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| PASADENA WEEKLY EXCLUSIVE |
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No Place Like These Homes—Corridor of Shame
Caltrans holds onto surplus properties no longer needed to complete the 710 extension
By Chip Jacobs
Nestled in a fraying landmark house with an escrow that never closes, Stephanie Buffington has learned a hard fact: what the bureaucracy acquires for itself the bureaucracy rarely liquidates.
For seven years, the ex-fashion designer has been trying to purchase her South Pasadena rental from the California Department of Transportation, which declared the house surplus when it realigned the pathway of the long-delayed Long Beach (710) Freeway Extension. The towering Craftsman with a reading salon, four fireplaces, columned portico and gargoyle-capped beams is an architectural laureate. Built in 1896, it is the oldest house designed by the famed Greene brothers that is still standing.
Just like Buffington intends to be when — and if — the deal finally culminates. She said Caltrans has balked at completing the transaction because it lacks the money to repair the place to lender requirements.
During that protracted negotiation, Buffington and her family have burned through five mortgage offers, four Caltrans right-of-way-agents and two file drawers of correspondence begging the department to finish what it agreed to. But doing that runs headlong into the state's neglect of vintage Craftsmen and Victorians along the corridor.
A Caltrans-hired architectural firm paid $25,000 to calculate what it would cost to bring the house to baseline state preservation standards, Buffington said, determined it would be a $600,000-job. Once that was known, she was told she had to buy it “as-is,” “ I guess their sales law changed for me,” Buffington said caustically last week. “That’s the thing: you have to make it your life's work to fight Caltrans, and I wont.”
Caltrans spokeswoman Deborah Harris said the department was still researching these claims.
Buffington’s saga is not an isolated one. Another tenant who has been trying to buy his house near the Pasadena/South Pasadena border since 1996 has forked out roughly $100,000 in additional rent since talks commenced.
The homes are part of 21 properties that Caltrans has retained since revelations in the mid-1990s that it was sitting on 56 parcels it no longer needed to complete the spur connecting the Long Beach and Foothill (210) freeways through Pasadena, South Pasadena and the northeastern section of Los Angeles called El Sereno.
Legislation authored by former state Sen. Pro Tem David Roberti requires agencies like Caltrans to begin negotiations to sell land originally acquired for public work projects within a year of the time they are deemed surplus. If the prospective buyer is a current tenant with a low or moderate-income they can get it at a heavily discounted price. The idea: ease the state's affordable housing crisis by trimming government fat.
Records show that Caltrans reaped $3.8 million from the 35 properties it did sell. Because two-thirds of those were purchased under the Roberti Act, they were collectively discounted $4 million below fair-market price.
The department owns 587 parcels along the corridor, most of them bought decades ago via eminent domain in the expectation they would be bulldozed or relocated when construction began. But court injunctions, mainly by South Pasadena officials worried about their community being carved in two by a trenched roadway, has warehoused the $1.1-billion-plus roadway into permanent limbo. Unable to complete the freeway system's missing link, the agency has rented out the houses. Over the years, though, Caltrans has allowed many of those properties to tumble into disrepair or fall vacant, rendering them magnets for vagrants, bizarre crimes, health code violations, lawsuits and neighborhood outrage.
How many properties are no longer needed after Caltrans shifted the pathway to spare some historic areas in 1998 has become a ticklish question that has drawn the interest of politicians, tenants, developers and even the NAACP.
As the Weekly has reported, Caltrans executives have concluded that the legal and community obstacles shrouding the 4.5-mile gap closure have made it virtually un-buildable, and that a tunnel or a smaller-scale impasse-breaker needs to be pursued. Depending on the option, hundreds of houses in an overheated real estate market could go on the auction block.
Even with currently approved design, Pasadena officials believe that there are 40 to 60 surplus or potentially surplus 710 houses on the west end of the city. A close look at agency maps pinpointing where the extension would be dug seems to indicate parcels that could be jettisoned on Pasadena and St. John avenues, State and Wigmore streets, Madeline Drive as well as in El Sereno. Adding to the confusion are conflicting Caltrans lists of what is and what isn’t surplus ranging from 21 to 38 houses.
Caltrans Director Jeff Morales, in an April letter to Assemblywoman Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, wrote that “various administrative, legal and environmental reasons” had delayed some sales of the original 21. Nonetheless, the department is complying with the Roberti Act, and has made offers to 15 eligible tenants, according to spokeswoman Deborah Harris. Of the six surplus properties not in that category, one tenant isn’t interested in buying and “housing entities” will be offered the balance.
“ The excess properties are not on hold,” Harris said.
This spring, longtime tenants on St. John fumed when word leaked out that Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard and other officials were seeking changes in the Roberti Act to leapfrog ahead of other prospective buyers. The city, which may seek that modification next legislative session, wants to get the large or vacant houses from Caltrans at the original price it paid it for them, sell them at market rate and use the proceeds to jump-start affordable housing.
Tenants jittery about the city's maneuverings decided to fight fire with fire: they hired Roberti to represent them. He is now in private practice.
“ It's very curious why they still have the (21) surplus houses,” Roberti said last week. “I can’t figure out what the reason for it is. I myself don’t feel the letter or the spirit of the law is that complicated.”
