Watts Housing Project Will Be Renovated

A multimillion-dollar face lift for the huge Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts was announced Friday at an upbeat gathering of public officials and tenants.

Under the plan sponsored by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, Nickerson--the largest housing project west of the Mississippi--will be divided into village-like compounds with their own managers, color schemes, laundry facilities and playgrounds. Tenants will be hired as painters and handyman for some of the redesign and landscaping work.

The undertaking, part of the so-called Watts Improvement Housing Program, comes at a time when federal housing dollars have grown scarce and critics have urged that large housing projects be sold and the tenants dispersed through other housing programs. The Los Angeles renovation work will be financed primarily by the Housing Authority and federal grants.

Mayor Tom Bradley told a cheering crowd, whose enthusiasm was not dampened by the chilly morning drizzle, that other cities with large public housing projects have “given up . . . and torn them down.”

“We refuse to tear down this project. We’ve chosen instead to remodel,” he said.

Dozens of police officers stood by with walkie-talkies and binoculars as one speaker after the other at Nickerson Gardens expressed hopes that the undertaking will improve the lives of the 5,000 tenants.

Ernest Shaw, chairman of the Nickerson Gardens Residents Advisory Council, said he expects the plan to “bring rehabilitation where there has been deterioration, light where there has been darkness and hope where there has been despair.”

The plan stresses tenant involvement, allowing residents to choose color schemes and types of trees and plants, for example, as well as giving them them jobs.

Officials of the Housing Authority, which runs the 1,064-unit Nickerson Gardens and 20 other large public housing projects, announced Friday that they have set aside $1.3 million for the first phase of renovation, which will begin as soon as contractors can be hired.

The money will pay for the hiring of tenants, a project-wide paint job, a little landscaping work and some additional lighting, said the agency’s modernization director, Faustin Gonzales.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development officials said they expect to allocate an additional $3.9 million for the second phase, which will include more landscaping, fencing off the project’s 69 acres into about 15 smaller village-like compounds and remodeling 76 kitchens that were left undone during a modernization campaign 10 years ago.

(The Times disclosed in 1984 that the Housing Authority had advanced a contractor $42,000 for the kitchen remodeling work, but that no work was ever done.)

The final phase of the job, which Gonzales said may not be completed for five years, would seek to restrict access to the project and provide better security for tenants by making many of the streets that now crisscross the project into dead-ends.

Gonzales said he also hopes that financing can be arranged for a child-care center, an eight-story senior citizens facility, a post office and space for a market and other commercial establishments.

Sherman Gardner of the Culver City-based development firm of Goldrich & Kest assisted Housing Authority Executive Director Leila Gonzalez-Correa in drawing up plans to implement the village concept at Nickerson Gardens. He said the design will give tenants a greater sense of community, with each village having its own identity--including a color scheme and support facilities, such as the playgrounds and laundries.

Councilwoman Joan Milkes Flores, whose district includes Nickerson Gardens, said the housing project has been unmanageable mainly because of its size. She said she hopes that the new plan will curb crime, gangs and narcotics activity.

Flores recently helped establish a city housing task force whose mission is to evaluate the city’s public housing projects and find ways to revitalize them. She said some projects--not including Nickerson Gardens--are so physically decayed that the city might be better off demolishing them than pouring in money to fix them up.

HUD spokesman Scott Reed said that housing authorities in Dallas, Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City have elected to tear down projects and start over. But so far, he said, no public housing projects have been razed in HUD’s Western region covering California, Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Hawaii.