Can Lawsuit Force Clovis to Roll Out Welcome Mat to Low Income Renters?

“Just because I’m low income doesn’t mean I should have to reside where there are always gunshots,” said Desiree Martinez. She should know. Martinez, who is 48 and disabled, runs a small nonprofit that helps the homeless, and was unhoused herself for three years until she received a rent subsidy that has allowed her to live in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Fresno. “It’s like I’m living in a movie – people jumping fences and running through yards,” Martinez said. Her suggestions to a 17-year-old daughter every time she leaves home typically include “Take the pit bull with you.”

Co-published by the Visalia Times-Delta

Martinez would prefer to rent in neighboring Clovis, where she had lived as a teenager and later as a young mother, and where she feels safer.
 

A lawsuit claims that the “Gateway to the Sierras” unlawfully keeps out low income renters and people of color.

 
Clovis may be the San Joaquin Valley’s most desirable community. Crime rates are low and its schools – with state and nationally competitive sports teams — are among the best in the state. The “Gateway to the Sierras” boasts a walkable historic old town and a town logo that depicts a cowboy astride a bucking bronco.

Clovis’ residents are predominantly white and more prosperous than residents of nearby towns. It is the 10th fastest-growing city in California and many who are priced out of coastal areas are drawn to the town’s spacious homes with big yards that are still affordable to middle-class buyers. But low income renters like Martinez face harsher prospects.

Martinez, along with Maria de Jesus Sanchez, another low income renter with roots in Clovis, has sued the city, its city council and city manager, arguing that Clovis, with its vast tracts of single family homes, unlawfully keeps low income renters and people of color out.

“Under the cover of preserving ‘the Clovis way of life,’ respondents have caved to citizen pressure and “engaged in a systematic effort to prevent the development of affordable housing in the city,” wrote Martinez’s attorneys in their complaint.

Clovis’ land use policy that reserves wide swaths of land for single family homes and far less for multifamily housing is to blame, they argue. It also accounts for conspicuous income and racial disparities between Clovis and Fresno, said Jessica Trounstine, a professor of political science at the University of California, Merced, in a declaration on behalf of the plaintiffs.
 

Report: Nearly 1.3 million low income California renters lack access to an affordable home. In Fresno County, 35,244 renters lack such access.

 
Fifty years ago, the two cities shared similar demographic characteristics, Trounstine wrote. But, by 2018, Clovis’ median income had exceeded Fresno’s by $25,000 and its white population was 26 percentage points higher than Fresno’s, reflecting the fact that the city’s housing, along with its safe streets and high quality schools, were increasingly inaccessible to lower income people of color like Martinez and Sanchez.

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Today nearly 1.3 million low income California renters lack access to an affordable home, reports the nonprofit California Housing Partnership, while in Fresno County, 35,244 renters lack such access.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development reports that just 98 of California’s 539 local jurisdictions are on pace to build enough low and very low income housing to meet state-assigned goals.

Clovis is an example of California’s current “intense battle over municipal land use,” said Stephen Menendian, assistant director of University of California, Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, a research center that aims to “eliminate barriers to an inclusive, just and sustainable society.”

State housing officials have vowed to get tough on cities that don’t meet affordable housing goals, and thereby exclude low income people and people of color. They say a series of laws approved between 2017 and 2019 will bolster their enforcement ability so that in 2021, they’ll finally have the tools to make a dent in the state’s housing shortage.

That would mean more multifamily housing and with it, increased diversity in exclusive enclaves like Hillsborough in San Mateo County, where single family-only zoning has led to income and racial segregation.
 

“I have an empty plot next to me and I’m like, please Lord, don’t let it be high density.” 

— Clovis resident

 
Meanwhile, cities are facing pushback from local officials and homeowner groups warning of the loss of local control over municipal land use decisions.

As one woman declared at a 2018 meeting when, under state pressure, the Clovis City Council rezoned land for affordable housing, “I do have an empty plot next to me and I’m like, please Lord, don’t let it be high density.”

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Every 10 years the state determines how many housing units in each of four income categories – very low, low, moderate and above moderate — are needed to accommodate the state’s population. Regional councils of government assign each city a goal in each category.

California doesn’t have the authority to force cities to actually build enough housing to meet their goals, but state regulators can demand that each city and county prove that it has zoned sufficient land to achieve them.
 

State officials found that Clovis lagged so far behind in zoning land to accommodate multifamily housing that it was out of compliance with state housing law.

