Run-Down Area Gets Uplift

City officials and residents in Garden Grove’s run-down community of Buena Clinton, identified as Orange County’s worst slum, are working hard to lose that image--and the conditions that gave it that dreadful distinction.

With the help of Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), the area took a giant step toward rehabilitation last Monday with the announcement that it will receive a five-year federal grant totaling more than $2 million. The grant will provide temporary rent subsidies for qualified lower-income tenants who agree to limit the number of people living in their apartments. The tenants will also take part in programs aimed at helping them become self-sufficient.

The program is one of the most ambitious and promising in the effort to rid the Buena Clinton neighborhood, which houses mostly lower-income Latino residents, of its run-down apartments and crime rate that is one of the worst in the county. And it helps make good the promise of the City Council, after years of neglect, to improve conditions in Buena Clinton.

In the last two years the city has put police officers on foot patrol in Buena Clinton to make the streets safer, closed down a bar where drug sales, prostitution and other crimes reportedly took place, cracked down on slum landlords, filing criminal charges against some who were too slow to correct dangerous living conditions, and adopted Project Self-Sufficiency, which in addition to the rent subsidies includes services such as job training and child care to help residents work their way off welfare.

The self-sufficiency approach also calls for offering owners low-interest loans to be used for improving apartments, acquiring and selling property to nonprofit corporations so the living units can be rehabilitated, and creating jobs for residents by locating a factory nearby.

The federal grant program secured with Dornan’s aid is a vital part of the overall plan. It not only will help individual residents and relieve overcrowding, which only compounds the problems of the older, run-down apartments, but it also can spur others into making improvements and encourage more cooperation and responsibility. Some landlords earlier this year formed a new property owners association with the intent of prompting all landowners to improve their property and set aside a portion of their rents to keep buildings in good repair.

Buena Clinton for years languished in neglect. Its landowners, residents and city officials seemed content to let it live in decay as the county’s worst slum. In recent months there is evidence of those attitudes changing markedly. The neighborhood is sure to follow.