Fourteen months after Kukui Gardens was put up for sale to the highest bidder, the 857-unit affordable-housing complex on the edge of Chinatown has a good chance of being partly or wholly preserved.

Moreover, experts say the grass-roots campaign residents employed to save their homes from redevelopment could well become a national template as federally subsidized housing developments nationwide lose their deed restrictions.

Kukui Gardens residents say they never expected their fight would rise to such prominence, becoming a statewide call to preserve affordable housing and giving a voice to thousands of working-class families who lost out in the booming housing market.

"I had no idea it would go this far," said Carol Anzai, as she sat with friends in her Kukui Gardens apartment Friday.

Anzai, president of the Kukui Gardens Resident Association, was key to spotlighting the issue. When she heard of the impending sale in January 2006, she called Councilman Rod Tam, whom she had worked with during his time in the Legislature. Tam pledged to come to a tenant meeting.

RALLYING SUPPORT

Before the gathering, Tam bumped into the Rev. Bob Nakata and Drew Astolfi, leaders in Faith Action for Community Equity, at Zippy's on Beretania Street. "I said, 'Bob, you're an advocate for affordable housing, and I need your help,' " Tam said.

Tam urged the two to attend the meeting with him. They did, and the campaign to save Kukui Gardens was born.

"We didn't really understand that it was going to be such a contentious issue," said Astolfi, lead organizer at FACE in Hawai'i.

"But it sort of took on a life of its own. It became kind of an emblematic issue."

So just how did Kukui Gardens residents launch a campaign that quickly gained the attention of lawmakers, residents statewide and national housing advocates?

Simple, Anzai said. Tenants banded together.

"We are close here," she said.

Anzai remembers the first meeting she had with residents after the sale was announced — the one Astolfi, Tam and Nakata attended. About 40 people crowded into the community center at Kukui Gardens. Tenants were worried about becoming homeless. Many said they had no place to go.

"I told them, if we don't do anything, we're going to lose our homes," Anzai said.

In some ways, the strategy for their campaign was developed at that first meeting — essentially, residents pledged to appeal to anyone who would listen. With FACE, they sent out news releases, set up press conferences and held community meetings.

Anzai scheduled resident meetings nearly monthly, calling on state representatives and senators, and members of Hawai'i's congressional delegation to attend. Before every meeting, Anzai would call her friends — and they would call theirs — reminding them to attend. Hundreds of people turned out for a meeting early on with Ching Foundation and Carmel Partners officials.

But the campaign really started gaining momentum, Anzai said, when concerned citizens outside of Kukui Gardens got involved. They were fighting to keep the project affordable for the principle of it — to send a message that Hawai'i's working people need affordable homes.

As it stands, Kukui Gardens is poised to become partly or wholly affordable in perpetuity. The state is pursuing eminent domain proceedings to purchase the property, but private, San Francisco-based developer Carmel Partners also is trying to work out a deal to buy half of the project and allow the other half to be purchased by a nonprofit entity.

The deal would require about $55 million in state funding and about $30 million in private financing, which includes plans for the renovation of existing units and construction of at least 200 additional apartments. Representatives from Carmel Partners and the Kukui Gardens Corp., which owns the project, did not return calls for comment.

Kukui Gardens Corp., has said it was forced to sell the property because of widespread maintenance concerns that it could not afford to address.

Astolfi said negotiations with Carmel Partners are ongoing.

SUCCESSFUL MODEL

Originally, Kukui Gardens Corp. planned to sell the project to Carmel Partners for $131 million. Though Astolfi and others are not yet claiming victory in their fight, they are now confident a significant portion of the project will remain affordable.

Buck Bagot, a nationally recognized affordable-housing expert, said the Kukui Gardens saga will undoubtedly be exported to the Mainland as not only an inspiring story, but a successful model.

"It's going to be the template for thousands of other developments all over the nation," said Bagot, who lives in San Francisco. "Because if we can win in a hot market in Hawai'i, we can win anyplace."

Local developer Clarence Ching built Kukui Gardens in 1970, with $15 million in federal funds. To get the money, Ching agreed to keep the project affordable until 2011.

The deed restriction is customary for federally funded housing projects.

Bagot pointed out that at least a dozen other affordable developments in the Islands, and several thousand nationwide, are subject to the same restrictions, many of which are set to expire over the next few years.

"It really is the tip of the tip of the iceberg," Bagot said, referring to Kukui Gardens. "As these restrictions run out, it really is the first of many units in Hawai'i and the nation."

The deed restrictions are all expiring around the same time because so many affordable-housing projects were built with federal funds around the same time — in the 1970s and '80s, during a nationwide push to provide more housing for low- and moderate-income families.

Tam, who is chairman of the City Council's newly created affordable-housing committee, said he expects the Kukui Gardens fight will inspire other residents in the Islands faced with the loss of their affordable rentals. And FACE-Hawai'i President Alan Mark said those tenants will likely have an easier time getting support for their cause early on, thanks to Kukui Gardens.

"If we lose Kukui Gardens, if a private developer were to come in and just pick it up, we'd be looking at a domino effect" Mark said. "But at this point, we've leveraged them."

'I HOPE I CAN STAY'

Though they've been told they don't have to, Kukui Gardens residents still worry about whether their homes will be saved. Some say they won't rest until they have it in writing that the project will be kept affordable.

Kelly Arrington, who has lived at Kukui Gardens for 24 years, said she made sure to stay involved, getting updates from Anzai and doing anything she could to help the effort.

Arrington earns about $40,000 a year and pays $690 a month in rent. Two teenagers and two grandchildren cram into her two-bedroom apartment. Her two older children moved out.

"When I came here, I didn't intend to stay here," she said. "But it was affordable."

Now, Arrington says she could never afford a place of her own on the market.

Yuk Lin Marr, a 72-year-old whose husband died in 2001, said she lives on her Social Security check and pays about $700 a month in rent. She couldn't afford much more.

"There are plenty of seniors here," she said. "I hope I can stay."

Mark, of FACE, said his involvement in trying to save the affordability of Kukui Gardens is tied to the organization's interest in easing the homeless crisis. Call it a pre-emptive strike.

"It's one of the things that we could do in the area of homelessness is prevent more homelessness," Mark said. "This was natural in the sense we were looking at 857 families who would likely be homeless in 2011. So we decided to take that on, never thinking this would take a year and a half to fight and still not be finished."

Nakata, also of FACE, said the organization was small and largely ill-prepared when it took on the Kukui Gardens fight. He had just joined the organization when it got involved in the issue. Earlier, he had been involved in bringing attention to the growing number of homeless people in Hawai'i.

"It was a tremendous challenge for FACE," he said. "Sometimes we laugh and say, maybe we weren't ready for it."

Reach Mary Vorsino at mvorsino@honoluluadvertiser.com.