Council Will Lend $818,000 to Agency for Housing Repairs

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to lend the beleaguered Housing Authority $818,000 to repair slum conditions at the dilapidated Jordan Downs housing project after several council members threatened to back a measure allowing tenants to refuse to pay rent.

The 9-1 vote comes in the wake of increasing criticism over the city’s failure to fix decaying units in its 21 public housing projects, while at the same time prosecuting private slumlords in court.

Council members sent the plan to the Finance and Revenue Committee, which will work out the details of the loan before returning the plan to the council for final approval.

‘Double Standard’

Councilwoman Gloria Molina, decrying what she called “a shameful double standard,” initially proposed a plan to allow tenants in city-run projects to refuse to pay rent if their apartments are neglected, instead placing the money in an escrow account to be used for repairs. Her sentiments were echoed by council members Nate Holden, Zev Yaroslavsky and Ernani Bernardi.

The council recently approved such escrow accounts for tenants in private housing, essentially allowing tenants to organize rent strikes against negligent slumlords.

“Last year a judge made a dramatic example of Dr. (Milton) Avol, a slumlord, and his sentence was to live within his own slum conditions,” Molina said. “I wonder what (would happen), members of the City Council and mayor, if the judge were to sentence us to the same situation?”

In the end, Molina offered to withdraw her motion in favor of an alternate plan by Councilman Robert Farrell. Farrell suggested lending the Housing Authority $818,000 for immediate repairs to 150 units at crime-ridden Jordan Downs in Watts, a 700-unit housing project widely regarded as the city’s worst. The money would be repaid with a federal grant expected this year.

Holden, a leading critic of the Housing Authority, cast the only vote against the loan, accusing the council of “throwing good money after bad to a group that has not been able to correct its problems.”

Leila Gonzalez-Correa, the Housing Authority’s executive director, said after the vote that she welcomes the loan and “takes blame, and the Housing Authority takes blame, for the inexcusable situation in Jordan Downs.”

She said she has been trying to resolve severe organizational problems within the authority created by her predecessor, Homer Smith. Smith resigned under pressure in 1985 after The Times reported widespread mismanagement of the authority’s 8,000 housing units and the City Council instituted numerous reforms, most of them against Smith’s wishes.

However, Gonzalez-Correa has encountered problems of her own since being hired in 1986. For example:

- Her program to paint and landscape aging apartments at Nickerson Gardens in Watts--announced with fanfare last summer--fizzled this winter after only some of the buildings were painted.

The $1.3-million program, which was supposed to provide painting and landscaping jobs to Nickerson residents, “was a disaster,” said Claudia Moore, Nickerson Gardens’ resident coordinator for Project BUILD, a job training program.

Gonzalez-Correa said Tuesday that she halted the work “because it didn’t make sense to paint the outside when the inside was so bad.” She said the program will be resumed shortly.

- Dori Pye, Gonzalez-Correa’s closest ally on the mayor-appointed Housing Authority Commission, is under fire from tenant leaders for bringing an armed bodyguard with her to recent meetings with tenants.

Moore called Pye’s action “insulting and incredible, as if we decent people are somehow to be physically feared.”

Pye, president of the Los Angeles West Chamber of Commerce in Westwood, said Tuesday that she brought an armed guard with her to a television debate with Moore, and to a meeting with tenants, because she had been physically threatened by two activists during a previous exchange over Gonzalez-Correa’s job performance.

Pye said she used a bodyguard, at Gonzalez-Correa’s suggestion, because a tenant “raised his fist at me” and another “came at me ready to swing her purse,” after Pye accused the tenants of being rude for criticizing Gonzalez-Correa in public.

Moore, who was present at the alleged fracas in February, said Tuesday that Pye’s charges were unfounded. “Nobody would ever try to attack Commissioner Pye--it didn’t happen and it is absurd,” she said.

- In December, 12 of 21 representatives of the public housing projects sent a letter to Mayor Bradley complaining of vacant units, long waiting lists of people wanting to rent units and modernization promises made by Gonzalez-Correa that had not been kept.

Despite such problems, many members of the City Council say they support Gonzalez-Correa’s efforts so far, arguing that she stepped into a disorganized agency at a time when federal Housing and Urban Development grants--on which the Housing Authority relies in large part--were scarce.

In fact, Gonzalez-Correa said Tuesday, the Housing Authority “can only turn things around” if it gets huge infusions of federal funds or finds another way to pay for $100 million in renovations needed in the drug-plagued and run-down projects.

This year, she said, she has asked HUD for $43 million toward that goal.

She said that the $818,000 loan approved Tuesday for Jordan Downs--while badly needed--is not likely to have a lasting effect on conditions at the project, where millions of dollars are needed for renovation. The city’s loan will be used to renovate 42 apartments that she described as “just terribly bad and uninhabitable,” as well as more than 100 other units that are in better shape but that need immediate attention.