Orchard Park taken to task over housing
Request for seniors' data raises issue of policy on out-of-towners
When Jean Deahn retired, she wanted to move closer to her daughter, Susan, and granddaughter, Cheyenne, who live in Blasdell.
So Deahn sold her home in Akron and got a tidy little one-bedroom place in the Carnation Apartments in Orchard Park, an easy 4.5-mile drive to have dinner, make applesauce or just visit with them.
"It's been a good move for me all around," she said.
Deahn is a spirited woman, quick to crack jokes, eager to chat with her neighbors and happy to brag about Susan, 12-year-old Cheyenne, and Deahn's son, Tom, who coaches for Temple University.
She also may be just the sort of person whom some Orchard Park officials are trying to keep out of their community — a retiree on a fixed income who is not from Orchard Park.
A local nonprofit group, People Inc., asked the town's Planning Board this summer to rezone a piece of land so it could build 43 affordable apartments for senior citizens, much like the one where Deahn lives.
The answer: No.
The reason?
Many of the senior citizens likely would not be from Orchard Park.
Town officials went so far as to send People Inc. a letter, asking for the ZIP codes of all the residents of Carnation Apartments, which is one of 16 such senior citizen buildings that the nonprofit owns in the region.
That was a red flag for People Inc.
It was not the first time that neighbors or officials in one town or another had asked where "those people" would be coming from. But such questions usually are asked in hushed tones, behind closed doors, according to Rhonda Frederick, the group's chief operating officer.
"This time was different, because it was so blatant, with them sending us a letter asking for it," she said of the request for the ZIP codes. "I feel very strongly there's discrimination against lower-income individuals in Orchard Park, against people who require affordable housing."
Orchard Park's response surpasses snobbery — it's illegal, according to one local fair-housing advocacy group, Housing Opportunities Made Equal. The apartments will be financed with a $5.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and housing that's federally funded must be open to everyone who meets the income guidelines, regardless of where they live.
Feeling almost insulted
Fair-housing advocates say Orchard Park's request for the ZIP codes may be a thinly veiled attempt to keep minorities from moving into the town.
"To me, that request for ZIP codes implied concerns about the race of possible future occupants of this proposed senior citizens housing," said Scott W. Gehl, executive director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal.
At the request of People Inc., HOME is investigating what happened in Orchard Park.
Town officials bristle when asked whether their response was racially motivated.
"That's almost an insulting question," said Remy C. Orffeo, the town's planning coordinator, who sent the letter requesting ZIP code information on behalf of the Planning Board.
"I'm not aware of anyone on the Planning Board or the Town Board who has a racial bias about people who live in Orchard Park," said Nan Ackerman, a longtime town councilwoman. "This has been a racially mixed community since I moved into it. We've got every race I can think of represented. There are Asians, there are Indians, there are quite a few black families."
She is right — Orchard Park is not entirely white.
It is, however, one of the whitest communities in Erie County. The last census, in 2000, showed that out of 27,483 residents, 518 were nonwhite. More than half of those minorities were Asian.
Blacks accounted for 133 residents — about 5 in every 1,000 people in Orchard Park.
The town's request for ZIP code information troubles fair-housing advocates, who point out that to be eligible to live in the apartments, people need to be at least 62 years old and make $22,250 a year or less.
"You already know it's seniors, so there's only so many other things you can do with ZIP code data," said Robert M. Silverman, associate professor in urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo. "It sounds like they're concerned about minorities moving into the neighborhood."
HOME is continuing its investigation of the situation.
Ackerman said she is not surprised by HOME's reaction. "An organization whose espoused mission in life is to find racial bias wants to find it, so it can justify its own existence," she said.
Neighbors living near the proposed apartments on Mid-County Drive, near Route 219, supported the plan. Town officials oppose it.
The reason Orchard Park is concerned about where residents would come from has nothing to do with race, Ackerman said.
