_14297_34265589.png){kind=logo}
Walking around Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill, you can forgive yourself for wondering if you made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in a park rather in an affordable-housing apartment building.
Over in the community room, you see about 30 smiling women twirling their arms skyward as they finish a senior fitness class. Step through the main office and you enter a courtyard that leads to shaded, tree-lined pathways that take you towards more swaths of green leading to basketball courts and playground apparatus and picnic tables where residents dry little date-like fruits called jujubes that taste good and treat everything from insomnia to anxiety to indigestion.
There’s also a computer classroom, a parking lot with charging space for electric cars available for share, and office space for an on-site nonprofit that provides an assortment of after-school, co-parenting and other family services. More important than anything, the calm and friendly faces of the 266 people from around the world who live at Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill tell that you are a world removed from the rest of the South Sacramento neighborhood right outside the gate.
It’s clear to anybody who walks through the front door at 6000 Lemon Hill Avenue and into the cool, comfortable atmosphere of the Mutual Housing community at the same address that you have arrived at an oasis.
Gangs, crime, tension and conflict may surround it, but within the creation of Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill, residents enjoy living in a stable and affordable community, where the young run around to play in safety and where the elderly can walk their laps around the courtyards and parkway in peace.
Tuyet “Ni” Ton is the Mutual Housing and Lemon Hill community organizer. “Our ultimate goal,” she said, “is to have our members feel that they have a voice.”
“Even in the midst of a neighborhood that historically has not been the greatest place to live in, I feel that Lemon Hill as a community is an escape from the Lemon Hill that was and used to be,” said Ni Ton, the Mutual Housing community organizer who works at the 74-unit complex. “We like to think of it as just a little safe haven here, for families to let kids run out and play and not have to worry about them getting hurt or anything like that. I feel like it is a little precious jewel that is nestled in the area.”
Jiali Wu conducts a job search on the Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill computer bank. Her view of the Lemon Hill community? “Safe and clean,” she said.
The irony of Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill is the land beneath it was at one time about the most dangerous on the block. In a neighborhood where crowded apartment complexes and mobile home parks and absentee investors collected rents and did little else, a vacated nursery turned into an illegal dumping ground for outsiders’ refuse while some addicted to narcotics shot up drugs , often at the same time that young kids cut through the empty lot on their way to Will C. Wood Middle School.
In the late 1990s, the Sacramento City Council member who represented the area had an idea to do something about it. Dave Jones, who is now the state’s insurance commissioner, and who had been a Sacramento Mutual Housing board member, thought the vacant land would be a great spot for an affordable housing community. He contacted former Mutual Housing California CEO Rachel Iskow about developing a proposal for an affordable residential community at the site of the Lemon Hill Avenue eyesore. He called neighborhood groups and promoted the work of Mutual Housing and got them in touch with Iskow. He helped arrange financing through the city’s Housing Trust Fund.
Van Dang absorbs the freshness of the Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill community garden. The affordable living community is a South Sacramento oasis.
“Dave went around the neighborhood, including the small businesses and churches and introduced us,” Iskow said. “He really put people’s minds at ease and got them excited about affordable housing. He really helped represent how this new generation of affordable housing is so high quality and that people don’t need to be worried and that new high-quality housing was severely lacking in Lemon Hill, and that this was the solution.”
Workers put the finishing touches on Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill, and in 2005 it opened – with a ceremony befitting a highly-diverse community heavy with residents who had migrated to the United States from Southeast Asia.
“When we had the open house, they sacrificed a chicken right at the front door,” Iskow remembered, “so the gods would bless us.”
Thirteen years later, it looks like the ritual has paid off.
It certainly has for Jiali Wu, 37. She is a member of the Lemon Hill resident council who has lived a Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill with her father since the year of its opening. Born in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, Jiali has worked over the years to bring together people from different ethnic backgrounds. She has helped to provide translation services to Cantonese and Mandarin speakers who don’t speak English, a language that she continues to master. The affordability of Mutual Housing has allowed her father to retire from his years working in a local Chinese market, while Jiali looks for work as an accountant and benefits from what she sees as the community’s two primary benefits:
“Safe and clean,” she said.
Jocelyn Cisneros benefits from the education program at Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill. “They always find a way to make it fun here,” Jocelyn says.
For Jocelyn Cisneros, who is 17, the story of her life has taken shape at Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill. She’s lived there for more than a decade now with her stay-at-home mom, her father who works as a landscaper, and her two brothers and a sister. She goes to school at home in an independent study program in which she receives guidance and instruction in a program run by Chanton Sitandon, the executive director of Arch Family Services, the nonprofit that works out of Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill.
“Tutoring, the summer program – they always find a way to make it fun here,” said Jocelyn, who hopes to become a nurse.
As is the case at the other 18 Mutual Housing communities in Sacramento and Yolo counties, one of the ideals of the Lemon Hill community is to help residents develop leadership skills that they can use to change their worlds. Jocelyn, for one, has become active in the Positive Youth Justice Initiative to help support previously incarcerated people her age “so they can get their second chance, to do what they want to do, and not go back to their old ways,” she said .
According to Ni Ton, another young man from the community spoke at a recent Sacramento City Council meeting on behalf of a community workforce agreement that promises to direct more construction jobs and apprenticeship opportunities to neighborhoods like Mutual Housing at Lemon Hill. For others, empowerment can mean something as simple as learning how the system works.
“Our ultimate goal is to have our members feel that they have a voice,” Ni said. “Although the residents here are a little timid in those areas, we’re trying to build their confidence, to let them know that they could do it if they choose to do it. We start small, with the residents’ council meetings here, the planning meetings, so they can build those skills, their leadership skills, and have confidence. Then there are members who say, ‘I just want to live in a safe environment, where I can provide for my family – that’s all I really care about.’ My goal is just informing our members of different policies and what not, so at the very least they can have an understanding and awareness, and then it’s up to them to take something upon themselves, if they choose to do it.”
Whatever they choose, they know one thing, and that is they are going to have a spectacular and affordable environment to do it in.