Seniors mobilizing to save Grantville mobile home park
There’s housing that happens to be affordable and then there’s Affordable Housing. The senior citizens who live at the Mission Valley Village Mobile Home Park have the former: Thanks to the private land owner, they’ve been able to live for years, sometimes decades, in their trailers for fairly low rent. But this year a developer, Archstone-Smith, offered to buy the property in order to build a 444-unit condo complex on the 10.2 acre lot. Under Archstone’s proposal, 10 percent of the units will be affordable to people who qualify as low-income earners and 10 percent will be affordable to people who make moderate incomes. The rent on these 88 units will be regulated by California’s Affordable Housing Law. The current residents of the mobile home part would be forced to move under this arrangement, so tomorrow, before the City Council takes up the crucial questions of zoning and permitting, they will be holding a protest in front of City Hall.
The seniors have been fighting this development since March, when they packed a meeting where the public was given a chance to weigh in on the project’s environmental impacts. Then they showed up at the Navajo Community Planners, a citizens’ advisory group for the area, and persuaded them to oppose the project, 9-3. When the project went before the city’s planning commission, commissioners voted to send the project on to the City Council for final approval, but not before recommending that the project include solar power and an additional 22 moderately priced units. The developer was fine with the solar panels, but not the extra affordable units.
