Alameda County Grand Jury
• 2017-2018
Affordable Housing Oversight in Oakland Executive Summary Last August, a concerned Oakland resident called the Grand*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 5 findings
F18-22
Loans from the city of Oakland for affordable housing rental projects are typically provided for a term of up to fifty-five years and, in exchange, rents are restricted for that same period, making the rents affordable to lower-income households. No repayment is expected until the end of the loan period or upon transfer of the property, giving the public the perception that these transactions are grants of public money rather than traditional loans.
No recommendations for this finding
F18-23
Oakland's Housing and Community Development Department has failed to inspect and audit all of its affordable housing stock annually, putting lower-income households renting at projects like E.C. Reems at risk of living in substandard conditions.
No recommendations for this finding
F18-24
The Housing and Community Development Department's failure either to provide building inspection training for staff or partner with Oakland's Building Services Department to inspect its affordable- housing stock inhibits the agency's ability to respond to tenant complaints and protect the residents properly. The Housing and Community Development Department's use of
No recommendations for this finding
F18-25
outdated technology to catalogue and manage data regarding the city of Oakland's affordable-housing stock prevents consistent oversight of those projects, putting public funds at risk.
No recommendations for this finding
F18-26
Failure to maintain consistent policies related to the selection process for affordable housing developers, especially in the area of financial strength of applicants, invites project management failures like the one that took place at the E.C. Reems Apartments.
No recommendations for this finding
Conclusions 1
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CL1Cities and counties play an essential role in helping to administer and oversee significant public investments in affordable housing. In Oakland, both the voters and city leaders have been committed to providing such investments for decades. Most recently, voters approved $100 million in bonds for affordable housing construction. The city of Oakland is distributing the funds in the form of loans but it is important for voters to understand that these are loans that most likely will never be repaid. Over the past 25 years, the city has provided private developers, including non-profit organizations, with these soft loans to build or refurbish thousands of rental units in over 100 affordable housing projects. In exchange, the developers were contractually obligated to keep the projects both habitable and available to low-income residents for decades. Despite some success stories related to building such projects, the city has a poor history of ensuring that failing housing project owners and managers are held accountable when residents are living in substandard conditions. Decades of mismanagement at the E.C. Reems Apartments have exposed the city's failure to invest in proper oversight and enforcement of developer covenants. Lack of proper staffing, failure to inspect and audit each project annually, antiquated record-keeping systems and insufficient vetting of developers can only invite more failures like those that occurred at E.C. Reems and Oakland Community Housing before it. At a time when affordable housing is so essential, the city must make a more serious commitment to both protect this significant public investment and the vulnerable residents that these programs are supposed to support. 2017-2018 Alameda County Grand Jury Final Report
No Responses Found 1
Government entities assigned to respond to this report. No response documents have been linked in our database.
Oakland
City
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.