In a small pocket along 29th Avenue at Clement Street lies a dilapidated Episcopal church where Father David Rickey prepares to coordinate its destruction. The land will be used for 20 affordable housing units, which will accommodate developmentally-disabled adults – a group for which San Francisco provides few places to stay.
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church is a small, red-bricked masonry building surrounded by over-grown grass and stray cats. The storm gutters have long since collapsed, hanging from the roof while the wooden boards in place of St. Peters’ windows flap in the wind.
The Mayor’s Office of Housing has voiced that the city does not provide enough housing for developmentally-disabled. A problem, according to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center’s Housing Director Kevin Kitchingham, that isn’t being solved.
The Center, a non-profit organization that helps develop affordable housing for low-income adults and people with disabilities, has been working steadily with Rickey for the last four years to coordinate the church’s deconstruction and the housing development.
The demolition of the church is scheduled to start summer this year with housing to begin construction in December, according to William Ho, Bernal’s project manager.
Father Rickey, who’s been with the church since 1997, says the process of figuring out what the land could be used for has been a long and arduous journey.
“It wasn’t enough to say how do we get our space, but who do we serve,” the 62-year-old father says of his discretion in choosing to build housing for the disabled, and working with the Bernal Center to begin development.
Kitchingham says the housing units will house the “lower 30 percent of median low-income developmentally-disabled adults” – roughly a group that makes lower than $24,000 a year.
The organization provides a buffer between the church and the city’s socio-political bureaucracy says Kitchingham. They arrange meetings between architects, contractors, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and the U.S. Department of Urban Planning and Development (HUD).
“There’s only two other places in this city for them to stay,” Rickey says of adults with developmental disabilities who urgently need housing. “There’s little housing for them.”
One set of apartments for disabled adults is in North Beach while the other is in the Tenderloin according to Rickey.
Developmentally-disabled adults refers to people with muscular difficulty, limited intelligence and motor functions, according to Rickey.
At first, Rickey says they considered building housing for seniors or teachers, but they didn’t know how to pay for the construction costs of building a parking lot underneath the units. Housing for developmentally-disabled adults doesn’t require parking lots Rickey says.
“It was serendipitous for them to come,” he says of how well the disabled adults’ situation fit in with the timing of St. Peters’ deconstruction and the space’s rebirth. “It solved our problems.”
The church first started working with developmentally-disabled adults since 2003, when it began renting out its basement to Opportunities Unlimited, a day program that teaches life skills to English- and Chinese-speaking adults with developmental disabilities Rickey says.
After spending time with the clients of the developmentally-disabled adult program Opportunities Unlimited, Rickey says he began to realize how few housing units for these clients there were in San Francisco, prompting him to acknowledge their need for housing.
St. Peters is using $2.7 million from HUD to build the housing units. The building will become part of the federal Section 8 housing subsidy program, whereby residents pay 30 percent of their income as rent, and the federal government will pay the remainder to the landlord according to Kitchingham.
Rickey says St. Peter’s and the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center have formed a nonprofit to serve as the landlord for the apartments.
They city has agreed to pay $584,000 to help spur housing for developmentally-disabled adults and the church is applying for a $3 million state grant, says Kitchingham.
The value of the lease is $1.6 million and the income from leasing the land will allow St. Peter’s to improve their parish and church offices, Rickey says.
“The compassionate conservative elemental emphasis on helping the developmentally-disabled has caused the city to intervene,” Kitchingham says. “They require of minimum of this element.”
“You go where the land is, where the deals are,” Kitchingham says of how the Bernal Center creates and nurtures housing in San Francisco.
The entire cost of the development is estimated at $10 million, half of which is reserved for construction alone, according to Ho.
“We’re not sure what to expect at this point,” Ho says of the project’s current situation, as the Center is about to start accepting bids from construction firms for the demolition and construction of the units.
Ho says right now HAZMAT remediation, which involves the removal of chemicals and addressing environmental concerns, is taking place.
Walking through the church, the heavy stench of asbestos can be sensed even though Rickey confirms it has all been removed.
“The entire building violates the building code,” Ho says. “They’re currently occupying a space in the Presidio.”
Rickey says that his congregation is planning on staying at a Chapel in the Presidio they’ve been worshiping at for the past year instead of building a new church.
The Richmond neighborhood’s church was built in 1913 on top of compacted sand dunes, which subsequently led to its damaging during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The city declared that the church violated the building code and was condemned, but the building continued to operate until 2007 when the damage finally caused the church to become unusable.
“The people who built this church didn’t read the bible, they built it on sand,” says Rickey as he walks through his decaying church’s corridors.
He points out cracks in the brick walls and foundation, boarded up windows, and a carpet saturated with rainwater due to a rotting roof. Even on a bright sunny day, the inside of the church feels more like a dank tomb than a place of worship.
In San Francisco, this problem is not uncommon at all. Many old buildings in the city bear the weight of being destroyed because of their structural inadequacies and irreparable damage due to earthquakes.
The city has declared many of these buildings to be in violation of building codes, but it also recognizes the underlying need for housing space in a constantly gentrifying town according to Kitchingham.
“You can find a number of buildings that are under [St. Peters’] problem,” says Kitchingham.
Buildings that violate the building code in San Francisco are required to be torn down. Demolishing buildings frees space for associations such as the Bernal Center to secure money for the development of affordable housing for low-income adults according to Kitchingham.
Overcrowding and the sacrifice of medical expenses have caused many developmentally-disabled adults to loose housing and look for more affordable accommodations Kitchingham says.
“We’re trying to make the price at a level they can afford,” he says.
“This project is vitally important,” said Opportunities Unlimited director David Lau. “Many of our clients come from low-income immigrant families that are living in small apartments with up to seven or eight family members.”
Lau says he’s seen an increase in the amount of clients in his organization that need places to live because the people that normally take care of them can’t afford to any longer.
The housing provides homes for developmentally-disabled adults who can’t afford to live anywhere else, Rickey says.
“I was around them all the time,” Rickey says. He was always passing them around the church and he had his office across the hall from where they would have classes he says. “They’re beautiful people.”
Rickey says he hasn’t encountered any threatening opposition to the housing project yet.
“There was one person who didn’t know if it would be safe to have those kind of people around him,” Rickey says. “He’s just got major problems.”
Rickey has stressed the idea of serving others during the entire planning and development process of the housing project. He says these people have a right and a need to have a place to live for which they can afford.
“The importance is serving others,” Rickey says. “By reaching out to other people, you actually find the answers.”
Sources
Kevin Kitchingham
415-786-2661
kkitchingham@bhnc.org
William Ho
415-206-2140
who@bhnc.org
David Lau
415-387-8405
David Rickey
415-336-1097
Mayor’s Office of Housing
www.sfgov.org/site/moh_index.asp
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Hud.gov
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