PERSON OF THE WEEK: If often seems that affordable housing has always been something of a challenge for real estate finance professionals, government planners and the people who are supposed to benefit from these projects. Filmmaker Carolyn Coal, in her documentary ‘A Place to Live: The Story of Triangle Square,’ focuses on the unique challenges behind a Los Angeles-based affordable-housing project that made history as the first project designed to accommodate the needs of lower-income gay and lesbian seniors. MortgageOrb spoke with Coal about the story behind her documentary, which was recently released on DVD.
Q: What was the inspiration for your film?
Coal: Our producer, Cynthia Childs, saw the building under construction in Hollywood and reached out to Gay Lesbian Elder Housing (GLEH) to discuss the idea of a documentary. Mark Supper, executive director of GLEH, connected with his board, which approved the idea, and we hit the ground running.
The building was nearing completion, and GLEH was about to hold town-hall-style meetings to inform the gay and lesbian senior population of the intended housing project and to build interest in applications. We learned that there were an estimated 70,000 gay & lesbian seniors in the Los Angeles area at that time. GLEH and the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center had an extensive mailing list and were able to generate informational letters to a number of seniors in the area.
While we certainly wanted to shed light on the gay and lesbian senior population and its struggle, it was not our desire to make a hard-hitting investigative journalism documentary. Rather, it is a human-interest story we hoped would expose the feelings and needs of the gay senior population.
Q: Why is it important for gay and lesbian seniors to have a housing complex for themselves? Is there a high level of discrimination and animosity against gay and lesbian seniors by other older Americans?
Coal: Let me answer this question by quoting a statistic I recently read in California Educator magazine (March 2011, Vol. 15, Issue 6, p. 11, by Dina Martin): ‘In 2009, nearly nine out of 10 GLBT students reported harassmentâ�¦ students who identified themselves as GLBT were more likely to miss classes, experience fallen grades, and suffer from an increased level of depression and anxiety.’
These statistics represent how people feel about gays and lesbians today. Imagine how gays and lesbians were treated in the 1940s and 1950s: beaten, marginalized, fired, ridiculed and disenfranchised. You have to realize that the same people who discriminated against gays and lesbians 50 years ago are the same homophobic individuals with whom they now retire.
Fair housing, Section 8 housing, and independent and assisted-living facilities are a diverse cross-section of people. Many gays and lesbians suffer from marginalization and discrimination in these facilities – not to mention the institutional discrimination gay seniors experience. For example, gay couples are not allowed to share rooms in many facilities because they are not legally married.
Q: Does Triangle Square's population consists solely of gay and lesbian seniors?
Coal: Affordable housing, by law, must be open to all applicants who fit the building criteria. Only around 80% of the building's occupants identify as gay and lesbian. GLEH was the corporate entity that built Triangle Square, but fair-housing laws applied when populating it.
Q: One of the challenges facing the developers of the Triangle Square project was financing. Considering that the project went up before the economy soured, why was it so difficult to secure financing for this particular project?
Coal: Affordable housing is never easy to finance. There are varieties of formulas utilized that allow city, state and federal funding (as well as private and corporate financing) to contribute to such an endeavor. Most affordable housing is also divided into units that correspond to people's incomes as it relates to the ‘average median income’ (AMI) of the city in which the building will be located – in this case, Los Angeles, which has a relatively high median income. The building units (and corresponding rental fees) are broken down into income percentages (60%, 50%, 40%, etc. of the AMI).
In the case of Triangle Square, more individuals in the 20% to 30% bracket applied for a space in the building, which meant that most of the seniors applying had very low incomes. This made it difficult to fill the building because the 50% to 60% units were not affordable to most seniors applying.
Q: As the number of seniors increases, do you believe that there will be adequate affordable housing to meet their needs?
Coal: No, because I don't think we value our senior population – gay or straight – and, therefore, have not made it a priority. Other cultures maintain multi-generational households, and they look to their elders for wisdom and guidance. However, Americans tend to send their elders off to the ‘home,’ where someone else can deal with them. It's as though we find aging unsightly instead of beautiful and natural.
It saddens me. My grandparents (especially my mother's mother) played a significant role in shaping my life as a child. It was a joy to direct this project, because it gave me an opportunity to spend time with the seniors we profiled. I fell in love with each one of them. I hope our culture begins to see the value of its senior population. Each one of us is aging and will one day face our own mortality.
