Diary of a Dying Community : Tenants Scarred by Trauma of Eviction

Hundreds of people are evicted in Los Angeles each month, often to make way for new developments. But few evictions wipe out an entire community and its intricate relationships. That is what has happened at the Alvern Park Apartments in Westchester, where about 400 people--half of them longtime, elderly residents--have been forced to leave to make way for a new, luxury complex.

But their plight prompted the Los Angeles City Council to adopt an ordinance that guarantees relocation money for tenants evicted to make way for new housing developments.

In the past four months, reporter Michele L. Norris has spent hundreds of hours at Alvern Park, interviewing dozens of residents, neighbors, the developers, and city officials.

This is a diary of a dying community.

Thursday, Jan. 2 The first notice arrives with the afternoon paper and hits Bob Stevenson like a punch in the gut.

“This letter is to inform you that the owners of the apartment complex in which you reside are going to demolish the building in order to construct a new and modern complex on the site.”

The words, Stevenson says later, “felt like they jumped off the page.”

“On or around the 15th of January, 1986, you will receive formal notice to evict your residence . . . . You must vacate your apartment no later than February 15, 1986.”

Before reaching the third paragraph, the 74-year-old man crouches over, his frail body heaving. The stress has triggered his chronic emphysema. Wheezing and hacking, he sounds like a tired engine on a cold winter morning.

By the time he finishes the letter, Stevenson is in his bedroom, the notice in one hand and a suitcase in the other. It takes several neighbors, who hear his gasps and desperate lurching about, to make him realize that he doesn’t have to leave yet. They put him in bed, where he stays for four days.

Not all of the 400 Alvern Park residents have lived there for 40 years as Stevenson has, but for most of them the prospect of eviction is just as alarming.

Another resident, a retired mechanic who still prefers his blue work uniform to street clothes, drinks until he gets sick. Then he gets drunk all over again to numb the pain of the eviction.

A 57-year-old widow with a unique shade of tangerine-colored hair becomes “crazy with anger” at the idea of leaving her home of 22 years, and hurls a cherished wedding gift through her bay window.

Although 33-year-old Sonya Cohen had been evicted before, she is “devastated” just the same. This time, Cohen, a credit manager for a medical sales firm, trashes her normally spotless apartment. “I thought it would make it easier to leave,” she explains later, “if the place was a pigsty.”

Ashtrays overflow, dirty glasses crowd the flat surfaces of her living room furniture and newspapers and junk mail pile up on the floor. “I just didn’t want it to look good anymore.”

Alvern Park tenants usually keep the complex spotless, both inside and out. It is not unusual to see them up at sunrise shaking out area rugs or washing the wooden siding on their green-and-yellow four-unit buildings. The complex has a small-town ambiance where residents still grow up, and grieved together when some died in the Vietnam War.

And now, having grown old together, they lean on each other to avoid going to rest homes or imposing on their children. For many, moving will destroy a support system when there is little time left to build a new one elsewhere.

“We’ve spent the best part of history here,” says George Jukkala, 81.

For him and his wife Aileen, 85, moving seems almost impossible.

The elderly couple moved into their one-bedroom apartment in 1955 with their youngest daughter, Georgiann (Gee Gee). Fifteen years ago, George, a former foreman for an iron works firm, lost both his legs when the artificial veins used to replace his hardened arteries became infected and gangrene set in. In recent years, Aileen has been losing her eyesight and she is now legally blind. They both are slowly losing their memory and depend on their live-in nurse, C. J., who asked that her name not be used. C. J. sleeps on a cot in the living room.

Neither fully comprehends why they have to leave.

“Those are the people we are most concerned with,” says tenant Aaron Schusteff, a tall, bearded graduate student who has taken a hiatus from his studies to help organize RAGE.

“Where are they going to go?” he asks, referring to the Jukkalas. “They’ll be lucky if they can afford to move into a studio apartment. Can you imagine the three of them in a one-room apartment with beds and wheelchairs and walkers all over the place?

“Thirty days notice is almost inhumane.”

Saturday, Jan. 11 The day starts out bad and will get worse.

In the morning, residents crowd into the recreation hall at St. Jerome’s Catholic Church, adjacent to the apartment complex, to hear bowel cancer had worsened, and that he had been unusually despondent since the eviction was announced. But there is nothing to connect the eviction with his death. The tenants blame the developer just the same.

