When Rosie Perez moved into the Hawaiian Gardens apartments in Imperial Beach 11 years ago, she said the 63-unit complex was a quiet, affordable and well-maintained oasis for her and her son. They rented a large studio for $735 per month and divided it into a living area and room for two beds.
There were community gatherings by the lima bean-shaped pool, an onsite laundry room and a full-time maintenance staff who responded to complaints promptly.
All of that changed when the family who had owned the tiki-style apartments for years put the complex up for sale. In June of last year, Perez and other tenants received a notice that a La Jolla-based company named F&F Properties had bought the complex and would be the new landlord.
Rents rose. Tenants were informed they would now be paying for water and sewer service plus a “convenience fee” of nearly $10 per month. Utility bills arrived charging more than $175 for a studio apartment because the company did not measure water usage in each unit but instead required residents to pay a share of all water used in the complex, including for landscaping, the pool and repeated slab leaks that Perez said often took days to fix.
Perez said life at the complex became intolerable. “After [F&F] came, everything got bad,” she said. “You called and they never came…They just let it go. There were weeds as high as me. Trash everywhere.”
Then, on Oct. 31, the company informed residents by letter that they would be evicted after Christmas to make way for comprehensive remodeling of the entire complex. Residents were more than welcome to apply to occupy one of the remodeled units, the letter said. But they were not guaranteed a place.
Perez said she wouldn’t be able to afford one of the new units anyway. F&F, which owns more than 40 apartment complexes throughout San Diego County, describes itself as a purveyor of “Boutique Communities” on its website. Currently advertised rent for a studio apartment in one of the company’s buildings is nearly double what Perez pays at Hawaiian Gardens.
“After we got the eviction, we don’t know what to do,” she said this week during an interview in her apartment. “We went everywhere to look at [other] apartments but the rents are $2,000, $2,500…It’s too much.”
On Wednesday, Perez and other residents at Hawaiian Gardens will ask the Imperial Beach City Council for help. Along with organizers at a tenant advocacy organization and residents from a neighboring complex that was also bought by a new corporate owner, they will ask city leaders to make Imperial Beach the third San Diego County city to adopt a tenant protection ordinance.
San Diego and Chula Vista recently adopted such ordinances. Tenants and residents at Hawaiian Gardens hope Imperial Beach will go a step further and specifically prohibit apartment owners from evicting residents during remodeling.
Calls to F&F Properties were not returned. Jose Lopez, an organizer with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, said he and the tenants he helped to organize at Hawaiian Gardens are hopeful that a majority of the City Council will recognize the need for help amid San Diego’s ongoing housing crisis.
“We would hope that in a city with 70 percent of people being renters that they would do this,” he said.
Stay tuned. I’ll report later this week about what happened at the City Council meeting, plus additional information about efforts to protect tenants in a fast-moving, high-priced housing market.
It’s Still Busy in National City
The news keeps coming in small but mighty National City. In recent weeks, I wrote about a move to censure newly re-elected City Councilmember Jose Rodriguez and an escalating battle between city leaders and the Port of San Diego.
This week, it’s the mother of all Planning Commission meetings and a proposal to regulate popular but controversial short-term housing rentals.
The Planning Commission meeting was on Monday. It lasted four hours. More than 40 people attended. Public comment stretched more than two hours.
The issue? A proposed carwash, fast-food outlet, gas station, liquor store and five housing units on a vacant lot on Sweetwater Road near Interstate 805. Virtually every speaker was against the project. Some were passionate in their denunciations.
Why? That’s the rub of local news. You never know when a seemingly mundane piece of government business will touch a community nerve. It turns out the multi-use development would have been at the main intersection leading to La Vista Memorial Park Cemetery, where people in National City and surrounding communities have been buried since 1868.
“Nine of my family members are laid to rest [at the cemetery] dating back to 1955,” said Alisha Morrison, who lives on nearby Orange St. The proposed project, she said in written public comments, would clog the area with traffic and make it impossible to reach the cemetery. “That proposed site will become the nightmare of Orange Street,” she said.
It will come as no surprise to learn that the planning commission turned the project down.
AirBnB Clampdown
National City Councilmember Jose Rodriguez seems to be fighting on all fronts these days. He held a press conference today to denounce an expected vote at this evening’s City Council meeting to censure him for what Mayor Ron Morrison described in a Council memo as a pattern of using public resources for personal gain and slandering other city officials. Rodriguez described the censure effort as “politics as usual” and a refusal by his opponents on the Council to accept his recent re-election with more than 70 percent of the vote.
At the same time, Rodriguez is urging city staff to draft a short-term rental property ordinance that would address what he said is a growing problem of “bad actors” from turning entire apartment complexes into short-term rentals that end up being used for parties, drug sales and prostitution.
Rodriguez recently sent his city staff assistants to interview residents near multiple such apartment complexes around National City. Residents described a litany of problems, including shootings, drug use, even an all-female fight club.
He asked city staff to draw up a proposed ordinance. The new rules will be discussed at tonight’s Council meeting. Apartment owners, no doubt, will not be happy.
New Water Leader
It’s official. Elizabeth Cox, daughter of former San Diego County Supervisor Greg Cox, has been elected to represent Bonita and northeast Chula Vista on the Sweetwater Authority’s seven-member board of directors.
Sweetwater Authority provides drinking water to more than 200,000 people in Chula Vista, National City and surrounding unincorporated areas. Cox will take office at a time of heightened scrutiny of the agency. A group of residents is organizing to block a proposed floating solar project in Sweetwater Reservoir and other residents are concerned about a recent authority report showing structural flaws in Sweetwater Dam. Labor negotiations with agency employees are at a standstill and employees plan to vote soon on whether to join a powerful national union.
Cox did not return a call seeking comment.
Defeated incumbent Josie Calderon-Scott, a sometimes contrarian voice on the board who was first elected in 2016, said she was actually “happy” to have lost. “I had to prioritize my family’s medical care over running a campaign,” she said, referring to a series of recent health setbacks in her extended family. “Now I can have an individual advocate voice.”
New Life for Sewage Fund
State Sen. Steve Padilla on Wednesday will unveil new legislation that would give the San Diego Association of Governments authority to carve out a portion of anticipated toll revenue from a new border crossing to create an environmental mitigation fund aimed at cleaning up sewage in the Tijuana River.
Earlier this year, city officials in Imperial Beach and Coronado pressed SANDAG leaders to set aside one percent of toll revenue from the soon-to-open Otay Mesa Border Crossing to address the sewage crisis, along with other pollution expected to be generated by the new crossing.
SANDAG officials reacted lukewarmly to the proposal. One Imperial Beach City Councilmember said a discussion about the proposal at a recent SANDAG board meeting left him feeling “a little disrespected.”
Cameron Sutherand, a spokesperson for Padilla, said the new legislation would signal to SANDAG that state leaders expect more. “It kind of puts our thumb down and puts the legislature’s thumb down, saying it’s a priority,” Sutherland said. “This will go toward fixing a problem that affects the air that San Diegans breathe.”
Padilla will unveil the proposed legislation at a press conference at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Tijuana Estuary Visitor Center, 301 Caspian Way in Imperial Beach.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct that Greg Cox was a San Diego County Supervisor.