UPDATED Aug. 21, 2024 | In the mid-1980s, Park Village Apartments could charitably have been viewed as needing some attention. The low-income apartment complex in Stockton, California, was in disrepair, with leaking roofs, sewage issues, abandoned cars, and stretches of dirt where landscaping should have been. Children living there had no place to play.
Almost 40 years later, the development is an entirely different place. Roofs and plumbing issues have been addressed, well-maintained gardens brighten the property, and the complex boasts a community center, a multi-purpose room with a commercial kitchen, and a playground.
The improvements were made over time by the complex’s residents, Cambodian refugees who in 1993 took control of the property from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But even as the tenants were making decisions, allocating millions of dollars for renovations, and spending afternoons and weekends cleaning and beautifying the complex, the group didn’t have total legal control of the property. Even today, 31 years after the contract of sale was signed, HUD has still not formally approved the residents’ full ownership of the apartment complex.
Seeking Safety and Security
In the early 1980s, Stockton welcomed a large number of refugees fleeing Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Some came to live at Park Village Apartments, a 230-unit, privately owned affordable housing complex near downtown. Few spoke English.
Even then, the development was rundown. “It was in very bad condition,” says Sovanna Koeurt, who emigrated from Cambodia in 1984 with her husband and two small children. “They never fixed anything. It was almost uninhabitable.” The units were largely uninsulated and cold, some bore signs of having been flooded, and many were infested with cockroaches.
With more than 250 big Cambodian families squeezed into small apartments, Park Village became increasingly dismal. Gambling was common, and families under stress were showing signs of domestic violence. Teens looking to gain acceptance joined gangs, and drive-by shootings began to occur. A local journalist later described it as a “squalid, overcrowded Cambodian ghetto.”
In 1989, unrelated to the complex’s gang issues, a man with reported anti-Asian sentiments shot five children at a Stockton school. Four of them lived at Park Village, and another 18 children from the complex were injured. It was one of the nation’s first school shootings.
That incident was the impetus for the creation of a new group. Koeurt and 35 other Cambodian families came together to establish the Asian Pacific Self-Development and Residential Association, or APSARA. (In Cambodian culture an Apsara is a divine spirit, as well as a dance form.) One of the organization’s original goals was to find or build a new home for themselves—somewhere where they and their families could be safe and heal from the traumas they’d experienced.
During the same time, many owners of low-income housing developments across the U.S. had loans in default. The energy crisis hit landlords hard, with operating costs for their properties trending higher than the rent they could collect. Other developments had simply been poorly constructed, and the cost of repairs eventually became untenable. Because the federal government had insured these developments, ownership defaulted to HUD once the loans were paid.
Park Village wasn’t spared. Around the time of APSARA’s formation, the complex’s owner defaulted on the property and HUD took ownership.
Another trend in affordable housing was underway then, too. Jack Kemp, then-secretary of HUD under President George H.W. Bush, was a disciple of homeownership as an antipoverty tool, and he pushed for resident ownership of properties under new programs like HOPE I and HOPE II.
HUD Properties Sold to Tenant Groups
HUD did not respond to Shelterforce’s inquires about Park Village Apartments, or the number of properties sold to tenant groups in the 80s and 90s. Housing experts disagree on how many of these sales took place.
The Sacramento Bee previously reported that Park Village was the first time such a sale occured, but Jim Grow of the National Housing Law Project disputes that reporting.
“There was real interest in advantaging more resident control and resident ownership of HUD assets,” says Jim Grow, senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project and an expert on the preservation of privately owned, federally subsidized housing developments.
APSARA began talking to HUD about acquiring Park Village for its own use. In 1991, HUD agreed and conducted a nonjudicial foreclosure of the property. In October 1993, the agency disposed of the property to Park Village’s residents for $1.
An article in The Sacramento Bee quoted William Bolton, a Sacramento-based HUD official who oversaw hundreds of affordable multifamily complexes in the northern half of California, saying, “This is the ultimate in tenant empowerment.” Other HUD leaders were similarly enthusiastic about the deal.
The agency agreed to continue to subsidize residents’ rents, and—as continues to be the case today—families paid no more than 30 percent of their monthly income.
Beginning from the Ground Up
Technically, HUD sold the development not to APSARA but to a new nonprofit called Park Village Apartments Inc. According to HUD’s disposition agreement, for the next five years, half of the nonprofit’s board of directors would be represented by APSARA; the other half would come from a local nonprofit, the Rural California Housing Corporation (RCHC), which would assist APSARA in developing the skills and capacity needed to successfully govern the complex. The memorandum of understanding stated that “at the end of [a] five-year period, APSARA and RCHC agree that RCHC’s role with the corporation shall end.”
Full control of Park Village Apartments Inc. by APSARA was also conditioned on solving the complex’s overcrowding issues.
Requiring new tenant owners to initially partner with an existing local nonprofit was a common requirement by HUD in instances like this one.
