Northeast Valley Plagued by ‘Suburban Slums,’ Poverty

Despite the continuing regional economic boom, poverty and housing problems in the northeast San Fernando Valley have reached a crisis, with no significant plans in place to rescue the area, officials and residents say.

Downtrodden sections of Pacoima, Arleta, Sun Valley and Sylmar compose a suburban slum, where pockets of poverty are often hidden in alleys and backyards behind seemingly well-kept homes on palm-lined streets.

Unlike elsewhere in suburbia, where trailers are for camping and garages for cars, in Pacoima and surrounding communities these often serve as cramped, substandard housing for a surging immigrant population.

After conducting its most comprehensive study ever of the area, the city last year proposed a massive, $490-million redevelopment program based on the study’s bleak findings. The plan set off an impassioned debate within the community.

But earlier this summer, the city put off further consideration of redevelopment for at least two years, dashing the hopes of some residents who saw it as the best hope for relief from the poverty and overcrowding that rival similar problems in other areas of the city more traditionally recognized for urban blight.

“To put it off . . . will just allow the northeast Valley to continue to deteriorate,” said Jose De Sosa, a 40-year resident of Pacoima and past president of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The unprecedented redevelopment proposal divided the community, with many homeowners fearing that it would result in the bulldozing of entire neighborhoods.

The Community Redevelopment Agency, which would run the program, failed to bring the improvements it had promised in a similar plan in North Hollywood, and skepticism about the agency’s motives and abilities was widespread.

City Councilman Alex Padilla offered an interim proposal this month to use $1 million in surplus federal funds to develop an economic development strategy and try to bring a Denny’s restaurant into Pacoima, among other things. Many have dismissed the plan as insignificant, given the problems.

Others hope that, even though no easy answers are in sight, Pacoima’s deeper look at itself will be a guide for other suburban communities facing similar problems.

Life Is Hard Sharing a Garage

Guadalupe Rangel’s hope is less ambitious. She dreams of one day living in a garage of her own.

The small room her family inhabits in Pacoima is accessible only through a dimly lit, trash-strewn alley. Rangel pays $300 a month for one bedroom--beds pushed together in the corner, possessions stacked high along the walls. She and her two young children share a kitchen and a bathroom with a family of five that sleeps crammed into another small room.

Rangel, 37, has no health insurance, and to obtain medical care for her young son, who has a blood disease, they must travel by several buses from Pacoima to downtown Los Angeles once a month, requiring the boy to skip school.

In the winter, rains turn unpaved streets and sidewalks in the area into unhealthy quagmires, causing school absentee rates to soar.

While problems are the most serious in Pacoima, the study last fall by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency identified a need for an unprecedented program to fight blight in a broader area of the northeast Valley as well.

Sylmar, adjacent to the north, shares the problems of an aging housing stock and a lack of medical care, while Arleta and Sun Valley, immediately to the south, have more middle-class neighborhoods surrounding pockets of poverty. The cluster of communities centered on Pacoima is home to more than 160,000 people.

In the minds of many across the nation, the San Fernando Valley suggests affluent neighborhoods, well-manicured lawns and middle-class living. But statistics drawn from federal, state and local reports tell a different story about this slice of suburbia:

* More than 30% of Pacoima residents live in poverty, compared with 22.1% countywide.

* Almost half the adult population of the northeast Valley lacks health insurance, a rate comparable with the worst areas in the nation. Numbers have nearly doubled since 1994, increasing at a greater rate than the population.

* Public health specialists have found a high concentration of shigella, an intestinal disease typically found in developing nations, in the northeast Valley.

* The area’s apartments have the city’s highest rate of building and safety code violations.

* The area’s housing is overcrowded compared with that in the rest of the city. Some neighborhoods average more than six people per residence, twice the citywide average.

* The annual per-capita income in the northeast Valley is $9,266, or about 57% of that for the city of Los Angeles as a whole.

Although other areas of the city have higher poverty rates--Watts’ is 55%, for instance--community activists say Pacoima and other parts of the northeast Valley face crises of their own and often don’t get the same attention from government programs because of their suburban locale.

“In some ways, it’s worse than Watts. It is definitely where the housing need is greatest,” said Terri-Lei Robertson, executive director of the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which is targeting the northeast Valley for new housing.

Since the late 1970s, the northeast Valley has slid economically. Employers such as Lockheed Martin, General Motors and Price Pfister moved manufacturing out of the area, taking with them thousands of high-paying jobs.

Development has been haphazard. Homes and apartments squeeze between noisy industrial tracts, flood washes, quarries and landfills.

A heavy influx of immigrants--many poor and undocumented--has also worsened a housing crunch and contributed to the region’s lack of political clout.

Voter turnout is low. The area was gerrymandered in the 1980s in a way that split communities between council districts, making it even harder to compete for funds.

Irene Tovar, president of the Latin American Civic Assn., has worked in the northeast Valley for 30 years, and said the area does not get its share.

“Across the county, certain areas have more traditionally been recognized as poverty areas and money goes to them. There are less services that come to this area than to any other,” Tovar said.

Several private organizations have emerged in the last decade to help improve the quality of life in the northeast Valley, administering millions of dollars’ worth of programs.

The Poverty May Not Be Obvious

Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps provide affordable housing in low-income communities, plans to build 53 homes in Pacoima. But already, five times as many people have applied to live in them.

Pacoima Beautiful, a nonprofit environmental education group, has organized a team of 15 “community inspectors” to cruise the streets looking for abandoned cars, graffiti and oil dumping and to report violations to the city.

But those who work with these groups say the problems are enormous and they cannot begin to fill the area’s vast needs.

