A Sacramento redevelopment plan focused on the historic New Helvetia neighborhood, home to one of the city’s only public housing projects and more than a thousand low-income renters of color, has residents and tenants rights activists worried about displacement. City council is set to vote on the plan on Tuesday.
But supporters of the plan, known as the West Broadway Specific Plan, say it will offer the neighborhood a better connection to downtown, as well as rehabilitate the Alder Grove and Marina Vista housing complexes — formerly known as New Helvetia and Seavey Circle, respectively — which have long been plagued with maintenance issues.
Councilmember Steve Hansen, whose District 4 encompasses the neighborhood, said the city’s redevelopment plan would dismantle “the racially concentrated area of poverty” and build through what was once an “industrial area to bring more life to it.”
“We have to center the people who are living in the public housing units and do what we can now for them now while we plan for a healthier future for the neighborhood...,” Hansen said.
But tenants are worried.
Part of the redevelopment plan would allow the Alder Grove and Marina Vista complexes to be demolished in the event that “rehabilitation of the buildings is not possible.”
The Alder Grove complex also stands as a local civil rights monument in many ways. In 1951, Nathaniel Colley, the first Black attorney in Sacramento, noticed that Black residents were being segregated to 16 of the 360 units in the complex. In response, he filed what would become a historic lawsuit against the housing authority to desegregate its units and create fair public housing practices.
Macheri Smith, a current tenant at Alder Grove, said she believes that rehabilitation can be done without the rest of the redevelopment plan.
“For me, I’m just like ‘no, that doesn't work for me, or my family or the community here.’ How are they going to be able to put us anywhere if there’s barely any housing anywhere?” Smith asked. “They say [demolition] could take 20 years, but at any given time they can say they just got a grant and that grant will allow us to move forward, let’s do it in two years. We didn’t get to have a say. It’s a way for developers to put money in their pockets.”
But officials with the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, which owns and manages the two complexes, have said that they do not have any future plans to demolish either public housing complex. Instead, since they do not know what might happen decades from now, they want to have flexibility in the plan.
“The SHRA has no claim, no funding and no intentions of demolishing buildings anytime in the near future,” Tyrone Roderick Williams, SHRA’s deputy executive director of development, said. “So all of the concerns, or really all of the disinformation that has been disseminated is an orchestrated effort that really, it does disservice to our residents, because we’ve said from the very beginning there was no plan for demolition.”
Hansen added that much of the plan’s proposals were just that — proposals. And that city council’s vote to approve the plan does not mean that any of the steps outlined in the plan would absolutely happen.
Some of the proposals include plans to remove a Shell petroleum tank farm and increase access to the grid for residents living in the complexes. It also proposes the possibility of adding mixed-income housing to the public housing currently available.
Williams said the plan to include mixed-income housing is not to help displacement, but it’s instead an attempt to not concentrate and isolate poverty.
“Alder Grove and Marina Vista have an elementary school that only the kids from Alder Grove and Marina Vista can go to,” Williams said. “That is segregation.”
But current tenants and opponents of the redevelopment initiative are worried the plan to create privately-owned mixed-income housing could displace hundreds of low-income residents, the majority of whom are people of color.
“There’s no academic research that says if you move market rate housing next to a housing project, that somehow the lives of the people in the housing project are going to get better,” Jesus Hernandez, an urban sociologist said.
Instead, Hernandez said the city would just be repeating history. “And we use this story again and again, we used it in the West End when we got rid of Chinatown, Japantown.”
Hernandez said that the neighborhood surrounding the two public housing complexes bear the mark of city-planned segregation. The area was purposefully divided from the Sacramento grid by the freeway, an “architectural device” he says was used to separate the city center from what was in the 1950s one of the largest concentrations of African American residents.
One of his biggest concerns about the plan is a map showing a road extended from the downtown grid and running through the Alder Grove housing complex.
He worried that this was the city dividing and separating a community again.
“Find the places of the poor, put your street right through them and you displace them. We use these freeways with purpose,” Hernandez said. “You do not need a specific plan with an option to demolish to rehab these places, you simply don’t need a specific plan that says demolish and bring in new market-rate housing.”
Other opponents of the plan see it as just the beginning.
Activist Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth, worried that this plan was similar to redevelopment that was done in downtown Sacramento. He said that improvement of the neighborhood will be done without keeping low income people of color in mind.By doing so, Accisu said the cost of rehabilitation will be increased rents and house prices that would eventually push out the same residents supporters say the plan seeks to help.
“This idea of redeveloping and rehabbing this historic community — segregation was fought right here,” Accius said. “To tear this down would be a travesty. To displace people in other communities would be a travesty.”
Katie Valenzuela, District 4’s councilmember-elect who’s set to replace Hansen in December, said that she hoped there could be some compromise at the council level.
“I do hold hope that regardless of what the council does tomorrow that there [will] be an opportunity for us to reevaluate before any projects move forward, so we can reengage the community and make changes to the specific plan, or envision more specific projects, that meet the community’s needs,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this isn’t going to be the end of the conversation.”
