El Paso City Council delays decision to cut percentage of accessible apartments

From NewspaperTree in El Paso, Texas:

Faced with convincing facts and people on opposing sides of a proposal to relax the city’s accessibility standards for new apartment complexes, the El Paso City Council officially put off a decision for at least six months Sept. 8.

Members and representatives of the city’s disabled community counted the council’s 4-3 vote to keep the percentage of required accessible units in new apartment complexes at 5 percent as a victory.

The proposal that has been debated for weeks would have reduced that requirement to 2 percent as a part of an incentive package for apartment builders.

The question is whether the decision will help the city get what it needs: thousands of new apartments for incoming soldiers and their families.

The council spent four hours listening to people with disabilities say they can’t find accessible apartments to rent and to apartment developers and operators who said people with disabilities aren’t renting the accessible apartments they have built.

Others favoring the current 5 percent standard argued that the city needs more accessible apartments, not just for people with severe physical disabilities but for those who are elderly or weakened by illness or disease.

Particularly discussed was the need for roll-in or walk-in showers versus bathtubs.

A city survey of nine apartment complexes supported developer contentions that people with disabilities aren’t renting accessible apartments.

Of the 2,000 units built since 1996, 104 were designed to be accessible. Of those, 11 units are rented by disabled tenants, 69 are reportedly occupied by nondisabled residents and the rest are vacant.

But city Rep. Emma Acosta said there’s no accurate way of knowing whether the 69 supposedly able-bodied renters in accessible units have a disability because it is illegal to ask under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city employees and inspectors involved in the survey obtained their information from apartment managers and by meeting some of the renters.

“Going from 5 percent to 2 percent is wrong,” Acosta said. “It’s a drastic move in my opinion, and I think it would be bad for us.”

Acosta joined Quintana and city Reps. Eddie Holguin and Steve Ortega in voting to take no action but to revisit the issue in six months after more information has been gathered. City Reps. Susie Bryd, Carl Robinson and Beto O'Rourke were on the losing end of the vote. Rep. Ann Lilly was absent.

In the meantime, the city will ask the El Paso Apartment Association and the Volar Center for Independent Living – organizations on opposite sides of the issue – to cooperatively compile and maintain a database of all the apartment complexes built since 1993.

“I will support it because it keeps the status quo,” Holguin said before casting his vote. “But it doesn’t answer the fundamental question: Do you support 5 percent or 2 percent. The database doesn’t do anything.”

An earlier motion to reject the change to 2 percent failed on a 4-3 vote in which Ortega sided with Byrd, Robinson and O'Rourke.

The database that the council asked the two organizations to compile is to contain information about all of the accessible apartments in the city, about how many are vacant and how much the rents are.

“A database doesn’t solve the problem,” O’Rourke said.

But Ortega contended that the availability of that information may go a long way toward solving the disconnection between the people who need to find accessible apartments and those who have them to rent.

Byrd later said the fact that no one – not the city, Volar or the apartment association – ever attempted to compile that information for would-be renters “baffles the mind.”

Tom Bohannon, head of Bohannon Development and the city’s largest apartment builder, said it wasn’t developers but the city that raised the issue this year by asking why apartments aren’t being built in El Paso and what it would take to jump start more development.

City officials asked because El Paso is facing a shortage of at least 8,000 rental units to serve about 21,000 new troops and 30,000 family members who are coming with the expansion of Fort Bliss in the next several years.

Bohannon and other developers told city officials that few large apartment complexes have been built in El Paso in recent years because the city’s economy and people’s income levels won’t support new apartments.

Last month, council approved property tax rebates at various levels as an incentive program for new apartment complexes.

But developers, including Bohannon, said they needed one more thing to provide sufficient incentive to attract builders: a reduction in the percentage of accessible apartments from 5 to 2 percent.

“If the 5 percent is moved to 2 percent, does Bohannon start building multifamily units it would not otherwise have built?” O’Rourke asked.

“Yeah,” Bohannon said flatly.

“I think 2 percent of something is better than 5 percent of nothing,” O’Rourke said. “Nothing is being built now. If new units are built, there will be a net gain in accessible apartments.”

Since the approval of the property tax rebates, developers have taken out tentative applications for the construction of 1,000 new apartments.

But it is uncertain what the impact of the council’s decision will be or whether those applications will be completed and the apartments built.

Among those who spoke in favor of leaving the standard at 5 percent was Robert Malone, who heads El Paso’s AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons.

“We feel that it is a reasonable recommendation in view of the fact that a lot of our members will be retiring,” Malone said. “Unfortunately, as retirement sets in so do disabilities.”

Volar’s executive director, Luis Chew, said the council should be mindful of the soldiers who will be coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with injuries as well as those with conventional disabilities who, for whatever reason, have been unable to find an accessible apartment.

“One of the things I have learned is that there’s a disconnect between the market and the demand,” Chew said, adding that many apartments billed as accessible really aren’t.

Bohannon said he has spent the past six months in discussions with Volar and other groups and in that time, no one needing an accessible apartment has been referred to one of his complexes.

He said his company owns more than 900 apartment units in El Paso and has observed the 5 percent rule since 1993 without question but now has only one of its 45 accessible apartments rented to a disabled person.

Eastsider Bill Sparks urged the council not to approve a blanket reduction because it would work against seniors like him who sometimes face physical challenges at home that people outside may not know about.

However, he said, the city might consider waiving the 5 percent requirement on a case by case basis for apartments being built with young soldiers in mind.

Another apartment developer, Ray Baca, said he has built a 160-unit apartment complex in Northeast El Paso that has filed 95 units in the 4-1/2 months since it opened.

He said he has advertised his accessible apartments on Craig’s list and in apartment magazines but has yet to rent one his eight accessible apartments to a disabled person.

“My eight units are still there … and will likely be six months from now,” he said. “At anytime, I’m going to have to start discounting them, and eventually I will rent them.”

He said the people at Volar have told him the rents – $598 for a single bedroom, $698 for two bedrooms – are too high.

But those prices are as low as can be found today for new apartments in El Paso, he said.

Baca said he has two new apartment projects on the drawing board.

“The rental rates will be at least $100 higher, and that’s if they get done,” he said. “I don’t know if it will work at 2 percent. I know it’s not working at 5.”

Afterward, Rep. Byrd said the problem appears to be that disabled people can’t afford the rents in market complexes and that what’s needed are more subsidized apartments that are accessible.

“If the goal is to find a fit between the need and what is affordable, really where we should spend our energy is on subsidized units,” Byrd said. “I think we’re extracting more from developers than what can be justified.

“I don’t mind extracting from developers as long as it has a real public benefit. But in this case it’s clear the market-rate apartments that are accessible are not being occupied in large numbers by the people who need them.”