Moving Out of Buena Clinton Can Provide a New Lease on Life

When Bertha Covarrabias lived on Keel Avenue in Garden Grove, she rarely left her one-bedroom apartment.

The drug deals on the streets, prostitutes hailing customers and garbage strewn in the dust-filled courtyards kept her indoors during her six years in the Buena Clinton neighborhood, she said.

So when the city told her and her husband, Juan, they had to move to make way for a factory, they jumped at the chance to leave the neighborhood. With a total of $4,000 from the city for moving costs and rent subsidies, the couple and their two preschool-age daughters were able to move into a one-bedroom house.

Not Sad to Leave

On Tuesday afternoon, sitting in the living room of her new home on a quiet Santa Ana street, Covarrabias said in Spanish, “It (Buena Clinton) is not somewhere that you are sad to leave.”

The opportunity to leave that slum area will be offered to about 100 more families as the city prepares to demolish eight 12-unit apartment buildings for development of an industrial park.

The city already has sold about 2.9 acres of the 7.8-acre site to developers Stan Smolin and John W. Casey for construction of a Carr-Griff Inc. engine plant. And by February, 1987, the developers plan to buy the remainder of the site to lease to other industries.

City officials hope that the development, approved by the City Council on Monday night, will be the start of a revitalization in the three-square-block neighborhood between Buena and Clinton streets, where police made 1,409 arrests last year, according to Sgt. Mike Walker of the Westminster substation in Buena Clinton.

Because the city is using federal Department of Housing and Urban Development money, before any development begins on the remainder of the site, the families must be moved to replacement housing, Lupe Garcia, real property agent for the city said.

The city has already relocated 12 families from the apartment building located on the site of the first part of the project. Ten of the families, from the beginning, said they did not want to remain in Buena Clinton, Garcia said.

Most Will Leave

“Most of their concerns were to be near their jobs and schools for their children. They are just like everyone else,” she said. But most of those displaced by the project, she said, probably will choose to leave Buena Clinton.

The city is offering to pay moving expenses or a fixed moving allowance of up to $500 and a lump sum payment of up to $4,000 to assist in the purchase of a home or for use as a rent subsidy over a four-year period, according to the program designed by Willdan Associates of the City of Industry.

Garcia, who must interview all the displaced tenants, has moved into the police substation to reach the residents of the neighborhood.

According to a study by Willdan, there is ample affordable housing within Garden Grove, Anaheim and Santa Ana for the tenants. Of the first batch relocated, some were able to move closer to jobs and to more desirable locations, Garcia said.

Gregorio Beltran said he is eager to leave the neighborhood. “I don’t let them play outside here,” he said, pointing to his daughters, aged 5 and 7. “With all the drugs and prostitution, how can I let them go out?”

Beltran and his wife share a two-bedroom apartment with her sister and brother-in-law and their infant.

Better Places Exist

“There are better places,” said Beltran, who hopes to move to a larger apartment.

Meanwhile, the industrial park might provide jobs for Buena Clinton residents, he said.

From her second-floor apartment in the back of a courtyard, Guadalupe Martinez, who arrived from Mexico last year, said she cannot see the drug sales or other unpleasant occurences that plague the block.

“As long as they give us time, I do not mind moving from here,” she said. “But I am happy here.”

She said her 9-year-old daughter, Laura, is doing well at school, and she would like her to finish the year at her present school.

Although she had been afraid the city would leave them homeless, a city flyer reassured her about the the plans. “It said someone would come around to tell us” about relocating.

Next to the site of the industrial center, the city has already purchased two rundown buildings and used rent money to make repairs. The freshly painted apartment houses have new, landscaped yards free of litter.

Esperanza Gil, the resident manager of one, said: “Before, there were too many problems, now there aren’t any.”

As she toured the renovated buildings, Garcia said: “We did this to show apartment owners it could be done. See, there is no litter. Now they can’t use the excuse of saying these people live like animals.”