Lack of Decent Homes Plagues a Corner of Suburbia

Guadalupe Rangel dreams of one day living in a garage of her own.

The small room her family now inhabits is accessible only through a dimly lighted, 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. To obtain medical care for her young son, who has a blood disease, they must travel by several buses to downtown Los Angeles once a month, requiring the boy to skip school.

Rangel has no bank account--not surprising in a community where all but one of the banks has closed. Besides, she said, she can’t afford to pay the $1-$2 fee to use an automated teller machine.

“For me, that’s two pounds of meat,” she said.

Their home is Pacoima, the San Fernando Valley’s poorest community. Pacoima defies the traditional image of a slum as towering tenement buildings rotting from within, crack houses and run-down liquor stores dotting every block, or homeless people loitering on street corners.

Here, pockets of poverty are often hidden behind a facade of seemingly well-kept homes. Unlike elsewhere in suburbia, where trailers are for camping and garages are for cars, here they often serve as cramped, substandard housing.

Faced with a city report painting a bleak picture of their community, fiercely proud residents are debating how best to fix it.

The most comprehensive city study ever of the area concluded that Pacoima and surrounding communities in the northeast Valley are beset by poverty, overcrowding and slum housing conditions, as well as inadequate street cleaning and maintenance--basic services that most other Los Angeles residents take for granted.

Others who know the area say its residents suffer from a severe lack of accessible health care that rivals other poor areas of the city.

Yet there are no long-term plans to fix these urgent problems.

‘Proud to Be From Pacoima’

Pacoima squats low and dusty at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, forming the core of a run-down area of 164,000 people stretching from Sylmar to Sun Valley.

The Community Redevelopment Agency last year recommended placing much of the northeast Valley--including Pacoima, Sylmar, Arleta and parts of Sun Valley and Panorama City--in the largest redevelopment project in Los Angeles history and pumping $490 million into the blighted area over the next four decades.

But the plan divided the community, with many homeowners fearing it would result in the bulldozing of entire neighborhoods.

The northeast Valley is home to a vocal group of proud homeowners and merchants who want their basic services but are deeply suspicious of the city redevelopment agency.

“People are proud to be from Pacoima,” said Marlene Grossman, who heads Pacoima Beautiful, a nonprofit environmental education group. “They want to make it better. They don’t want to leave.”

The CRA, which would have run the program, failed to bring the improvements it had promised in a similar plan for North Hollywood, and skepticism of its motives and abilities is widespread.

Some anti-redevelopment activists charged that the project would make the northeast Valley a cash cow, diverting tax revenue from the area to bail out an agency short on funds and finance redevelopment programs in other parts of the city.

The city recently backed off, delaying any work for at least two years and dashing the hope of many residents that something would finally be done.

“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.

Two weeks ago, Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla offered an interim proposal to use $1 million in surplus federal grant funds to devise an economic development strategy and try to bring, among other things, a Denny’s restaurant into Pacoima. Many have dismissed the plan as insignificant, given the scope of the problems.

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 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 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, just 57.2% of that for the city of Los Angeles as a whole.

‘The Forgotten Stepchild’

Community activists say the northeast Valley rivals any community in Los Angeles in terms of poverty and need. But when it comes to the battle for funding, the northeast Valley often gets less.

“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.

“But when I talk to potential donors, people tend to want to have their money go to Watts,” Robertson said. “The northeast Valley has not had a riot. It’s kind of the forgotten stepchild.”

Pacoima residents have faced hardship for decades.

Discrimination prevented many African American families from moving into other areas of the Valley after World War II, said the Rev. Zedar E. Broadous, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP.

“The reason it attracted them was, at that time, that was the only place they were allowed to buy homes,” said Broadous, whose family was among those who moved to Pacoima.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, the area became known as a middle-class black enclave.

In recent decades, African Americans have been replaced by Latino families, including many poorer immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

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.

The 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 past decade to help improve the quality of life in the northeast Valley, administering millions of dollars’ worth of programs.

Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps provide affordable housing in low-income communities, plans to build 53 homes in Pacoima. But already, about 250 families have applied to live in them.

The nonprofit Los Angeles Educational Partnership has built a network that attracted other nonprofits and served as a distribution channel for information and funds. It has become a model for other communities.

