Seeing double trouble with second group home next door

YAKIMA Wash. -- Having one group home in the neighborhood was bad enough, says Alex Santillanes. Now he's got two, side by side.

"It's like, when's the third one coming?" says Santillanes, a well known gang intervention consultant who lives in the 1400 block of West Chestnut Avenue, one of Yakima's most venerable neighborhoods.

Fearing a group-home proliferation in his neighborhood, Santillanes recently complained to the City Council, which in turn asked city staff to investigate.

Santillanes and his wife, Virginia, say their opposition to a second group home comes from years of negative experience with the first. They have lived there for 30 years.

Located at 1408 W. Yakima Ave., the first group home started out in the early 1990s as a drug treatment facility and briefly morphed into a men's shelter before settling in as "clean and sober" housing for women in recovery.

The home is operated by Triumph Treatment Services, which calls it Sage House. It shares a common alley with the Santillanes home, which has a lot to do with the friction.

The Santillanes' say traffic in the alley has been a constant source of frustration, as is loitering, smoking and boisterous behavior. Even before the second group home cropped up, they were worried about the resale value of their own home, a charming Craftsman built in 1910.

"How are we going to be able to sell our place?" asks Virginia Santillanes. "Would you want to live next to a group home?"

Now there's another one.

Alex Santillanes says he first got wind of it a few weeks ago when he noticed there appeared to be some construction work going on at the home next to Sage House.

After poking around a bit, he learned the house had recently been sold. Incredibly, it was set to become clean-and-sober housing too. Alarmed, he alerted city officials, who paid the site at 1406 W. Yakima Ave. a visit.

In short order, code officers determined the construction work -- actually demolition -- was being done without the proper permits. The house had been subdivided into a triplex in 1982, and the new occupants wanted it to be more like a regular single-family home.

The permit problem was easily remedied. Beyond that, however, city officials warn that federal law and rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court severely limit regulation of clean-and-sober housing.

"It's not a zoning issue, and there's no land-use authority," says Bill Cook, the city's director of economic development. "By law, we cannot treat them any differently than we would a single family."

The second group home is operated by Oxford House Inc., a national nonprofit that since 1975 has planted roughly 1,400 clean-and-sober houses across the country.

Stacie Anderson, a regional spokeswoman for the group, says there are 207 Oxford Houses in Washington state alone. In fact, seven of them are in Yakima.

"We've been here for awhile," she says. "We're just under the radar."

Oxford House homes are run by the residents, who in turn enforce a zero-tolerance policy against substance abuse that is the cornerstone of the group's philosophy, Anderson says.

Following Santillanes' most recent complaint, city staff has researched and prepared a report on the matter. That report will be presented to the City Council and be available for discussion at Tuesday night's regularly scheduled city council meeting.

Councilman Bill Lover, interviewed late last week before he had seen the report, expressed concern about the situation.

"We're importing pover-ty and problems," Lover said, "but I don't want to be a destination for this stuff."

Lover was also surprised to learn that this would be the seventh such house in Yakima.

"It looks like there's a business model here that's getting bigger and bigger," Lover said. "We've got enough problems as it is."

Like Sage House, the new Oxford House home is restricted to women in recovery. Anderson predicts the Santillanes' opposition to the home, newly dubbed Portia Park House for a nearby park on Yakima Avenue, will evaporate in time.

"If a dope house springs up next door, we're going to be the first ones to call," she says. "We end up being the best neighbors on the block."

Ironically, Anderson says she had no idea when she signed a lease on the house that another group home was next door.

The same goes for the new owner of the home, Dave McFadden, who says he had a confusing conversation with Alex Santillanes early on in which Santillanes repeatedly referenced long-standing grievances with a group home that sounded different from his property.

"I didn't even know what he was talking about," McFadden says. "I'm like, 'Are you sure we're talking about the same thing?' I was dumbfounded when I realized we were talking about two different places."

McFadden says the lease with Oxford House was negotiated with the previous owner shortly before he bought the property in August and that he and his wife have since come to regret the decision to close the sale.

McFadden is president of New Vision-Yakima County Development Association, the county's economic development arm. He stresses that he and his wife bought the property as a personal investment opportunity and that the purchase has nothing to do with New Vision.

He says he has mixed feelings about the group home but, due to provisions in the lease, isn't in a position to pull the plug on it.

"You don't buy a rental property to get a headache," he says, adding, "On the other hand, they're taking very good care of the house."

Meanwhile, the Santillanes' say they're very interested in hearing what the city has to say from a policy standpoint about group homes.

Alex Santillanes says he's not too worried about creating a stir.

"I don't think Dave McFadden would want to live next to two group homes, and I'm sure nobody on the City Council would either," he says. "They'd probably be yelling, 'Not in our neighborhood' just as loudly."

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.

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