Cure for an Eyesore : Huntington Beach Crackdown Changes Face of Commodore Circle

Cockroaches still share living quarters with some residents, but the rats that peered into apartments in broad daylight are gone. Most landscaping amounts to dirt yards, but ceilings no longer are missing. On Commodore Circle that is progress.

The Huntington Beach cul-de-sac of two-story apartments--surrounded by a sea of modern condominiums--has undergone a change in the 18 months since city officials began smacking landlords with criminal complaints.

Property owners were ordered to correct more than 700 housing code and safety violations, among them collapsing ceilings, stairways and floors, decaying walls and plumbing and infestations of cockroaches and rats--even rodent nests in ovens.

Roaches on Children’s Faces

A young mother once told a reporter that roaches scurried across her two sleeping children’s faces.

That was in late 1985.

Although the city’s efforts to persuade landlords to form a homeowner association failed, the threat of criminal prosecution, city-sponsored low-interest loans and grants and beefed-up inspections have had an effect.

“It’s still the worst street in the city,” said the city’s environmental officer, Susan Tulley, “but it keeps improving. I don’t think life in general has changed that much--you still have overcrowding--but Commodore Circle is not anything like the street it was in 1985. Thank God.”

Since the Orange County Health Care Agency discovered chronic violations on Commodore Circle in 1981, Huntington Beach officials had tried in vain to improve the one-block street, where mostly poor Latino and Vietnamese families lived in overcrowded squalor.

The 20 fourplex apartment buildings, west of Main Street and Beach Boulevard in the shadow of the newly renovated Five Points Shopping Center and surrounded by middle-class suburbia, had become an eyesore and a den of crime.

Tulley, who was hired two years ago to clean up the slum, made numerous trips to Commodore Circle. Tenants came to know her by first name and approached her in the street with complaints about landlords, she said.

On her first visit in November, 1985, she went into each of the 80 apartments, cataloguing health and safety violations. She left with a chronicle that revealed “just disgusting” conditions.

But one morning this week, as city crews pruned trees along the street, Tulley made a surprise spot-check of some buildings, and came out impressed.

Work was under way on new windows, doors, staircases and ceilings.

In one upstairs apartment, a Vietnamese mother and her children watched with curiosity and smiles as workers went in and out of the spartan but tidy rooms with spackle and paint.

In the project’s community recreation area, an L-shaped swimming pool, once thick with algae, had been drained and turned into a garden of corn, tomatoes and squash--a trade-off for one tenant who, in return, maintains the grounds of an adjacent apartment building.

“My, my,” Tulley mused.

Six months ago on her last visit, Tulley said, she and a county health inspector found only six violations for what she termed “minor” problems: chipping tiles, loose pipes, a faucet dripping here or there.

“It’s really coming along,” she said, leaving an apartment.

“My first trip out here, ceilings were falling in on us. The balconies were falling off buildings; staircases were about to fall off; ceilings in some of the downstairs units were just gone. I mean gone. You could see through the first floor to the second floor. The filth was incredible.

Discovery of Rat’s Nest

“Cockroaches would crunch under our feet. Big water roaches, an entire bucket of them, were under leaking water faucets. The rodent infestation was the worst I’ve seen anywhere. As we walked through the buildings, rats were sticking their heads through holes in the ceiling (that) they’d eaten through. In a broiler in one kitchen, we found a rat’s nest.”

Tenants and some neighbors blamed absentee landlords for neglecting the buildings. Some landlords blamed irresponsible tenants and interest rates. The city tried to have the landlords form a homeowner association to qualify for a half million dollars in federal housing grants, an effort that failed because some landlords said they feared being sued collectively for an individual’s liabilities. The city has since offered low-interest loans to individual property owners.

By the spring of 1986, a frustrated City Hall issued its final order for landlords to bring buildings to code or face criminal prosecution.

Several criminal complaints were filed, but most were dismissed when landlords made improvements before scheduled court appearances.

“That was fine with us,” Tulley said. “All we wanted was compliance with the law.”

Martin Douglas Settles, who owns one building, pleaded no contest on June 30, 1986, to seven criminal counts of violating the state housing code. Tulley said he was sentenced to serve 15 hours of community service, fined $1,200 and placed on one year probation.

City Loans and Grants

Another property owner, Bruce Belcher, said he and his co-owners have spent $90,000 to improve their two buildings, part of it city-sponsored loans and grants.

But owning property on Commodore Circle can be frustrating.

“Some of the owners really want to clean it up and are making a real effort,” Belcher said. “It’s really horrifying to be concerned and go in and do the work and then watch (another landlord) not do anything with his buildings, and everything goes down the drain. That and tenants not taking care of things is still a problem.”

At 7651 Commodore Circle, the sidewalk still buckles a half foot into the air and the front yard is only dirt. The building is among three on the street owned by Edward and Patricia Vergara; it was cited in 1985 for a total of 94 safety and housing code violations.

But Maria Espinoza, 24, who lives in the front apartment at, with her husband, their three children and three other relatives, said things are much better now. Espinoza, described by Tulley as a model tenant, was cooking a pot of menudo in her immaculate three-bedroom apartment this week as she recalled when the bathroom ceiling sagged like a hammock, and leakage from the upstairs apartment stained the kitchen ceiling. But all of that has been repaired.

“If it weren’t for the city, though,” she said, “this place would be full of cockroaches.”

Poor Conditions Persist

At 1632 Commodore Circle, 31-year-old Gabriel Torres last week allowed Tulley to inspect his apartment. She found a ceiling that was stained and dry-rotted and several walls so softened by water leakage that her touch left fingerprints. Bugs were in the bathtub, and cockroaches roamed the walls and floor of the kitchen.

“When you see cockroaches out in broad daylight, you know they’re real bad,” Tulley said.

Torres, who earns money driving neighbors to work in his car, said seven men share the apartment, although nine bicycles are parked on the patio, and a list of household chores, taped to the kitchen wall, lists 11 people.

Despite her suspicion that the apartment is illegally overcrowded, Tulley cannot issue a citation because only three men are there at the time.

Some apartments are progressing better than others, Tulley said.

“It’s improving all the time, and as soon as they finish up the outsides (of the buildings), we’ll hit them up for landscaping. I’m pleased.”

There are reminders that the job isn’t quite done, like a tattered gold couch propped sideways on three old abandoned stoves. “Well,” Tulley said with a sigh, “we’ve cleaned the insides fairly good, and the landscaping has been done in some units, and it may get done in others. “But how do you get people to take enough pride to pick up the trash and diapers and couches. There is an overcrowding problem that hasn’t gone away entirely either. There is only so much a city can do.”