Sonora Town - a different part of Gilbert

Sonora Town sits near the heart of Gilbert, but was annexed into the municipality within the last three years. Yet it still feels like an entirely different place.

The neighborhood is wedged into a triangle, between a 9-year-old subdivision and a canal which separates it from the Gilbert Town Square shopping mall. Town Hall is about half a mile away.

The narrow streets haven't been paved in years, and they don't get much traffic, and the silence is often punctuated by clucking chickens, not motors. Many yards have laundry hanging out to dry above rusted vehicles.

"It might be ugly and everything, but it's so peaceful," resident Susan Flores said, adding she and her neighbors call Sonora Town their "little ranch."

The 20 or so houses are anywhere from 30 to 100-plus years old. Some of them are solid, and a few look as if they're about to collapse.

In short, Sonora Town looks like a place that could use a little help. But for more than a year, $417,000 in a federal grant that was set aside to rehabilitate its homes has gone untouched.

So this week, Gilbert's Town Council voted to siphon off $95,000 of the grant, mostly for a separate townwide emergency and minor home repair program.

This still leaves well over $300,000 for Sonora Town, where 100 percent of the cost of repairing owner-occupied homes will be covered, or up to 50 percent of rental properties.

Three Sonora Town homeowners have applied for the money so far, said Carl Harris-Morgan, Gilbert community development specialist.

Two have gotten an initial acceptance and are getting more paperwork together to continue the process.

In the third case, "unfortunately their home was considered to be beyond rehab, and it would be more cost-effective to rebuild it," Harris-Morgan said. "We felt it would be better to wait until after a planned sewer project is completed."

Town officials hope to use funds from a different pot of federal money to replace the septic tanks Sonora Town residents rely on with sewer hookups within the next year or so. Once that's done, the case of the "beyond-rehab" house could be revisited.

Harris-Morgan said there may be a few reasons why the housing rehabilitation funds have gone untouched, including a lack of trust of the local government.

Sonora Town residents, he said, "are a little suspicious of the town of Gilbert. They are concerned about this possibly being a way for the town to take away their homes from them, eventually."

Under the terms of the rehab program, Gilbert will place a lien on the house for the value of any improvements made, which decreases over time.

"If they sell within a certain period of time they might need to pay some of that back," Harris-Morgan said. "If we put in $40,000 worth of improvements and then they sell the home halfway through the period, they're only going to have to pay $20,000 of that back.

"The intent isn't for people to profit off the program, the intent is to help the people who are currently living there."

Sonora Town resident Joe Gonzales said he's not interested in the grant money for himself, and many of his neighbors worry about protecting what could be their only asset.

"No, I don't need it, I got everything OK for me," Gonzales said. "There's some people who need some more work, but what they say is they are afraid of the lien."

The house "is all they've got, and they are afraid," he explained.

Harris-Morgan said he can show people paperwork from past programs to prove the rehab grants are not used as a back door into taking possession of the house.

Gilbert did buy 12 Sonora Town houses when Warner Road was widened more than a decade ago, and bought a trailer park on the north side of downtown in 2002, offering relocation assistance to displaced tenants. That land is for the Heritage Marketplace mixed-use development.

Nothing like that is going on here, Harris-Morgan said, "When the town is interested in buying properties, the town is very upfront with its intentions."

The septic tank for the house Flores has rented for two years has given her and her four children a lot of headaches.

The house doesn't have air conditioning or insulation, and she had to paint, replace electrical plugs and do other minor repairs when she moved in.

Still, "My opinion is if I lived in one of those new houses over there," she said, motioning to the newer neighborhood to the west.

"I wouldn't be as happy. Because here the kids are able to run around outside here, and sometimes the little girls will come out with their radio and start dancing in the street. In those new houses, it's so quiet you almost don't feel like you're at home there."

She thinks her landlord, who lives in Prescott, knows about the rehab program, but doesn't know if he is going to participate.

Gonzales' grandson, Justin, said many of the people who grew up in Sonora Town have left, guessing 60 percent of the homes are now rented. The mostly Hispanic neighborhood remains pretty tight-knit, with few public safety problems, he said.

He said the home he shares with his grandparents is well-maintained, but he is trying to convince his grandfather that it might be a good idea to take advantage of the rehab program.

"Until I can convince him and some other people that this is the right thing, there are going to be people on the outside who will say 'yes, Sonora Town does have problems. Yes, Sonora Town does need help,'" he said. "And that's partly true."