Concerned Landlords Band Together to Tame Pervasive Evils of ‘Jungle’

Drug trafficking and other crimes are rampant in an apartment area of Los Angeles known as “The Jungle,” but some landlords, among others, are banding together to make things change.

Eric Crumpton is one. He owns about 150 units in seven buildings in the area, which spreads from La Brea Avenue on the west to Hillcrest Drive on the east and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the north to Santo Tomas Drive on the south.

In September, he bought 100 units on three different sites, and 45 of those apartments were occupied by what Crumpton described as “people involved in unlawful activities: They were doing drugs, robbing people, snatching purses, doing everything to keep the community on a downward trend.”

Crumpton evicted these tenants, and now he is rehabilitating the buildings with his own funds.

“We’re working to take control of this negative element, even if we have to strip our own personal bank accounts,” he said of his and other landlords’ efforts.

Another landlord who requested anonymity, said, “As an apartment owner, I’ve been working closely with the city’s narcotics squad, telling who they should hit (with a drug raid). I live in the community and feel that I must invest in the community.”

He invested in a 27-unit apartment building there that had three separate drug-dealing operations working simultaneously. “And some of the tenants were users,” he added. “Without support of the narcotics division, it would have been impossible to get these people out.”

He’s supportive of the police. So is Crumpton. So are other members of the community intent on cleaning up “The Jungle,” which has about 10,000 people and 5,000 apartments.

They’re so supportive that they are planning a reception for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division on Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center, 4000 S. La Brea Ave.

Gilbert Fernandez, executive director of the Good Shepherd Center for Independent Living Inc., said, “We’re showing the police department (through the reception) that we support them.”

The reception will be hosted by the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program, a nonprofit corporation that Crumpton heads, but Fernandez--who has an interest in the area because of his organization’s need for decent and affordable as well as accessible housing--and Emerson Everage, who is president of the Crenshaw Chamber of Commerce, will be there too.

“We’re working together--landlords, business people and others in the community--because with strength, we think, we can overcome our problems,” Everage said.

Problems in “The Jungle” are not limited to crime. As Capt. Terry Dyment, commander of the police department’s Southwest Division, observed:

“If you go in there and drive around, you’ll see some apartments that are nicely maintained, with owners who have a genuine concern that their properties have a pleasant appearance and that their tenants cause no problems.

“You’ll also see apartments whose owners obviously don’t care as much about who they rent to or what the apartments look like. These are the apartments where there is narcotics activity and where people reside who are involved in robberies, burglaries and thefts in the area.”

These apartments are run-down, often with boarded-up windows and graffiti-marred walls.

“The problem is management,” George Thomas Jr., a local builder and developer, asserted. “Real estate syndications still control the vast majority of the apartments, and members of these syndicates live elsewhere, so they don’t care.”

Probably the worst landlord, though, is not a syndication. It is the city of Los Angeles, which owns a 24-unit apartment complex on La Brea Avenue that has been vacant for at least 13 years.

HUD Foreclosures

That’s when Veniore Robinson moved in as a watchman. “I came here at the end of ‘72,” he recalled, “and it was vacant before that.” The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development owned the building when he moved there.

HUD had taken the property through foreclosure. “We sold it twice after that and took it back both times through foreclosure,” Fred Stillions, in HUD’s Los Angeles office, said.

HUD finally sold it to the city’s Housing Authority for $1 in 1980, and although the Housing Authority was supposed to rehabilitate the building and rent it to low-income families, the building is still an eyesore.

Fires in Living Room

“I’ve had my problems with the place,” Robinson acknowledged. “People come in and sleep here when it’s cold. They’ve set fires (in the middle of living room floors) to keep warm. One year, I had a problem with people bringing old cars into the parking area and stripping them out. Now I have a problem with people dumping trash here when I’m not around.”

Robinson lives there with his wife, 3-year-old daughter and two Great Danes--his “protection,” he says.

Hopefully, he won’t need the protection in a few months. Walter J. Clarke, a program manager with the city’s Community Development Department, said funding is being set aside to rehabilitate the building, and “the blighted condition will be terminated. We’ll put in about $10,000 a unit to fix the building up starting in January.” The city is still working on a plan for tenancy or ownership.

Upgrading Apartments

Despite its record with the vacant units, the city has inspired the upgrading of other apartment buildings through its Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program, established in 1980 as a partnership between property owners, tenants, financial institutions and the city to develop improvement programs without public subsidies or substantial rent increases to low-income tenants. The program includes “The Jungle” and about 3,500 apartment units just outside.

Several programs funded by Community Development Block Grants supplement the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program. Among them: the Homeowners Opportunity Maintenance Effort, Commercial Area Revitalization Effort, Greater Crenshaw Revitalization Agency and Crenshaw Project Area, which involves the Crenshaw Shopping Center, less than a mile from “The Jungle.”