Homestead officials say they have evicted thousands of people in Los Angeles under similar circumstances, but never so many senior citizens. Suddenly, Danny Lerner, the Homestead representative whose name appears at the bottom of the initial eviction letters, is uncomfortable with his job.

“I’m just doing my job but that doesn’t make it any easier,” says Lerner, a middle-aged man who speaks with a thick Israeli accent.

“Of course I feel terrible. I have parents, too. But I don’t think the residents understand our position.”

The Homestead Group--a partnership of investors with holdings primarily in Westwood--is losing money on Alvern Park because rent control holds monthly payments below $300 for half of the residents. Furthermore, the development group says it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the 40-year-old units up to standard.

Officials say they had no plans to raze the complex and rebuild when they bought Alvern Park in early 1985.

But now, Lerner says, “it would be foolish for us to go on losing money. We are not a nonprofit organization. We have bills to pay and mouths to feed just like they do.” He is obviously shaken by the hundred or so calls he has received from “angry old ladies and tenant radicals.”

“We bought a piece of land about a year ago that is not turning a profit. We plan to build twice as many apartments that will rent for twice as much money. We are evicting 400 residents on one hand but providing homes for nearly double that on the other. If the tenants

stopped to think about it I think they would be more understanding.”

Saturday, Jan. 25 Unseasonably warm weather lures residents out of their apartments and into the complex’s central courtyard, where they gather to gripe about their landlord and discuss strategies for delaying the eviction. The things they usually talk about--grandchildren, the weather, rising prices, failing health--are lost in a cloud of depression and fear.

Aaron Bovshow, the Homestead Group’s attorney, says he is particularly thankful for the day’s pleasant weather. It means fewer people will be home when he knocks on their doors to deliver the formal eviction notices that he and his son are distributing.

At Councilwoman Russell’s urging, the Homestead Group has agreed to extend the eviction date to May 31, giving tenants roughly four more months to find new homes. The extension is supposed to ease tenants’ anger and feelings of betrayal. Still, Bovshow dreads meeting the residents face to face.

“They look at me like I’ve come to kill their firstborn child and some have said things I don’t want to repeat,” he said later.

Conversations stop as Bovshow approaches the buildings that line the main courtyard. Halfway through his rounds, he extends a friendly wave. In response, several tenants raise their hands and drop them palms down, as if swatting a fly out of the air. Bovshow doesn’t try to communicate again.

“I didn’t expect the tenants to greet me with open arms,” Bovshow said later. “I can actually understand their anger. But all in all, most of them felt better knowing they wouldn’t have to rush out of their apartments. I think there is some comfort in knowing exactly when they will have to leave.”

Indeed, the new notices and their May eviction date send a surge of positive energy through the complex, although residents’ cheer is somewhat tempered by the fear that time alone may not help the old tenants relocate.

The younger residents, fearful that the case-by-case assistance plan will help only a few senior citizens, plan a rally at City Hall to pressure the council into passing a relocation ordinance that would force the Homestead Group to provide $2,500 to households with dependent children or tenants older than 62, and $1,000 to all other residents.

“Even with the relocation fees, we are going to have a hard time placing our seniors in new apartments,” said Karen Litfin, the backbone of the tenant’s group. “It takes more than money to find an apartment. It takes time and energy. A lot of these seniors don’t have enough energy to walk to the store around the corner. How are they going to conduct their apartment search?”

Friday, Feb. 7 The City Council had been considering a relocation ordinance and was expected to vote on it in June, but Russell gets its moved up to today. It passes easily. From now on, any developer who tears down housing to build new homes will have to pay evicted households with children or elderly residents $2,500. All other households will receive $1,000.

The tenants, who had appeared at hearings on the new ordinance, never kidded themselves into thinking they could halt the eviction, but at least they have won a battle. They take some solace in that.

The council’s action nullifies earlier agreements with the Homestead Group, and the developers feel betrayed.

“We extended the eviction date, not because we had to but because we wanted to help those people out,” Lerner says. “We even agreed to pay the needy residents $1,000 out of the goodness of our hearts. We had an agreement with Pat Russell and now she says that’s not enough. We have to pay everyone to move.

“To carry the project for four months with interest and also to pay a quarter-million dollars in relocation fees is impossible.”

Sunday, Feb. 9 The backlash hits before most residents even crawl out of bed.

Saying they can no longer afford to postpone the development, Homestead Group officials drop off new eviction notices moving up the eviction date for senior citizens to April 9. All other residents will have to leave by March 9.

