Build homes in the desert, and the poor will come

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Maria Ninfa Martinez is on her couch shuffling envelopes, the bills inside them pushing up the pressure of the blood in her arteries.

She’s 73, and her husband is dead. She earned a paycheck for 58 years and has $1,194 in monthly Social Security benefits to show for it. Her rent is $625 a month. Then there’s her cancer and the bills it brings.

Martinez is among the 30,000 valley residents older than 65 who live on less than $20,000 a year, one of the several categories of people for whom simply paying the rent or mortgage every month has become increasingly difficult.

Enter the 10-year-old Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act and its provision to sell federal land at discounted prices to encourage construction of affordable housing.

Martinez and at least 110 other senior citizens are on a waiting list to move into 105 apartments that will rent for as little as $338 a month when Harmon Pines, the first project to be completed under the act, opens in July at Harmon Avenue and Jones Boulevard.

So should we be happy for Martinez and her neighbors-to-be or frustrated by a government inching ahead at a pace that seems to ensure supply will never meet demand when it comes to the poor? The federal law that made Harmon Pines possible has, after all, existed for a decade.

Mike Mullin, executive director of Nevada Housing and Neighborhood Development, the nonprofit organization building Harmon Pines, says he concentrates on today, on getting the job done. He uses phrases like “We’re playing the hand we’re dealt,” opting not to dwell on the passage of time.

“If I worried about the need too much, I’d die of a heart attack,” he adds.

Mullin notes that five years of work went into Harmon Pines before any dirt was turned for the project. He attended meetings to create regulations for the federal law in 2003. Those meetings continued for a year before agencies could agree on the regulations. Two years later, the county handed over five acres of land to Nevada HAND for Harmon Pines.

The land was appraised at $3 million but Nevada HAND got it for $198,000. For the next two years, the organization plodded through paperwork on $11.7 million equity from $10 million in tax credits and $1.26 million in additional funds. The project cost $16 million, leaving Nevada HAND with a mortgage of $3.1 million.

Finally, in March, workers began laying pipes and then framing walls.

The idea behind the law is that local governments can ask the Bureau of Land Management to sell them land for affordable housing. There are millions of acres out there, so in theory, there could be lots of affordable housing someday. Under the law, the bureau works with the Housing and Urban Development Department to evaluate requests from local governments. The federal agencies set a discount on the price of the land based on appraisals and the income of the people who will live in the housing. The local governments then turn the land over to private groups to build the housing, with or without bids.

In the case of Harmon Pines, Clark County issued a request for proposals and Nevada HAND’s was the winning proposal. The county has been the most aggressive of the local governments in setting aside, in its planning documents, land for developing affordable housing under the act. The county earmarked 1,200 acres in 1999. Henderson, Las Vegas and the state also have land they’d like to develop under the law, but the county has pushed along the only other project currently on the books, housing for 180 families on 10 acres.

Douglas Bell, manager of Clark Community Resources Management, testified before a congressional subcommittee about using discounted federal land for affordable housing in 1992. He has stayed with the issue since. He says one reason the first project has taken so long to come on line is the need for so many public and private agencies to work together along the way. He refers to the “different cultures” of the agencies — the BLM manages land, HUD oversees housing, nonprofit organizations worry about people, local governments tend to budgets, and so on. Then there’s the rising price of land and the lack of financing for affordable housing.

Hillerie Patton, a spokeswoman for the BLM, says it took a long time to schedule all the necessary meetings, more than 20 over the years. She says her agency has “been doing what we’re supposed to do” along the way.

Bell has always seen the law as being on the cutting edge, “a pilot project for the rest of the country,” and, like Mullin, sees the first project as “a great opportunity.”

In the shadow of Palace Station, in a tight apartment packed with boxes of photos and books, Geraldine “Denie” Walsh is holding on, hoping her opportunity to breathe a little easier comes soon. She’s 65 and recently had a knee replaced. She never married and has lived alone since her mother died in 2005. The two shared a house her mother bought, but in the past year Walsh lost the house as well.

She lost it to foreclosure. It was worth $300,000, she says. She rejected an offer of $176,000; that was less than she owed on the house.

Like Martinez, Walsh carries in her head the numbers that fill her days with stress. She gets $717 a month in Social Security benefits. She pays $950 in monthly rent. A family member loans her money for that.

She notes the impact of it all — losing her mother, living away from family in Boston and California, having no place she can call home, counting unpaid bills.

She considers herself a survivor, a fighter. She has an easy laugh and waves her hands when she speaks. But in the past year, she thought of killing herself for the first time.

“I’ve never in my life been so lonely,” she said.

Across town, near Decatur Boulevard and Desert Inn Road, Martinez makes for an echo of sorts. Like Walsh, she has already done the math on what Harmon Pines will mean to her. By paying $200 less in monthly rent, she could pay off the $100 she owes to the ambulance company, the $1,000 she owes the bank, the credit cards.

Then, maybe she could visit family in Houston.

Walsh daydreams of visiting friends in Bermuda.

Mullin says he knows how the cost of housing affects the poor, chipping away at their days. It goes beyond senior citizens, of course, affecting many of the valley’s workers. A 2003 commission on growth in Clark County called affordable housing one of the valley’s most pressing needs.

That’s why Mullin would like to see the issue capture the attention of more sectors of society, especially when it comes to financing the construction of housing. Mullin and Bell see the valley’s main industry as a possible solution. They say casinos could contribute to financing by buying tax credits, now that banks are buying less of them because of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Casinos could buy the credits and offer whatever they’re worth to developers building affordable housing, obtaining a tax write-off in the process. The companies could see it as a way of ensuring that their workers have an affordable place to live, Mullin says.

Another idea is that Congress could create an act to sell large chunks of federal land at discounted prices, a sort of fast track to affordable housing, Mullin says. This would cut down on the paperwork needed under the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, now tied to each sale of land.

Then there’s the issue of affordability itself, one that took up many of those meetings during the years before the act’s regulations were set. Currently, housing built under the law has to be for people earning less than 80 percent of the area’s annual median income. The median is $44,700 for a single person, which makes the cutoff $35,760. Bell thinks the federal government may need to raise the limit, since even people earning more cannot afford housing in the valley.

Of course, if you make more people eligible, that will only make the waiting lists longer unless the supply increases, too.

“I would love to see thousands of units being built because of this program,” Bell says, referring to the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act.

He figures that will happen when more agencies in the public and private sectors realize it is in their interest to do so.

“As people see the importance of affordable housing to the economic sustainability of the region, other people will come to the plate.”