“It was so that HUD would have some assurance that the ownership entity was capable of doing the job,” says Grow. “There are a lot of examples where these things have gone into the tank.”
Technically, however, it meant that RCHC co-owned the apartment complex for as long as its representatives served on the board.
That fact may not have been entirely clear to APSARA’s leaders, due to language and cultural barriers. “Meetings and documents were never professionally translated into Khmer for APSARA,” says Jay Cumberland, a lawyer with the Oakland-based Sustainable Economies Law Center who has been helping the group. Koeurt provided basic translations for her fellow residents, but Cumberland suspects that much of the legal minutiae wasn’t conveyed.
Additionally, Koeurt has said that written contracts were not prominent in Cambodia, so she and other residents didn’t realize their significance in this situation. As a result, residents may not have fully grasped that they didn’t completely control the property.
And they were busy and distracted trying to improve the development. Koeurt, who has led APSARA for its full 35-year history, says that managing a property like Park Village was remarkably challenging. “For five years, we had a lot of issues to take care of,” she says.
With RCHC’s help, Park Village Apartments Inc. received a $7 million loan from Bank of America for renovations. Appliances, cabinets, floors, and other interior elements were replaced, as were roofs, balconies, and sidewalks. Twenty-two new four-bedroom apartments were created to reduce overcrowding. And the group built a community hall for classes and activities, and created gardens where residents planted lemongrass, onions, flowers, and Cambodian vegetables.
Fixing the buildings, that’s easy . . . But fixing the social behaviors—not easy.”
Sovanna Koeurt, APSARA founder
RCHC helped train APSARA’s members to address the complex’s physical issues. But there remained much more to do. “Fixing the buildings, that’s easy,” says Koeurt. “But fixing the social behaviors—not easy.”
Gang activity, for example, continued at the renovated complex, and Park Village Apartments Inc. had to ask several families to leave. Additionally, HUD had hoped that Park Village Apartments Inc. would offer programs and social services for the residents, and getting up to speed on how to do so took time.
After the initial five years, Koeurt and her APSARA colleagues agreed that they weren’t yet ready for RCHC to disappear. They needed more training in how to take full responsibility for the property—and its inhabitants.
Park Village Steps up, HUD Steps Away
Over the next few years, APSARA became a certified nonprofit organization, allowing it to receive funding for some resident programs. The community center began hosting a range of activities: nutrition and exercise courses, mental health counseling, tutoring for schoolchildren, free groceries for those struggling with food insecurity, English classes, and traditional Cambodian dancing and chanting.
“I tried hard to be a real nonprofit,” says Koeurt. “I learned how to write grants, how to do programs.”
In 2000, Park Village’s property manager left. In response, Koeurt stepped into the role. “I volunteered for one year so I could know what was going on,” she says. She learned how to communicate with residents and ensure that everything was functioning as it should, as well as how to manage the property’s finances.
By that time, William Bolton and other HUD leaders who’d been so fired up about Park Village’s promise were gone, and the department’s new officials had little direct interaction with Koeurt and APSARA. That was largely left to Stan Keasling, executive director of RCHC, and his staff. But conversations were infrequent, Keasling said; the two parties would go months or more without communicating.
The organization was experiencing its own changes. In 2000, RCHC fused with Mercy Housing, which wasn’t interested in jointly owning a Stockton apartment complex, according to Keasling. RCHC continued to exist as a separate entity and its representatives remained on Park Village Inc.’s board, but they began to ask HUD about stepping away and letting APSARA take full control, pointing out that APSARA had learned all it was going to and it was time to separate.
“But whenever we’d talk, [HUD would] say, ‘We’re not ready to see that happen yet,’” says Keasling. “I don’t think HUD ever gave a definitive reason [for it].”
A report issued by the University of California Center for Cooperatives in 2000 examined several other properties that HUD had sold to tenants. It found that HUD was “inconsistent in its recognition of resident groups as legitimate partners” and that “outsiders perceive a strong anti-resident bias at HUD.”
However, the overarching reason for HUD’s caution and lack of support may have been more political. In 1995, Newt Gingrich ushered a new Republican majority into the U.S. House of Representatives, and soon HUD’s budget and very existence were under threat. Many of the programs that had supported initiatives like resident-owned properties were zeroed out, and the department’s funding—as well as public sentiment about taxpayer-funded affordable housing—never completely recovered. “That, I think, is a more credible explanation than simply lack of interest and resolve” on HUD’s part, says Grow of the National Housing Law Project.
Whenever we’d talk, [HUD would] say, ‘We’re not ready to see that happen yet . . . I don’t think HUD ever gave a definitive reason [for it].”
Stan Keasling, executive director of RCHC
To boot, the results of some other resident-owned experiments were coming in, and not all were doing well. “It’s not an easy job,” says Grow. Tenants don’t always recognize how much effort managing a large property requires, and they can struggle to remain united and govern themselves well. HUD officials may have become wary about allowing groups like APSARA to go it alone.