“Now that there is a new law in effect you are receiving a notice reflecting the time specified by law. . . . We hope to have your full cooperation.”

Somehow, knowing that all residents--young and old alike--will receive moving stipends made the news easier to swallow, several say.

Forty or so tenants have moved out of the complex so far. Another dozen plan to move this week. Already the community is starting to atrophy. Attendance at St. Jerome’s Sunday Mass has started to wane, and employees at a shopping center on nearby La Tijera Boulevard have noticed a decrease in their elderly clientele.

“A whole group of old ladies used to stop by here every morning to buy a few little things,” says Randy Eyermann, a butcher at Von’s.

“I’ve noticed that some of them don’t come in here anymore and I wonder where they are. I bet their new butcher isn’t as good to them as I was,” said Eyermann, a favorite among elderly tenants who appreciate the tiny cuts he’s willing to prepare for them.

“Pretty soon there won’t be any old people left around here. They call it progress. I say it’s a shame.”

Wednesday, Feb. 19 A small group of tenants march in front of The Homestead Group’s offices in West Los Angeles this morning to protest the change in the way the developer is handling their eviction.

Lerner and Bovshow watch silently from a second-story window as a dozen tenants push four wheelchairs back and forth to represent the elderly tenants they left at home.

By now, the Alvern RAGE objective has dwindled to a single demand: low-income housing for senior citizens in the new development. Bovshow and Lerner, however, say they cannot afford to provide senior housing in the new, upscale complex, which will be called Sunrise Village. They further note that that they are not required to do so because their company opted not to use Los Angeles municipal bonds, which require that developers set aside 20% of the units for low-income housing.

“This little protest is probably a waste of our time,” says Carolyn Goodson, a middle-aged resident who drove the seniors to the protest. “Those highfalutin developers wouldn’t dare come out here and look that woman in the eye to tell her why they want to throw her out of her home,” says Goodson, pointing toward 79-year-old Norma Tierney as she shuffles back and forth under the weight of her homemade sign.

“I want to meet these men,” Tierney says. “I’m squeezing to pay the $285 I pay right now and I’ll never find anything as cheap. I want them to know that.”

Bovshow and Lerner decide to take an early lunch.

“We don’t mean to be evasive but there is nothing we can say that we have not already told them,” Lerner says.

“We are not going to turn our back on the senior citizens. We are not the heartless people that these residents think we are.” he says. “We’re just hungry.”

Thursday, Feb. 20 Most of Bob Stevenson’s bad news lately has been slipped under his front door. Today it arrives in the afternoon mail.

A retired sound editor with MGM Studios, Stevenson hoped to live out the rest of his days at the Motion Picture and Television Country Home in Woodland Hills. Problem was, so did just about every other motion-picture retiree.

A polite rejection letter tells Stevenson he will be placed on a three-year waiting list. He has less than two months to find a new home and doesn’t particularly want to live anywhere else.

Stevenson, one of the first people to move into the Alvern Park complex, used to boast about how he carried his new bride over the threshold into their “honeymoon apartment.” But since his wife died a few years back, he has rarely talked with other residents and has become increasingly withdrawn.

On more than one occasion he has told friends that he doesn’t “have the strength to go on.”

“Bob took the eviction sort of hard,” Cohen says. “He lost his wife not too long ago. The eviction was the second strike.”

Apparently, the rejection from the motion picture and television home was the third.

Friday, Feb. 21 Sometime between sunset on Thursday and sunrise today, Bob Stevenson picked up a handgun he kept for protection, sat down in a living room chair and shot a hole through his right temple.

He didn’t leave a note. Residents say he didn’t have to. “Before he died he made it clear that life had become a burden,” Cohen says.

Saturday, Feb. 22 The residents hold a garage sale today to raise money to cover the cost of publishing the RAGE Page--the tenants’ newsletter. But Stevenson’s death casts a dark cloud on this sunny day.

Tenants huddle in clusters behind their display tables, practically ignoring the customers on the other side.

“It all seems futile now,” Goodson says. “We’re all out here selling things we don’t really want to get rid of to raise money for a hopeless cause.”

Stevenson’s death has brought a defeatist change in attitude, even for residents who have vowed to force the developers to provide senior housing in the new complex.

“I thought I’d fight this to the end, but no one’s life is worth losing over something like this,” Cohen says. “Bob’s death was a turning point. I decided that nothing was worth this and started concentrating on finding a new house.”

