ex kept me going for a while,” she says. “I borrowed money. I prayed a lot. And I was in terror. And each time there’s a new crisis, I’m in terror again.” Hundreds of people lost vouchers in Alameda last year before funding was restored. Brady fears that if the program is cut here, she’ll be out on the street. “There are a few friends I could stay with for a month or so. After that, I don’t know what I would do.” Pagett is worried, too. “We’re in the process of slowly losing vouchers across the country,” she says. “How we’re going to serve this population of people below 30 percent of median, I don’t know.”

Many of them will go unserved. They’ll sleep in their cars, or go from one friend to another, sleeping on floors and couches. They’ll camp in the woods, in church parking lots and under freeways. Last January’s one-day homeless count tallied 1,017 homeless people in Marin—that’s only the ones that were found that day. Ninety-eight were families with children. During the year ending April 2005, Homeward Bound’s family shelters housed 212 kids, almost half of them under age 6; 296 of the adults in all the shelters had jobs when they became homeless; 254 were physically disabled.

ON THE BRIGHT side, some Section 8 vouchers will become available within the next few months, for the first time since 2002. Chris Gouig, executive director of the Marin Housing Authority, has been accumulating unused vouchers and now has to figure how far her budget will go. “We have to look at what rents we’re paying now and try to get an idea of likely rent increases and estimate how many new vouchers we can issue,” she says. “I don’t think it’sll be more than 50 households.”

People on the waiting list are assigned “preference points” if they fit certain criteria: if they’re presently homeless; if they’ve been displaced by domestic violence or natural disaster; if they’re employed or in an employment training program; families, the elderly, veterans and disabled people are also given points. “Of course, there are hundreds of people tied,” says Gouig. “Any time we pull off of the waiting list, the points are reviewed, assigned again and a lottery’s done.”

Kwateca Rivore seems to fit several of the criteria. Will she be one of the lucky ones to win the lottery? Or will she be among the 1,150 families, seniors, disabled and other needy Marinites who will still be struggling to survive?

Betty Pagett and other housing advocates are working to shore up funding on the federal and state levels. Congress will soon determine next year’s HUD budget. The state bond money that has brought millions to Marin runs out in 2007 and will need to be replaced by voters next year. Pagett says one of the funding vehicles being considered is a real estate document transfer fee. “It may only add $25 to the sale,” she says. “We’re not talking about anything that’s a deal-breaker. But you add it all up across the state over a year and it could generate $400 million.” Passing such a measure would mean overcoming resistance from the real estate industry.

Perhaps the most important piece of the funding picture is the local community. “Communities have to plan for housing and not oppose it,” says Pagett. “That means we might have to have some higher-density housing downtown. Communities have to come together and say, We want housing for our frail elderly. And we want the people who take care of our children and take care of the elderly to be able to live in this community.”

To join Save Section 8 or get more information, call Marion Brady at 415/454-2763 or send an e-mail to marion3823@earthlink.net.

ILLUSTRATION BY JING JING TSONG

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