This editorial appeared in the Monterey County Herald on October 13, 2002 (page F2):

When 65 people are on a waiting list for affordable housing - and countless others are in need - available units shouldn't be sitting vacant. But that's exactly what's happened in the city of Monterey.

Just ask Tasha Tolbert, who has been on the list for a year while the object of her desire, a city-owned condominium on English Avenue, has been empty for about as long. And this isn't an anomaly. An examination of the city's Purchase and Resale Program by reporter Alex Friedrich, detailed in an article in Sunday's Herald, found that in about one out of 10 cases, the city has taken at least 300 days to sell a vacant unit Two were vacant for almost two and a half years.

The lag time is an appalling situation that city officials said they hadn't been aware of - a troubling admission in its own right. Now, officials pledge to speed up the process for matching applicants with housing, and to improve the tracking system to make sure units don't sit empty while people sit wanting.

That's an appropriate response. This is a good program that should be better. Under the current system, the city buys housing units and then resells them at affordable prices to qualified buyers. Since 1991, more than 116 individuals and families have used the program to buy homes. There is also a mechanism for keeping the units affordable: If the owner decides to sell, the city has the first option to buy and there is a cap on how much the resale price can escalate from the original purchase price.

Prospective buyers have to meet various measures to qualify. They must live or work in Monterey, and household income can't exceed certain levels. For example, a single person can earn no more than $45,200 a year. The city says that adhering to those qualifications, keeping in contact with people on the list and working through some of their personal challenges - from obtaining credit to dealing with custody battles - is a complicated process.

No doubt that's true, but it can't possibly explain why a home was empty for more than two years.

The city's fix-it plan involves dividing work among more staffers to take the load off the senior property agent and to add some checks and balances; use of a new flow-chart system to track the process and make it more systematic; and putting the waiting list on a spreadsheet to make it more manageable. The city also should set a formal review date, say in three months, to see how the system is working and whether units are getting filled any faster.

The reforms are the right thing to do, to fulfill the needs of people like Tasha Tolbert and to make a good program even more effective.