Bryant-Vanalden’s Residents Mobilize to Resist Eviction

Residents of a Northridge apartment complex, faced with mass eviction because of neighbors’ complaints that the project is a reservoir of crime, vowed Monday night to resist a city plan to move them out.

“This is not fair,” Jose Luis Perez told about 200 people who attended a meeting at Napa Street Elementary School on the edge of the Bryant-Vanalden apartment. “Not all of us are criminals.”

Perez, a machinist, helped organize the first meeting of the mostly Latino residents of the apartments since the Los Angeles City Council gave initial approval Aug. 7 to a plan to evict them to make way for a gated, middle-class community.

Collection Plate

A small amount of money was collected on a battered aluminum tray passed around the room as the audience heard representatives of Latino and tenants-rights groups, including Tenants United and the San Fernando Valley Concilio of Chicano Affairs, promise organizational and political support.

One resolution the group approved by acclamation was to ask police to help organize a Neighborhood Watch group to reduce drug trafficking and other crimes.

A neighborhood watch could “detour those drug people right out of the community,” said Raul Morales, a shipping manager for a Los Angeles electronics firm who lives in one of the apartments.

Morales said he and several neighbors have formed a group, Padres Unidos (United Parents), that will resist the evictions and fight drug sales and other crimes.

“We must teach the children to say ‘no’ to drugs and we must teach them to report people who try to sell them drugs to their principal or their parents or the police,” he said.

The tenants at the meeting also agreed to organize weekend cleanup brigades. Neighbors of the development have complained that it is an eyesore. The group also approved a proposal to ask the managers of the run-down buildings to hire unemployed tenants to fix them.

Most of the speakers at the meeting agreed with critics who say the complex has a crime problem but argued that the residents suffer more than anyone else.

“We are all frightened,” said Carla Perez, wife of Jose Luis Perez, who said she has five children and is a volunteer dance teacher in the elementary school. “We cannot leave our children outside one minute, not one minute. The women don’t dare go outside alone, and even the men are afraid to go out alone.”

Fear of Retaliation

Her husband said residents are afraid to report criminal conduct to police because the criminals “come back and retaliate against us.”

The tenants are threatened by City Council’s move to grant owners of the 30 buildings a one-time exemption to the city rent-control law, allowing them to evict tenants after spending $7,500 in renovating an apartment--instead of the $10,000 required now--in order to attract what a council committee report called “a different class of tenants.”

The plan, sponsored by Councilman Hal Bernson, also calls for a $40-million tax-exempt bond issue to finance renovations.