“You almost have to live there and see to understand the depth of the deprivation,” said Helen Kleinberg, a Valley executive with the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, another nonprofit group working in the area. “When you drive through, it just looks like single-family homes. You don’t know there are four families inside sharing one bathroom.”

Basic city services have also been lacking.

The northeast Valley is home to a large concentration of the city’s unpaved roads, with 29 dirt and gravel streets in the 7th Los Angeles City Council District alone.

Ray Schwager has been trying for five years to get the city to pave a dirt stretch of Vinedale Street in front of his Sun Valley welding business.

“This street is just horrendous. It looks like a Third World country,” he said.

The survey for the postponed redevelopment project found that 53.4% of parcels are on streets “that are either deteriorated, are unpaved, or have deteriorated or missing sidewalks and/or curbs and gutters.”

The area has declined despite representation by some high-powered politicians, such as Rep. Howard Berman and former Assemblyman Richard Katz, who say they have helped steer millions of dollars into anti-poverty and public improvement programs.

“A lot of us who have tried to turn the area around made incremental changes, but it is not where it needs to be,” Katz said. “For the longest time, the northeast Valley has been neglected by city officials. It goes back decades.”

A state enterprise zone that was set up in 1986 to provide tax credits and other incentives to Pacoima businesses has had only “mixed results,” bringing in a disappointing number of jobs and businesses, Katz said.

Councilman Alex Padilla won election last year with a campaign that decried decades of neglect by City Hall and vowed to bring the district its share of basic services.

He has had modest success in attracting aid, winning more money for streets and sidewalks. But on a recent tour, Padilla, who grew up in the area he represents, pointed out vexing problems, noting that there is no sit-down, full-service restaurant along two miles of Van Nuys Boulevard, Pacoima’s main artery.

Longtime residents complain about inadequate storm drainage that causes water to back up on many streets, even during light rains. There are one-third fewer street lights in the council district than the average for other districts, a fact that residents say hinders efforts to fight crime.

Padilla said entire blocks around Telfair Elementary and Pacoima Middle schools lack sidewalks, sometimes making it difficult to walk to school during the rainy season. The principal of Arminta Elementary School has said absentee rates often shoot up as much as 10% during the winter months because of flooding.

But it is a lack of safe, affordable housing and limited access to health care that pose the biggest obstacles.

An expanding network of public, private and school clinics has struggled to make health care more available to the poor in recent years. The $120-million Olive View UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar served more than 175,000 patients from throughout the Valley during the past year--86% of them Medi-Cal and indigent patients. But people are still turned away.

“The demand is greater than the supply by a substantial amount,” said Wes Simmons, Olive View’s associate administrator of finance. “We are not adequate to take care of the patients we have.”

That is partly because the number of uninsured patients in the northeast Valley has nearly doubled since 1994, while medical care is just now returning to pre-Northridge earthquake levels. The county’s fiscal crisis in 1995 interfered with progress.

Massive Problems, Limited Resources

Like the shortage of medical care, the housing problem has eluded easy solutions.

Two years ago the city launched what was billed as an aggressive apartment inspection program.

The goal: Inspect every one of the city’s 750,000 apartments every three years, rather than only in response to complaints. But after two years, inspectors have reached only a quarter of the units, and some officials say it will take at least six years to get to every apartment.

Inspectors routinely find life-threatening conditions in the northeast Valley, such as exposed wiring and immovable security bars on windows.

“You are picking up after years of neglect,” said Chris Hatzikian, a senior city housing inspector.

The program does not target the illegally converted garages, shoddily built home additions and trailers--of which there are thousands.

Such as the home of Maria Ortiz. At 34, she lives with her three children in a battered old camping trailer parked in the barren backyard of a Pacoima house.

For $150 a month, Ortiz gets broken windows, no heat, a ripped door and holes in the roof covered ineffectively with a blue tarp.

In winter, she wraps herself and her children in layers of blankets to keep warm. When it rains, she must sleep diagonally on her bed to avoid the water leaking in through the broken window. In summer, the trailer heats up like a tin can.

“I would like to live in a better place,” Ortiz said. “I would like a better life for my children.”

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Monday: The housing crisis in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Northeast Valley

In a comprehensive study of the northeast San Fernando Valley, city officials concluded last fall that the area is impoverished and underserved and includes some of the city’s worst slums.

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BLIGHTED NEIGHBORHOODS

The Community Redevelopment Agency has targeted the area below for redevelopment, but the plans are on hold for two years.

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KEY STATISTICS

* Unemployment in the Pacoima area is the highest in the San Fernando Valley, ranging from 9.6% to 9.9%. In the Valley as a whole the unemployment rate for 1998 was 5.6%, the most recent year for which figures were available. *

* 44% of those in the East Valley Health District, which includes Pacoima, Sun Valley and Panorama City, lack health insurance. That compares with 31% of the population that is uninsured countywide.

* There are about 8,500 street lights in the 7th Council District, about one-third fewer than the average for all City Council districts.

* Two-thirds of the residential units in the northeast Valley are renter-occupied. *

* Only 39.5% of voters in the 7th Council District voted in the 1993 mayoral election, compared with 45% citywide. *

* The northeast Valley’s 7th Council District has the highest rate of building and safety violations per inspection of apartments in the city--2.44. Citywide, inspectors found 1.8 violations per apartment inspected.

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COMPARISON WITH THE REST OF THE CITY

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Northeast Valley

Citywide Average

Percent difference

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Household size (persons)3.932.8637% higher

Per capita income (annual)$9,266$16,18843% lower

High school graduates42.9%67%36% fewer

People in poverty30.3%*26.9%13% higher

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*For Pacoima

Source: City of L.A.