Bryant-Vanalden Residents Elect Leaders to Fight Eviction

About 100 residents of the Bryant-Vanalden apartment complex gathered Thursday night to elect leaders for a campaign to fight a proposed city plan to evict them.

At the meeting, the third organizational effort by the residents, tenant organizers shouted and cheered: “We are fighting for equality, justice and to save our homes.”

The three-block development of shabby, crime-plagued apartment buildings in an otherwise upper-middle-class area of Northridge is home to about 3,000 predominantly low-income Latinos. The Los Angeles City Council has given preliminary approval to a controversial renewal plan that would make it easier to evict tenants and turn the area into a gated, middle-class community.

Community Split

The plan, proposed by Councilman Hal Bernson, touched off a wave of community activism in Northridge. It pits residents who live outside the development, and support the measure as a way to solve the area’s history of blight and crime, against Bryant-Vanalden tenants and civil rights groups, who say it is racist and unconstitutional.

A 12-member tenant committee was approved by residents who gathered in the Napa Street Elementary School auditorium. Raul Morales, co-chairman of an organizing committee called Padres Unidos (United Parents), said the group will continue a cleanup campaign that began Saturday, when 60 tenants took up brooms and shovels to clean filthy alleys and gutters.

Letter to Council

Residents decided to mail letters to members of the City Council, declaring:

“Most of the tenants in these apartments are children of school age. To force them to leave their schools and seek housing in an unknown part of the city is inhuman.