Halfway house operator ran Stockton home amid troubles
The Rev. Jasper Lowery landed in Stockton in spring 2015 with grand plans to help homeless mothers and children get off the streets. Having spent decades working with the poor in Oakland, the charismatic preacher leased an old residential hotel on North California Street and filled it with needy families.
“God sent me here to help these families,” he told the Stockton Record newspaper. “It was meant to be. Each time I came, I saw people that needed help.”
In a city with hundreds of homeless women, many whose children had been taken away by the county, Lowery seemed to fill a need. But it wasn’t long before Lowery’s nonprofit, Urojas Community Services, started hearing from resi-
who complained about rodents, bedbugs and undelivered meals, and from city inspectors who found a lack of safety equipment.
On Friday, Lowery was again defending what he described as his “holy” mission after a fire killed four people in a ragtag West Oakland halfway house run by Urojas.
For 22 years, he said at a news conference at his attorney’s office in Oakland, the nonprofit has been caring for the needy without any substantial funding from public or private sources, which have rejected most requests for aid.
“We provided food, clothing and shelter,” he said. “In some cases we took people in. In some cases we referred people out. This is what we did around the clock.
“When people need clothes, they could call Urojas. When they got released from prison, we bring them in in the middle of the night, help them structure their lives.”
He was joined by Urojas’ co-founder, the Rev. Aurea Lewis, who said one of the fire victims was her brother, Edwarn Anderson.
“This is a heartbreaking, trying time,” Lewis, who is also an Oakland library commissioner, said as she held up a picture of her brother. “He was a dynamic, young 64-year-old.”
The fire on Monday ripped through the halfway house at 2551 San Pablo Ave. in West Oakland, home to more than 80 residents. Oakland officials say the fire was accidentally ignited by a candle and that the building had failed a city fire inspection three days earlier.
Before the fire, the building owner, Keith Joon Kim, was seeking to evict Urojas and its clients for failing to pay rent, but Urojas refused to leave. James Cook, the lawyer for Urojas, said Friday the nonprofit had attempted to pay rent but Kim had refused to accept it, preferring to bring in a new tenant.
Urojas contends the squalid conditions were the fault of the landlord, who has not commented.
Lowery founded Urojas Community Services in 1996. Records show the group received $25,000 in public funding from Alameda County around the time the group began leasing the building in Oakland in 2012. But the organization’s finances are largely unknown, and it has not filed nonprofit tax disclosures since 2010. In that year, it claimed total revenue of $5,000.
Supporters say Lowery and his nonpartment profit group deserve credit for taking in society’s most downtrodden in both Stockton and Oakland — parolees, recovering addicts, homeless veterans and the mentally ill.
“It was the place you could refer a mentally ill brother or sister or a young man getting out of prison who couldn’t stay with Mom in public housing because he had a felony record,” said the Rev. Raymond Lankford, who for many years ran his Health Communities nonprofit from a building across the street in Oakland.
“Urojas took people at face value simply because they need housing and showed a desire to change their lives,” he said.
Residents of the Oakland building said that while they were thankful for an affordable place to live — they paid up to about $800 a month for an apartment — the conditions on San Pablo Avenue were trying. Irene Randel, 28, and Eliza Anderson, 29, said the building was overrun with rats and didn’t have fire alarms or working lights in common areas.
Similar conditions were reported in Stockton, where some residents complained of rodents, bedbugs and a lack of heat.
A meal a day was promised but sporadically delivered, according to residents and social workers familiar with the hotel. The building was supposed to be free of drugs and alcohol, but residents said narcotics were clearly being sold out of some of the units.
By last August, city code enforcement inspectors were cracking down on the group, issuing it a warning after an inspection found missing smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, cockroaches and rubbish heaped in hallways. The Record, which had written a glowing story about the group a few months earlier, followed up with an article questioning the situation.
“It is a horrendous living environment,” Susan Gibson, whose daughterin-law and grandchildren lived in the building until the fall and who helped several other families move out of the hotel, said in an interview with The Chronicle. “It all sounded lovely when they talked about it. But that wasn’t the reality.”
A social worker who assists homeless veterans in Stockton, who asked that her name not be used because she still interacts with Urojas Community Services, said the group contacted her because it wanted to place veterans in the Stockton hotel under the U.S. Dedents of Veterans Affairs’ Supportive Services for Veteran Families program.
But she said the property Urojas leased was not qualified to be part of the program, which requires basic kitchens and bathrooms and must meet fire safety standards.
She said Lowery and Lewis asserted they should be eligible for $800 monthly from each veteran, which she said was far above market rent in Stockton. They also wanted Veterans Affairs to fork over money for residents who said they were veterans but didn’t have the paperwork to back it up, she said.
Even without an agreement, the social worker said, Lowery and Lewis continued to demand money for veterans they said they were housing.
After residents complained about the problems in the Stockton building, Lowery blamed what he said was a disgruntled resident in an interview with the Record.
At Friday’s news conference, he said, “Stockton was a whole other issue. There were people out there who needed help. We thought we could help them.”