Los Angeles Urban Funders, a philanthropic nonprofit organization made up of 26 private groups, has given $400,000 to Pacoima programs since 1996 and channeled an additional $2.6 million in private grants to the area.

Pacoima Beautiful 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 Educational Partnership. “When you drive through, it just looks like single-family homes. You don’t know there are four families inside sharing one bathroom.”

‘Looks Like a Third World Country’

Basic city services also have 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 City Council’s 7th 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.

One dirt block of Bromont Avenue is so rutted and primitive that cars lurch over bumps and water sits in stagnant pools after draining from nearby homes.

Residents pile sandbags in their frontyards to fight flooding during the rainy season.

Street workers alongside Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima recently were stunned when they discovered a plate embedded in the roadway when it was first built, indicating it had not been repaved in 50 years.

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 curb 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.

A state enterprise zone 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.

A federal empowerment zone approved for a square-mile area of Pacoima is just now beginning operation. It would offer federal tax incentives to companies that employ local residents.

The financially troubled Community Development Bank--financed by the city with federal funds to buttress empowerment zone activities--recently closed its Pacoima office.

Katz said a lot of his efforts to attack blight in the area were hampered by a lack of city assistance.

“For the longest time, the northeast Valley has been neglected by city officials,” Katz said. “It goes back decades.”

He asserted that City Council members retaliated against colleague Ernani Bernardi, a staunch foe of redevelopment during his 32 years in office, by giving his district short shrift on city services--a charge Bernardi denies.

Bernardi’s successor, Richard Alarcon, began to make progress after being elected in 1993 but left the council for the state Senate last year.

Padilla won election to the City Council 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.

Residents say they can see differences between their supermarkets and others. They say the stores have higher prices, are less clean and more rundown, and the cuts of meat are not as good.

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 told city officials that absentee rates often shoot up as much as 10% during the winter months because of flooding.

‘We Are the Faceless People’

Residents also complain that repeated calls to get discarded couches and refrigerators picked up fail. Abandoned cars, sofas and mattresses lie scattered on the curbs in many neighborhoods. Alleys are worse.

“We are the faceless people,” said William Bryant, who bought his Pacoima home in 1957.

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

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 in 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.

There is no orthopedic care available for indigent or Medi-Cal patients in the Valley, forcing them to go to County-USC Medical Center near downtown--a significant barrier to families who do not have cars. Emergency dental care for indigent patients also is hard to find.

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

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: exposed wiring; immovable security bars on windows; cockroach, flea and rat infestations; and families of six or more packed into living spaces meant for three.

“You are picking up after years of neglect,” said Chris Hatzikian, a senior housing inspector for the city. “It’s a big task.”

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

Such as the home of Maria Ortiz.

‘I Do What I Do in Mexico’

The 34-year-old 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 by a blue tarp held down by bricks.

With barely enough money to feed her children, ages 10, 8 and 7, Ortiz has no health insurance and prays they do not get sick.

If they do, “I do what I do in Mexico,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “I rub them with herbs so they are OK.”

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 aluminum trailer heats up like a tin can in the sun.

Electrical extension cords snake out the windows to the house. She has no hot water, boiling water on the stove for baths.

Out of the chaos of her cramped trailer she holds up the one thing she is proud of: 17 well-kept certificates she has earned for, among other things, completing adult school classes in nutrition and English and for her children’s perfect school attendance.

Her worried face relaxes into a smile as she shows the documents to a visitor.

“I’m studying,” she said proudly. “I want to be able to help my children.”

The trailer may be bleak, but it’s a step up from her last place, which had no lights, no stove and no running water.

“Now I have everything,” she said with the humor that has helped her survive.

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

(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.

BLIGHTED NEIGHBORHOODS

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

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. *

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* 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.

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

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

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

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* 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.

COMPARISON WITH THE REST OF THE CITY

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Northeast Valley Citywide Average Percent difference Household size (persons) 3.93 2.86 37% higher Per capita income (annual) $9,266 $16,188 43% higher High school graduates 42.9% 67% 36% fewer People in poverty 30.3%* 26.9% 13% higher

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* For Pacoima

Source: City of L.A.

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Monday: The housing crisis.