Sunday, March 9 George Jukkala watches the world from his bedroom window. Today, propped up on a mound of pillows, he watches the young tenants move.

Tenants younger than 62 must be out by nightfall. As the legless man watches residents dart back and forth in a race with the sun, he wonders aloud where he and his blind wife and their nurse will be 30 days from now.

The Jukkalas’ youngest daughter, Gee Gee Cassano, spends about four hours a day looking for an apartment. She has yet to receive even an inkling of interest from a prospective landlord.

“People are overwhelmed by my parents’ problems,” Cassano says. “Half of the nice apartments I’ve found are on the second or third floors. That’s out of the question. The other half are owned or managed by people who don’t want to have three people living in a one-bedroom apartment.”

George says he feels helpless. His eyesight has become so bad that he can’t even scour the classified ad section for apartment listings. He spends his time watching sports or news on a television set that rests at the foot of his bed.

His daughter and a steady stream of neighbors used to keep George and his wife, Aileen, company. But since the eviction started, their numbers have dwindled and now as he stares out the window George wonders who, if anyone, will come back to chat.

Saturday, March 22 Altheda (Skipper) Moody is tired of saying goodby. “Seems like all I do these days is say goodby and cry,” said Moody, 78, who moved to an apartment less than a mile away several weeks ago but still comes back to check on friends.

Today she has come back to check on 93-year-old Catherine Cornell. “At least this trip isn’t so sad,” Moody says. “Catherine’s story has a happy ending.”

The Little Sisters of the Poor have accepted Cornell into their San Pedro rest home after reading about her plight in a community newspaper. Cornell, who had previously been rejected by the San Pedro home, was having a difficult time finding an affordable apartment when she first applied. She has lived in her apartment for 22 years and, despite her age, she remembers each rent increase as clearly as the letters in the alphabet.

There was a slight rise in rent when Vince Edwards, the actor who played television’s Dr. Ben Casey, sold the apartment complex to Carol Burnett. And another when the actress sold it to a real estate company about 10 years ago. Cornell’s rent increased slightly with each new owner, settling at the $280 she presently pays for her one-bedroom apartment.

“I can’t afford any more than I pay right now,” Cornell says. “I could have gone to live with my grandson, but they would have felt sorry for me. He said he would be glad to have me but I didn’t believe him.

“Skipper and I are lucky,” Cornell says as the two old woman hold each other’s shaky hands. “We are leaving with our pride. Not all of us can say that.”

Wednesday, April 9 Almost everyone has moved out of their apartments by now. Everyone except Cohen and the Jukkalas.

Cohen is waiting for escrow to close on her new condominium and the Jukkalas are, as their daughter puts it, “waiting for a miracle.”

The apartment complex looks like a ghost town. Vandals have already picked up the scent of abandonment. Broken windows and graffiti attest to their visits. Cohen, who said earlier this year that she was “only afraid of the devil and God himself,” leaves a radio on whenever she leaves and sleeps with the lights on and a baseball bat under the bed. “This place is absolutely spooky,” Cohen says. “Every little crack makes me nervous.”

Friday, April 25 George and Aileen Jukkala have left their apartment five times in the past year. Today they are leaving for good.

But they haven’t found a permanent home. The Homestead Group has allowed them to move to the south side of the complex, where they can stay until tenants on that side are evicted later this year. In the meantime, their daughter will continue to look for a permanent home.

George and Aileen sit in two wheelchairs across from each other in what used to be their crowded yet orderly apartment as Cassano and another daughter, Marion Winter, haul boxes to the new flat.

“Careful with that,” Aileen admonishes as Cassano picks up a Finnish relic from the Old Country.

Their new apartment looks just like the old one, but Aileen is not fooled. “Take me home,” she demands. Her daughters try to explain that this is home, for now.

Saturday, April 26 The north side of Alvern Park succumbs to death today, as bulldozers close in on the edge of the complex where Cohen and the Jukkalas once lived.

The Jukkalas’ daughters spend the morning rearranging their parents’ furniture, trying to re-create the setting they had just left behind. A destruction crew has already lifted the roof off their old apartment building, and bulldozers are standing by waiting for Cohen, the last tenant, to make her final departure.

Cohen is moving on to her Inglewood condominium, grumbling all the time about how the new complex “is probably slapped together with spit and tar paper.”

“They just don’t build buildings like this anymore,” she says.