"We were hoping it would be for our own residents and not a lot of other people. The problem with senior housing is that we usually have an increased number of emergency calls for the paramedics," she said, and local tax dollars support the police and firefighters who respond to those calls.
"We felt, if we were serving our own people, that was one thing," she said. "If we're serving the needs of the greater community, we need to go where those needs are."
There's another reason town officials do not support the rezoning from industrial to multifamily.
Orchard Park's comprehensive plan calls for the town to preserve its industrial land so that when companies come looking for some, it's available.
"We don't have lot of industrial land. The intent is to keep as much of it as we can," Orffeo said. "When the economic recession we have is over, there's going to be a demand for industrial land."
There are about 1,100 acres of industrial land in Orchard Park — about equivalent to the size of UB's Amherst campus. People Inc. asked the town to rezone six acres of it.
The rezoning has not been called to a formal vote, but during a meeting last summer, the planning board made it clear it did not support the rezoning.
"We are not encouraging you to move forward," Harold T. Fabinsky, the Planning Board chairman, told People Inc.
West Seneca setback
When HUD awards a grant for affordable housing, the recipient group has a limited amount of time to start construction. People Inc. already has exceeded that time limit in Orchard Park.
HUD has granted an extension, which expires Oct. 31. Another extension may be possible.
But if the apartments aren't built soon, the grant will be withdrawn, and another community will get the money, said Stephen T. Banko III, director of HUD's Buffalo office.
In the meantime, People Inc. also has encountered delays with an affordable senior citizen housing project in West Seneca. There, the Town Board, in a 3-2 vote, recently denied a rezoning for a 47-unit building on French Road.
"I was for the project, I was just not for the particular location they had chosen," said Councilwoman Sheila M. Meegan, who said she prefers a location on Ridge Road.
Neighbors lobbied hard to block the project, primarily citing concerns over drainage — concerns that People Inc. said it addressed. Now, People Inc. is looking for a different site in West Seneca for the $6.1 million project there.
The delays in Orchard Park and West Seneca have raised concerns among HUD officials, who say officials at the town level seem more inclined than ever to object to affordable senior citizen apartments.
"It's beginning to get a little troubling," Banko said. "There seems to be a pattern of reluctance to allow these projects to go forward, and that should be troubling to all of us, particularly as the population ages."
Affordable senior citizen housing is overwhelmingly populated by residents such as Jean Deahn — single women, many of them widows.
Social Security alone
After Deahn's husband died of heart problems 25 years ago, she sold the family's dairy farm in Arcade and moved back to Akron, closer to family, while she raised her daughter, then 9, and helped put her son through college.
A teacher, Deahn saw her hopes of finding a full-time teaching job fizzle in the face of a tight job market. Instead, she strung together a series of jobs: proofreading stories at the Amherst Bee, making salads at the Asa Ransom House, doing marketing for a car auction in Akron.
All of those things paid the bills. None provided a pension.
So, at 72, Deahn is living solely off her Social Security checks, like so many other retirees. She pays 30 percent of her income toward rent; the government picks up the rest.
"When I came here, I wondered: What is this going to be like? I'm in subsidized housing. But I had to get over that," she said. "Once you get here, then you find out, this isn't so bad. There's community here. Most people have lost their husband. They share that loneliness."
The irony, according to fair-housing advocates, is that people generally don't want to move too far; most people moving into affordable housing come from within a five-mile radius, Frederick said. The ZIP code data shows that two-thirds of the residents of the Carnation Apartments are from Orchard Park or a neighboring community, such as Hamburg or West Seneca.
Generally, senior citizens who have moved from farther away, such as Deahn, moved to be closer to their children who live nearby.
"When you talk about affordable housing, there is often the subtext that this is going to mean a racially diverse population," Gehl said.
"Assuming you ensure equal opportunity, that is theoretically possible. However, experience shows most people aren't inclined to move too far from their home communities."
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