Rent Strike Exposes Buena Clinton Again

If a poll were taken to select Orange County’s worst slum, Buena Clinton, a 39-acre neighborhood in Garden Grove, would easily win again.

About five years ago, the rundown neighborhood made news when county health officials did indeed identify it as the worst slum. In reaction to that, the Garden Grove City Council vowed to improve the area. Some changes were made, but not nearly enough.

In the meantime, the public spotlight shifted away, and the rest of the county forgot about the overcrowded neighborhood, where crime was as rampant as the rats were plentiful in the rundown apartment buildings. Unfortunately, not much has changed for residents, and the City Council’s vow remains unfulfilled.

Buena Clinton is still one of the county’s worst crime-ridden areas, with a rate 400% above the city’s average. Rats still run loose. Plumbing still leaks. And too many absentee landlords still buy and sell buildings, reaping rents and tax write-offs but neglecting to maintain the substandard apartments.

Buena Clinton’s more than 5,000 residents are not the kind who complain. About 80% of them are Latino; most are undocumented. For the most part, they are poor and uneducated, victims who suffer in silence. But some residents have had enough, so Buena Clinton is back in the news this week--this time because of a rent strike being staged by about 150 tenants.

Under the direction of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino immigrant-rights group that the residents asked for help, the tenants have begun a rent strike. Starting today, instead of paying their rent to landlords each month, the striking tenants will begin depositing the money in an escrow account until repairs to their apartments are finally made.

A similar rent strike in roach- and rat-infested apartments in Santa Ana in 1985 wound up in the courts. The jury decided that the landlord couldn’t evict the striking tenants, reduced back rents for apartments found to be substandard and cut current rents to a level considered fair for the condition of the buildings.

Conditions in some Buena Clinton apartments seem to be every bit as bad. In the last three months, according to city officials, citations have been issued ordering landlords to make repairs in 22 apartments. The landlords can, and have, applied for extensions on their deadlines for making the repairs.

City officials must persist, however, and aggressively enforce health, safety and building codes. Some landlords accuse tenants of not taking care of their apartments. In some cases that may be true, but that is no excuse for the generally rundown conditions that prevail in too many Buena Clinton apartments.

Orange County is well known for its high-priced homes and exclusive neighborhoods on the coastal plain in Newport Beach, in the hills of Tustin and ranchland in the booming south county area. But Buena Clinton is part of Orange County, too. And its residents, like tenants anywhere, deserve safe and healthy living quarters.

The shame is that they have to strike to get them.