Doing Its Home Work

Surrounded by factories, train tracks and a fenced-off field contaminated with industrial wastes, the William Mead public housing development just east of Los Angeles’ Chinatown may not be everybody’s idea of home. But it is to Lucy Esquibel, who grew up there and lives there today with five children in a four-bedroom duplex facing a grassy play yard and communal laundry lines.

Sure, graffiti, gangbangers and pollution are still worries, and the heating and plumbing systems in the two- and three-story brick buildings are lousy. Yet new programs for youth recreation and adult job training have improved life for the 1,400 residents who, she stressed, appreciate the federally subsidized rents and strong sense of community.

“Any housing development is going to have problems. You are not going to satisfy everybody,” said Esquibel, the tenant leader at the 415-unit complex that, like much of public housing in Los Angeles, was built in the 1940s and badly needs modernization. “But you’ve got to work with problems, not run or hide from them.”

Her philosophy also could be the motto for the city Housing Authority, which administers William Mead and 19 other major public developments--with about 8,300 apartments and 26,000 residents--from the San Fernando Valley to the Harbor area.

Lawsuit Settled, Rebuilding Protested

The agency’s problems include a recent $1.3-million settlement of a federal lawsuit brought by Latino and African American tenants who alleged that they experienced racial threats and violence. The Aug. 7 agreement requires the authority to work toward easing ethnic tensions as the numbers of Latino residents rise in developments that used to be nearly all African American turf.

In addition, the authority faces uncertainties over its expensive and controversial plans to renovate or rebuild big swaths of its aging housing stock. Those plans involve complicated issues of tenant relocation.

One such proposal received a boost this week with a $20-million federal grant to help demolish and partly rebuild the 56-year-old Aliso Village on the Eastside, despite some residents’ protests about leaving the 685-unit complex. A similar $50-million construction project, designed to provide modern, more spacious facilities and reduce hiding spots for gangs, is well underway at the adjacent Pico Gardens and Aliso Extension and includes some townhouses that will be put up for sale.

Projects Have a Low Profile

Despite the lawsuit and the objections to its Aliso Village plans, the Housing Authority seems to be operating these days without the paralyzing furors that racked it during the 1950s and without the allegations of financial mismanagement that produced federal rebukes in the 1980s.

Stan Vosper, a Washington-based spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides nearly all the funds for public housing, said Los Angeles’ agency “is doing what it is supposed to be doing.” In the past eight years, under Executive Director Donald Smith and his predecessor, Joseph Shuldiner, the authority has pulled itself out of previous management troubles, he added.

Compared to the situation in other big cities around the country, public housing has a low profile in Los Angeles, Smith and other experts note.

“That’s probably because we have a very small, low inventory of public housing for a city of this size,” said Smith, who has led the authority since 1994 and won credit for helping to form tenant-owned enterprises for construction and household moving.

Smith points back in time, to the furious political opposition in the 1950s that stopped major expansion here. In a 1952 election that reflected passions of the McCarthy era, voters rejected a plan to add 10,000 public housing units, including a proposed high-rise development in Chavez Ravine designed by the noted modernist architect Richard Neutra. Critics called public housing a symbol of “creeping socialism,” while supporters saw it as a compassionate alternative to slums.

The next year, Mayor Fletcher Bowron lost his reelection bid mainly because of his support for public housing. A few years later, Chavez Ravine became home to a baseball team from Brooklyn.

Just three years ago, neighborhood opposition caused the agency to drop plans for scattered, modest-sized buildings in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere. There was little hope of getting the permits, Smith recalled, even though the projects were designed to avoid the social segregation, crime and drab architecture of older public housing.

As a result of such opposition, Los Angeles, with the second largest municipal population in the nation, ranks 12th in the number of public housing units; the top three are New York City, with 160,000 units; Chicago, 40,000; and Philadelphia, 22,000.

On the other hand, Los Angeles has the second-largest number of low-income households subsidized by the federal Section 8 program, which is also administered here by the Housing Authority. The 42,000 local Section 8 families can rent private apartments and houses throughout the region, without next-door neighbors even knowing about their housing status.

Plus, even in the face of gang domination and leaky roofs, Los Angeles public housing, with its garden-apartment style, is considered a better place to live than the notorious high-rise projects of, say, Chicago.

Tensions Rise as Racial Makeup Shifts

The Los Angeles projects are 98% occupied, and there is a waiting list of about 20,000, officials said. Tenants generally pay a third of their incomes in rent, which averages $190 a month citywide in the projects.