 
Clovis has so far built more than double the number of moderate income and market rate units the state says it needs, doing far better than most California cities in those categories, but it has built no units for very low income people and has only reached 7.6% of its low income housing goal.

Two years ago, state officials found that Clovis lagged so far behind in zoning land to accommodate multifamily housing that it was out of compliance with state housing law. The city risked losing millions of dollars in state housing funds if it didn’t set aside land for denser housing that would be affordable to lower income renters.

“It seems like a hard pill to swallow because we are going to have to lower the Clovis standard,” said City Councilman Jose Flores as he and his council colleagues considered their predicament at an October 15, 2018, council meeting.

“Are there any cities that do not comply?” wondered Councilman Vong Mouantonoa. Maybe Clovis should find out how Bel Air and Beverly Hills skirt the rules, Mouantonoa suggested.

The state wielded a big stick: It offered Clovis the option to acquiesce to the state’s demands or lose money, and the council voted unanimously to approve a rezoning plan. It allows multifamily housing on land currently zoned for schools, police stations and other public facilities and permits both low and higher density housing in certain other areas.

The state approved Clovis’ plan in March 2019. But Martinez and Sanchez argue that the city’s revised housing plan was inadequate, destined to fail and approved by the state in error.

“You can make them plan for it and they [developers] will come,” said Patience Milrod, one of Martinez’s attorneys and the director of the Fresno-based Central California Legal Services, arguing the state had missed its chance to do so.
 

“We don’t build houses. We can’t force people to build an affordable housing complex if it’s not going to pencil out for them.” 

— Clovis Mayor Drew Bessinger

 
She and Martinez’s other attorneys contend that if the city permits both high and low density housing on the same site, developers will opt for the more lucrative low-density options that will almost certainly be out of reach to low income people. They maintain some of the sites the city has identified that are also zoned to accommodate public buildings like courthouses or schools are inadequate by the city’s own admission, and they point to statements by city officials like the ones Flores and Mouantonoa made to show the city doesn’t intend to comply with the law.

The city’s mayor, Drew Bessinger, a retired Clovis police captain and current chief of the Fresno Yosemite International Airport Police Department, rejects those arguments.

“We don’t build houses. We can’t force people to build an affordable housing complex if it’s not going to pencil out for them. Since I’ve been involved in politics, I’ve met a lot of developers — they’re not going to lose money.”

Bessinger points to the city’s accessory dwelling unit building program and a new affordable housing complex expected to open next spring.

“It gets frustrating when we get beat up for being rednecks. It’s not fair,” Bessinger added. “I recall rolling pennies. I ate peanut butter sandwiches every day in the police academy. We want to be an inclusive community to people regardless of who they are.”

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In February 2021, Superior Court Judge Kristi Culver Kapetan is expected to wade into the dispute by issuing a ruling on whether Clovis’ housing plan passes legal muster. She will also rule on whether to order the city to invest in measures aimed at spurring low income housing development, like offering incentives to affordable housing developers or establishing an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, as the plaintiffs have requested.
 

“Kids shouldn’t have to be raised like this because their parents are low income. Give parents a chance to go somewhere they feel safe.” 

— Desiree Martinez

 
The arguments on both sides mirror the larger debate in communities in many parts of California. Elected officials like Bessinger contend they can’t force developers to build, while housing advocates say the zoning power cities wield gives them near total control over what kind of housing is built and who can afford it.

On a panel hosted by the nonprofit Marin Housing Solutions last year, Megan Kirkeby, the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s deputy director for Housing Policy Development, noted that in the last eight year housing cycle, Beverly Hills was required to accommodate just three units of affordable housing, while Azusa, a far less affluent city of the same size, was assigned a goal of more than 600. Now, Kirkeby said, exclusive cities will have a harder time using their political clout to avoid taking on their fair share of affordable housing.

Kirkeby added that California housing officials have lacked enforcement authority in the past but now they’re prepared to insist that even exclusive enclaves like Rancho Palos Verdes or Atherton open their doors to affordable housing.

“They can’t say ‘no’ anymore,” she told Capital & Main.

Still, lasting change will likely come slowly. UC Berkeley’s Menendian said far more sweeping reform is necessary, such as mandating greater housing density statewide and providing more generous subsidies for affordable housing.

For now, Desiree Martinez hopes her lawsuit will raise awareness of her struggle and that of other parents to bring up their children in a better environment.

“I am sick and tired of drive-bys, gunshots and helicopters,” she said.

“Kids shouldn’t have to be raised like this because their parents are low income. Give parents a chance to go somewhere they feel safe.”

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