Last June, nine renters on St. John Avenue and Bellefontaine Street near Huntington Hospital asked the California Transportation Commission for help in getting their properties declared surplus so they could purchase them. A Caltrans official wrote back to the tenants, saying that until the CTC endorses the pathway's final alignment and construction design, their houses remained only “potential” surplus.
David Brewer, the CTC’s deputy director, confirmed the commission has not approved those details despite widespread perceptions the project is further along. It was unclear why Caltrans had not pursued that sign-off.
To punctuate their beliefs that the agency is hanging onto obsolescent land, four St. John tenants have bright yellow signs with black lettering reading “STATE-OWNED PROPERTIES” posted on their front lawn Easily mistaken as government issued, right down to the Sacramento reference number, the signs don’t connect the curious to some perky state real estate agent. They jangle the offices of Gov. Gray Davis, Director Morales and Davis’ transportation secretary.
Buffington began renting in 1979. When the extension's footprint shifted — there has been 24 routes contemplated — she immediately expressed interest in snapping up her Greene and Greene. Then the paperwork flew and repair costs sank in. A $20 million state renovation of 92 historic houses along the extension only fixed 39, missing hers.
Buffington finally offered to buy it at fair market value minus the required repairs, and that has gone nowhere. Unable to close, she says she'll stay a permanent renter in her National Register of Historic Places house with a damaged roof, broken rain gutters and blistering lead paint.
How resolved is she? Two years ago she came down with the Typhus bacteria carried by raccoons that had burrowed through her roof and into her walls. The infection landed her in the hospital with a 105-degree fever and organ damage. She decided against suing Caltrans, which she claimed failed to respond to the infestation for 18 months, because “she didn't want to rock the boat” with her pending sale.
Buffington chuckled there has been one positive aspect of her deed chase: befriending a lot of Caltrans rental agents who she called “good people in a losing proposition.”
A couple able to pull the trigger on their purchase said the ordeal left them reeling. Because homebuyers like them must receive written approval in advance from Caltrans for any repairs or updating exceeding $2,000, this couple asked their name not be used for fear of retribution. To prevent property flipping, Roberti Act sales require the house be kept in the affordable range for 30 years after someone buys it from the state.
But it’s the low purchase price and rents that many tenants say breeds resentment among some Caltrans real estate people.
“You get nasty and sarcastic responses saying, ‘Aren't you lucky getting a house at such a good deal,’” one buyer said. “If people thought they went through something renting from Caltrans, buying from them was much worse,” that buyer said. “There’s a lot of dishonesty and excuses … Now I know people who had a good experience, but the majority of them say it’s so awful they don’t want to talk about it.”
A little-known state audit completed in 2000 concluded the fundamental problem is mission: Caltrans management has a highway-building and maintenance mindset, not a property one. The audit found Caltrans owned 1,928 parcels it didn’t need, 821 in the LA-area region that covers the Long Beach-extension. “Sales during the last 10 years,” auditors wrote, “have taken as little as several days to as long as 38 years.”
Assemblywoman Liu said a public hearing in the area next month would address her own findings about the surplus land as well as issues raised by recent Weekly stories about Caltrans’ property dealings. She said her office has received calls from Caltrans tenants in surplus houses willing to pay market value for their houses but stymied from getting them.
“ It would seem, especially in these times of budget deficit, that Caltrans would be expediting the sale of these properties, not throwing up road blocks,” Liu said. “The [agency’s] right-of-way manual lays out the process for disposing of excess properties. I don’t understand why it doesn’t follow it.”
Then-Caltrans Director James W. Van Loben Sels enunciated this same logic in a May 1995 memo. After a Los Angeles Times expose uncovered dozens of unneeded houses still in agency hands, the local Caltrans office argued they should hang on to all of them, presumably to play if safe in case the freeway path changed and they would have to pay top dollar for land they just unloaded at rock-bottom prices. Loben Sels disagreed: “It is imperative,” he said, “that Caltrans divest itself of any property not absolutely required. We should be looking at reason to dispose of, rather than retain property.”
He seemed to have won a half-victory. The 21 surplus houses have a market value of $5.7 million.
The majority of homes that Caltrans parted with were in South Pasadena and even there controversy shadowed it.
A dozen of them were released in a single batch to a non profit called Esperanza Charities, which had proposed using the structures for developmentally disabled tenants. Two homeowner groups and South Pasadena in 1997 sued to block the deal, claiming it lacked environment review, good judgment for the neighborhood and smart business practice since selling them en masse produced less than selling them individually.
In the end, Esperanza capitulated, making only two of the 11 in South Pasadena for disabled tenants. Despite speculation that Esperanza converted the homes to market-rate, all of them remain fixed in the affordable range, according to Joseph Borda, the charity's founder.
“The houses were in horrible shape when he bought them,” he said.
Week 1: Corridor of Shame—No Exit
Week 2: The Untouchables—Corridor of Shame
Week 3: Tunnel Visions—Corridor of Shame
Week 4: Legislature Needs to Take Control of Caltrans
• Chip Jacobs can be reached at machimbo1@earthlink.net.
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