“L.A. doesn’t have that same density as some of the high-rise communities. You just don’t have those kinds of concentrations and problems in L.A.,” said Sunia Zaterman, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, a Washington-based group.

However, Constance L. Rice, a Los Angeles attorney for public housing tenants in the recent lawsuit over racial tensions, stressed that the city faces big problems in easing the threats and violence suffered by blacks in Latino-dominated developments and by Latinos in primarily black projects.

Tenants’ demographics are “in the middle of this huge turmoil and change, and the Housing Authority was not equipped to handle this transformation. But then, not many cities could,” said Rice, who represented the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the case. The Watts-Century Latino Organization and Watts Health Foundation were the main complainants for an estimated 300 residents.

The Housing Authority, while not conceding fault, agreed to pay $1.3 million for possible restitution and to join a new blue-ribbon committee seeking improvements in race relations and security. Meanwhile, new lease rules approved last week are supposed to make it easier to evict troublemakers.

The demographic shifts citywide are aggravated in public housing “by the fact that you’ve got very low income people all put in densely populated situations,” Smith said.

“Are the problems manageable? We think so. Are they solvable? To a certain extent, we think so. You can’t solve all the problems, but we will bring a lot [of resources] to bear,” he said.

Latinos now constitute about 70% of the city’s public housing population, blacks 25%, Asians 4% and whites 1%. Although blacks remain in the majority in such South Los Angeles projects as Imperial Courts and Jordan Downs, their numbers are decreasing. The citywide tenant newspaper prints articles in English, Spanish, Cambodian and Vietnamese.

The racial case settlement did not trigger much discussion at City Hall. (The Housing Authority’s seven-seat commission is appointed by the mayor but operates as a quasi-independent agency.) One reason is that 73% of the city’s public housing is in just two council districts: the Eastside’s 14th, represented by Richard Alatorre, and the 15th in the Harbor and Watts areas, represented by Rudy Svornich Jr.

“I’m sure if you had one in every district, it would have a higher degree of attention than it does,” said Daniel Cartagena, an aide to Svornich.

The 15th District, he said, includes an admirable public housing plan--the new Harbor Village, which is replacing the World War II-era Normont Terrace. Returning to a New Deal philosophy that public housing should not just be for the poorest of the poor on welfare, officials decided that about a third of Harbor Village would be condos and single-family houses for sale. Prices will range from $90,000 to $170,000. Officials report that the first phase of sales is going well.

Tenants Focus on Upgrades, Security

Yet Svornich’s district also contains, Cartagena added, one of the agency’s most troubled projects--Jordan Downs, where five members of a Latino family died in a 1991 arson fire set by drug dealers about whom they had complained.

The Housing Authority scored 94.23 out of 100 possible points last year in a HUD rating on such issues as vacancies, maintenance and finances. New York City and Oakland scored 99, Houston 95, Detroit 83, Boston 72, Chicago 62 and San Francisco 54. Officials say the Los Angeles grade shows major improvement from the “troubled” ranking it had at the decade’s start.

“‘I think things have gotten better. The Housing Authority listens a little more to residents’ needs. They pay a little more attention,” said Maria Del Angel, an Eastside tenant activist recently named to the Housing Commission.

In interviews, tenants said their biggest concerns focus on modernization and security. Many units have just tubs, no showers, and the small kitchens are often inadequate for a big family, they say.

As for crime, residents say it depends on whether the housing development is the turf of one gang or is contested--and more dangerous--territory. Housing Authority police, who share jurisdiction with city police, report that serious crime at the projects has declined about 25% over the past four years, mirroring regional statistics. However, at the most troubled developments, the crime rates remain about 20% higher than in surrounding neighborhoods.

Still, if her neighbors had to find privately owned apartments, Esquibel says, they probably would wind up in worse housing conditions amid worse crime. And they would probably pay higher rents and not have easy access to the social programs, computer lab and health clinic offered at William Mead.

So Esquibel, a single mother and former gang member who works as a classroom aide in a nearby school, hopes that the fenced-off playing fields at the housing development will be cleaned of the industrial wastes and that the small rooms in her apartment will be renovated to include a shower and better ventilation.

“This is where I’m at,” she said, “And this is where I want it fixed.”

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L.A.’s Biggest Projects

The 12 largest public housing developments in the city of Los Angeles range in size from 284 units at Rancho San Pedro to 1,057 at Nickerson Gardens. The Pico Gardens-Aliso Extension complex on the Eastside is being demolished and rebuilt; nearby Aliso Village is scheduled for similar work.

Source: City of Los Angeles Housing Authority