An Issue of ‘Neighborhood Decay’ : Legislation is the only way to maintain property values, says a Ladera Heights homeowner who accuses day laborers of gambling, urinating in public and leering at women.

Ladera is characterized as an upper-middle-class neighborhood. There are a lot of professional people who live here. The homes are reasonably valuable. The apartments have rents that are reasonably expensive. But people are willing to pay what they pay to live here because it’s always been a nice, well-maintained, relatively low-crime area.

While others assume there’s no nice place to live in the inner city and move to the suburbs, we chose not to do that. We worked hard for these homes and we worked very hard to keep our neighborhood a nice place. And it’s been a very desirable place to live over the years.

But we don’t have to go very far to take a look and see what has happened to some very nice neighborhoods where the neighbors did not stand up and try to maintain their neighborhoods. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to see our neighborhood decay.

And anything that challenges that, you’re going to find that the neighbors here are very, very active in trying to make sure that we get whatever we need to keep this neighborhood a desirable place to live.

I first started to notice the day laborer problem about a year and a half ago. I noticed it because I would go out jogging every morning. At least I used to. I had to start taking a different route because there were so many men standing out on the corner. It was anywhere from 40 to 100 on any given day.

During the time that they are standing there, some of them would get very bored and you’d see them start gambling. Or they would sit on our lawns. And there are no (restroom) facilities on the street, so they would urinate in our yards. The stench of human urine was so bad that you couldn’t go down the alley.

The situation was not something we wanted to live with. This was destroying the quality of life in Ladera. So one of my girlfriends and I decided that we don’t have to take this. But when we started calling the sheriff, what we found is that the loitering laws that are on the books didn’t really cover this situation.

All they could do is ticket them; they couldn’t put them in jail. The sheriff’s deputies would go to the limit to try to urge the day laborers to get off our lawns and move on, but there was a limited amount they could do. But most of the neighbors all had the same frame of mind: They were not willing to accept having day laborers in the neighborhood.

There’s sympathy for the day laborers, absolutely. Everybody understands perfectly why they are there. Obviously they need to make a living. And we do understand that if people did not pick them up and utilize their labor, they wouldn’t be doing it.

Our first solution was to find a site away from the homes where people can find them. After we looked at the lay of the land in Ladera Heights, we found there isn’t any place in Ladera for that to take place.

What we came to after looking at it and weighing a lot of alternatives was that there wasn’t an alternative to legislation. The only choice we had is to try to get some kind of legislation to make it illegal for this to take place in a residential neighborhood.

We are not sophisticated politicians, and we did not know what we were opening up. We thought of it as a neighborhood issue. We look at it like zoning. But now we’ve been drawn into a situation where we have no choice but to understand that we’re part of a larger picture. The people who are advocates for the day laborers are certainly looking at it in the bigger context.

Probably the reason the ACLU and other groups are interested in seeing what it is we do here is because they’re afraid that whatever happens here might set a precedent for other areas.

It sounds selfish, but we weren’t concerned about what effect it would have overall. I find it very frustrating that we are just trying to maintain the quality of life in our neighborhood and that fact is being used as if we are being racist and trying to destroy the quality of life for other people.

This is not a Latino issue. Everybody is trying to make it seem as though it is. It is not. The issue in our neighborhood is the behavior. The practice of blocking the streets and the practice of flagging folks down and blocking traffic and those kinds of things. Those are the issues. And leaving trash and litter and defecating and urinating. And gambling and leering at women.

I hope we can come up with a solution that everybody can live with. If people are out of work and need work, can’t we find some solutions other than having them hang out on the streets? That should not be the only way.