A HUD spokesperson, speaking on background, agreed. “Residential real estate is a very complex, difficult business,” they said. At the same time, the spokesperson added, “Doing things with people in a group is hard. It’s a very difficult balance. It’s not hard to find examples of co-ops that have failed. And when they do, it can get really ugly, resulting in deferred maintenance and unsafe housing.”
But with the determined Koeurt at the helm, the Cambodian group survived and even thrived.
The Sole Condition in the Contract
As the years ticked by, RCHC personnel began to wholly defer to residents’ wishes at Park Village Apartments Inc. meetings. “We committed to APSARA having as much decision-making authority as they could,” says Keasling. “Even though we were joint owners, we acted as if their three votes decided everything.”
As a result, while APSARA wasn’t legally the sole owner, the organization was effectively in control of the apartment complex for many years. Koeurt and her colleagues made their own binding choices about financial operations, property management, and programming. Communication with HUD faded out.
After about 2007, however, RCHC became even more vocal about wanting to step away. In response, APSARA itself began looking for a local nonprofit that could serve as a replacement partner; by now, the residents’ group took as a given HUD’s requirement that it share duties and decisions with a nonprofit. But the organizations that expressed interest either wanted more than a 50 percent share or seemed to not trust APSARA’s experience and expertise.
That’s how APSARA leaders met Cumberland from the Sustainable Economies Law Center. The center provides legal assistance to underserved communities, and in 2020, Koeurt and her colleagues asked it to vet a proposal submitted by a prospective partner that might replace RCHC.
“They asked us to look at the agreement because they didn’t trust it,” says Cumberland. APSARA wound up rejecting that partnership, but Cumberland began wondering whether the group actually needed a partner organization at all.
“We got 30 years’ worth of documents from [APSARA] and read through all of them,” he says. “And I eventually came to the belief that they don’t need a partner organization.”
Cumberland combed through HUD’s 1993 Use Agreement. There was no demonstration of capacity required of APSARA. The only legal condition mentioned, on a standalone page, was regarding overcrowding, something Park Village Apartments Inc. says it solved in 1998.
Cumberland wrote to HUD officials, telling them APSARA had met that single condition and was planning to replace Park Village Apartments Inc.’s three board positions currently held by RCHC with their own representatives.
That is, APSARA would now take full ownership of the property. He sent the email in October 2023, exactly 30 years after the original agreement.
“And then we never heard back from anyone,” says Cumberland. “It’s a fight we were ready for, but now . . . it’s a silence that’s hard to read. It’s very strange. Kind of disappointing.” APSARA decided to move forward nonetheless.
Of the handful of resident-led organizations that took ownership of their affordable properties in the 1990s, Keasling believes Park Village Apartments is one of only a few still operating in their original form. In a way, that’s not too surprising. For a cooperatively owned property to survive, says Grow, “it takes a core of people who are really interested and dedicated.” And this group of Cambodian refugees is indisputably dedicated and engaged.
For example, in recent years—more than two decades after the last renovations—Park Village’s complex needed new roofs, stairs, and walkways. APSARA members had assumed they couldn’t get a bank loan for renovations without a local partner, so instead they carefully built their reserves over many years and were able to pay for the repairs, $4 million in total, in cash.
If HUD finally agrees to APSARA’s full ownership of the property, the organization is considering forming a limited equity housing cooperative that would allow the residents to become homeowners, rather than merely renters.
It would certainly fit APSARA’s DIY ethos. “We do it ourselves,” says Koeurt. “My board may not speak English, but they have good wisdom, they feel ownership.”
“That’s why we survive until now.”
Editor’s Note: After Shelterforce began inquiring about the ownership status of the property, HUD officials recently responded to APSARA. “HUD is not opposed to APSARA becoming the owners for the property,” they indicated in an email to Cumberland. Soon after, HUD personnel conducted a site visit to Park Village Apartments and discussed moving forward with a modified physical transfer of assets, according to Cumberland.
This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the residents were refugees, not immigrants, as they were forced to leave Cambodia.
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3 thoughts on “Will This Resident Group Get Full Control of the Complex They Helped Fix?”
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Hi Amanda,
That is awesome true well written article. I strongly hope that the message in your article will help HUD redetermine their decision to approve the full ownership of Park Village Apartments to APSARA soon with smooth transition. Then, our dream will come true.
Sincerely,
Sovanna Koeurt, APSARA Founder
Excellent article! Clearly spells out the history of tenant empowerment here. Hope that HUD takes a closer look and supports these residents in their long march to resident-controlled ownership! –Michael Kane, Mass Alliance of HUD Tenants and Leaders and Organizers for Tenant Empowerment
Shoutout to two housing justice compatriots: JimGrow, NHLP, Michael Kane, National Alliance of HUD Tenants.