“Did you know that the Crenshaw Shopping Center was the first regional shopping center in the country in 1947?” Leon Davis, a project coordinator with the Community Development Department working with the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program, asked.

Douglas Ford, general manager of the Community Development Department, said that remodeling and expansion of the center should begin in about six months. It would have been sooner, but some seismic studies took longer than expected.

Enclosed Shopping Mall

“The Community Redevelopment Agency is assembling the land, and we and the CRA are each putting in about $5 million, so we’ll get 25% equity participation, and we’re doing some of the construction financing,” he added. The $50-million to $60-million project, which will be an enclosed mall, will be developed by Alexander Haagen of Manhattan Beach.

The remodeled shopping center and spruced-up nearby storefronts are expected to attract new merchants to the area. “And it could attract tenants back and encourage landlords to get their act together,” Davis added.

“The Jungle” didn’t always have negative connotations. Also known as the lower Baldwin Hills area, it was nicknamed “The Jungle” because of its tropical foliage. That was before the so-called “white flight,” or exodus of whites after the Watts riots in 1965. Many merchants relocated with the opening of the Fox Hills Mall.

Units Rehabilitated

The departure of tenants left many vacancies, some still unfilled. With the vacancy problem, landlords became less particular about qualifying tenants and maintaining properties, Davis explained.

Even so, since the apartment improvement program was initiated, 750 to 800 units have been rehabilitated, Ford said, and 200 new ones have been built.

“Sherm Alley,” widely publicized as a former drug-dealer’s paradise, has been cleaned up, and the Community Development Department rehabilitated a 120-unit apartment building on one side, installing such security features as carport gates and barbed wire. The department plans to start on a 90-unit building on the other side at the first of the year.

‘We’re Concerned Citizens’

A new 200-unit senior citizens project, financed by a bond issue, was built, and a deteriorating 33-unit apartment building was turned, with $150,000 through a HUD program, into an attractive low- to moderate-income cooperative. Oscar Gibson, who owns other apartments in the area, now owns a share of the co-op. He lives there.

He is like other landlords and community activists trying to upgrade “The Jungle,” changing its image and maybe even its nickname. As George Thomas, the local builder, put it: “We’re concerned citizens. We want to be involved.” That’s the reason, he said, for the fund-raising police reception.

He and other businessmen, including landlords, are pooling their resources to give the Southwest Division a copying machine, a pry bar (used to open apartments fortified by drug dealers), a personal computer and, as Crumpton explained it, “whatever else we can afford to make their crime fighting easier.”

“We want more protection,” the anonymous landlord said.

Need for Policing

“We need a little more manpower, maybe even a foot patrol,” the chamber’s Everage said.

“There should be more police in The Jungle area and the rest of the city. There’s no doubt about that,” Dyment of the police department acknowledged.

About a dozen landlords are doing what they can, they say. They are planning to set up a data base “so that a rock-house operator doesn’t get evicted from one apartment building just to move into another across the street,” Crumpton said.

They’re trying to get other landlords to join them in refurbishing apartments and screening tenants. “If a tenant is unemployed or working part-time, that’s a clue that you could have trouble,” he continued. “Also, sometimes, drug dealers use welfare mothers as fronts. The welfare mother rents the apartment, then the drug operation moves in. Once the bars go up to secure the apartment, you know a rock house is there.”

Approval from Landlords

He would like to see a new law requiring security companies to get the approval of landlords before installing such bars and other fortifications.

Through the apartment improvement program, landlords are also getting tenants interested in forming block clubs to keep their eyes out for criminal-like behavior. “Like these so-called food or ice cream trucks,” the Community Development Department’s Clarke observed.

“They look like something from the A-Team, and they’re really selling drugs to kids. I mean, who buys ice cream at 3 in the morning, when you hear them roll by?” There are already a dozen Neighborhood Watch programs in The Jungle.

The landlords are also planning bimonthly management seminars, starting in January.

Need Tight Management

“Palos Verdes and Beverly Hills have people that are heavy on drugs, but their neighborhoods aren’t deteriorating,” builder Thomas observed.

So a key to the landlords’ problems in The Jungle, as Leon Davis sees it, is tight management.

“One of the largest landlords in the area, who has more than 2,000 units scattered in several buildings, has no drug problems,” he noted, “and that’s because he has tight management.” In other words, he added, that landlord does a good job in screening tenants and maintaining his properties, including keeping them secure.

A lot has been done in The Jungle and the rest of the Crenshaw Corridor, but--as Ford observed--”there is a lot to do.”

With the attitude of landlords like Crumpton and the city’s revitalization programs, though, he figures that “the community will do just fine.”