Senior complex honors 25 years

NEWPORT BEACH — Ruth Mang has been living in the same apartment for 25 years, and she couldn’t be happier.

The apartment complex offers movie nights, barbecues and the occasional art class. Also, she’s close by the Oasis Senior Center — and when you’re 97, proximity can be important.

Mang is one of five tenants who have been living at Seaview Lutheran Plaza since it opened in 1982. Residents of the 100-unit building, staff members and the board of directors will celebrate the plaza’s 25th anniversary with a luncheon today.

Seaview is one of two affordable senior housing complexes in Newport that were financed through government programs.

Charles “Pete” Gross, president of Seaview’s board of directors, said city leaders originally frowned on the project because the plaza’s founders planned to use the federal building loan and rent subsidies.

It wasn’t because of the stigma sometimes attached to government-funded housing, but because some City Council members worried one federal program would beget others, Gross remembered.

“If Newport Beach is conservative now, it was even more conservative then,” he said. “The problem was that once you took any federal funding, the camel had its nose in the tent.”

It took three years for members of the Lutheran Church of the Master to get approval for Seaview, which today sits next door on Pacific View Drive. Since the plaza opened to residents in 1982, the units have been full and there’s a waiting list of several years, Seaview administrator Steven Dowell said.

To get an apartment in the plaza, residents must meet federal income guidelines and be older than 62, but some younger people with impaired mobility also are eligible.

Residents’ rent is calculated not to exceed 30% of their income, so someone who received $1,000 a month from Social Security, for example, would pay rent of $300 a month.

For Newport Beach, that’s very affordable. But Seaview is one of only a small number of affordable housing developments.

Bayview Landing, which was built through a state tax credit program and opened in 2006, is also exclusively for seniors, and the rest of the city’s affordable housing is clustered in a number of apartment complexes or integrated into market-rate developments. Assistant City Manager Sharon Wood said Newport has 416 units considered affordable housing, less than 1% of the roughly 42,000 housing units citywide.

The scant availability is probably why Seaview’s units have been fairly well-filled for the past 25 years. And residents can now stay longer, because although the complex doesn’t provide medical or other assistance, residents may obtain whatever help they need to remain in their apartments rather than moving to an assisted-living facility.

“As you mature in life, that becomes very, very significant,” Gross said. “You don’t want to have to move, you don’t want to have to lose your home.”

For Mang, that hasn’t been a problem. She lived in Newport as a child and came back to raise her children here after her husband died. She’s lived on Lido Isle, in Corona del Mar, and now at Seaview. The reason she stayed is simple.

“It’s the greatest place on earth to live,” she said.

ALICIA ROBINSON may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or at [email protected].