Drafting a Blueprint for Hope

Tamatria Haley, like many of her neighbors in the Barton Hill section of San Pedro, dreams of a world she does not know.

Haley, a young mother, wants to raise her two boys in a neighborhood where kids ride their bikes without running into warring gangs, and where parks are jammed with wide-eyed Little Leaguers rather than glassy-eyed dope peddlers.

Haley would like a big grocery store--the kind that advertises on TV--that she can walk to, and more restaurants where people go to eat rather than get drunk.

Haley longs for a home where she can park her car overnight without worrying about finding bullet holes in the windshield the next morning.

Haley is searching for the good life--and, she says, she is determined to find it in Barton Hill.

“A lot of people are just totally frightened to live here,” the 29-year-old part-time activities coordinator said recently, her 11-month-old son Jeremiah tucked under her arm. “We have 10-year-olds selling dope on the corner. . . . But this is our neighborhood. If our neighbors would just band together, we could do something.”

Haley is one of several dozen residents of Barton Hill, one of San Pedro’s poorest and neediest neighborhoods, who are trying to change their community--at least on paper. In an unlikely partnership with graduate students 30 miles away and a world apart at UCLA in Westwood, the Barton Hill neighborhood is drafting a plan for new development--a plan that residents see as a blueprint for hope.

Bringing in Experts

“It is our town, and we should have a say in its future,” said Armando Sanchez, one of about 60 residents who attended a recent workshop on the new plan at the Toberman Settlement House, a social services agency where Haley works. “The idea of bringing in experts to help is excellent.”

Unable to afford land-use consultants typically hired by homeowner groups in more affluent areas of Los Angeles, the Barton Hill residents have turned to volunteers for assistance. Ten aspiring urban planners at UCLA adopted the community in January and have been combing the neighborhood for information and ideas ever since.

“We want to get out into the community and hear their opinions,” said Lisa Brownfield, a 29-year-old graduate student from Chatsworth who worked as a city planner before attending UCLA. “We pretty much know what the community activists are saying, but we also want to know what the individuals are saying.”

At the workshop and several smaller meetings, the graduate students have exchanged ideas with cannery workers, auto mechanics and housewives who hope the plan will make the 50-block community a safer and more attractive place to live while preserving its low-income housing.

“I would like to see something for the kids, like a skating rink,” said Lorenza Archuleta, a retired Pan Pacific cannery worker who attended the workshop.

The students will write the plan--which will cover such things as housing, commercial development, zoning issues, traffic problems and the need for social services--based on their research and sessions with the residents.

“This is an area in economic transition,” said Prof. Leo Estrada, who is supervising the two-quarter urban planning class, which serves as a final thesis for the master’s degree students. “We want to keep the area from deteriorating any further, while making sure speculators don’t come in and take away the affordable housing.”

Estrada and his students acknowledge, however, that the evolving plan will offer no guarantees for change. The plan, expected to be finished at the end of the month, will be a wish list of sorts with no legal significance.

The city of Los Angeles already has a San Pedro Community Plan that includes the Barton Hill neighborhood, and city officials said they see no compelling reason to draft a new one. The community plan, a general document that sets zoning guidelines for all of San Pedro, was adopted in 1980 and amended four years ago during so-called “zoning consistency hearings.”

David Kuntzman, who handles San Pedro planning issues for the city, said planning officials have decided that the community plan “should be allowed to mature” before any additional changes are contemplated. He said the city does not intend to develop a more detailed plan--known as a specific plan--for Barton Hill.

Once completed, the Barton Hill neighborhood’s plan will be presented to Harbor Area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who has also steered away from giving the residents any false hopes about the plan. Mario Juravich, Flores’s San Pedro deputy, said the councilwoman has promised to look at the plan--but nothing more.

Even so, the plan has brought a sense of hope to Barton Hill, a melting pot of Latinos, blacks and ethnic East Europeans squeezed between Gaffey Street and Harbor Boulevard north of downtown San Pedro.

Leaders say the plan--regardless of whether it is accepted by city officials--will serve as a moral mandate for future development.

One resident said it will serve as the collective “voice of the people” of Barton Hill, a community that until recently was known in San Pedro only for its crime and poverty, not its community activism.

“If they build too many new commercial buildings and condominiums, it is going to be hard for low-income residents to live in this area,” said Norma Acosta, a 25-year resident of Barton Hill, who attended the brainstorming workshop at Toberman. “At the same time, we would like to live in a nice area, something that we can be proud of.”

The Barton Hill neighborhood, anchored in the south by the Rancho San Pedro public housing project and severed at the north by the Harbor Freeway, is dotted with bungalows, small stucco homes and duplexes--many of which, the UCLA students say, are in disrepair.

“Some of these places look better from the outside than they actually are,” said UCLA student Lorraine Zecca, an accountant from suburban Philadelphia who is focusing on housing needs in the Barton Hill plan. “There are houses where the plumbing is so bad that people have to go next door to use the bathroom.”

In late 1986, Barton Hill’s deteriorating housing stock caught the eye of officials from the San Pedro Peninsula Chamber of Commerce, which was launching an aggressive marketing campaign for San Pedro in an effort to attract new business.

In a report called “San Pedro 2000,” the chamber proposed zoning changes in Barton Hill that would have allowed property owners to build three rather than two units on their lots. The chamber believed that the higher-density zoning would provide a financial incentive to owners to replace deteriorating single-family homes and duplexes with modern triplexes.

The chamber report also called for demolition of the 479-unit Rancho San Pedro project, the construction of new low-income housing several blocks away, and the development of a harbor-front retail and office area where the project stands.

To Barton Hill residents, the chamber report amounted to a declaration of war. Rancho San Pedro tenants, fearful that the project would be torn down and new housing never built, joined Barton Hill homeowners and renters in opposing the plan. The homeowners and renters interpreted the proposed zone changes as an underhanded effort to force low-income residents out of the Barton Hill housing market.

The chamber’s plan, which was rejected last fall by the city’s Planning Department, inspired Barton Hill residents to begin thinking about their future. Through the Barton Hill Neighborhood Organization, a social services agency of the United Methodist Church, the residents put together a response to the chamber’s proposal. Called the “Barton Hill Master Plan,” the residents dismissed the chamber’s proposed reforms, suggesting instead an emphasis on the preservation and upgrading of the existing neighborhood.

“We are aware that people in other parts of San Pedro think negatively about Barton Hill,” Rancho San Pedro resident Paulette Symonds said at a meeting with city officials last fall. “But we love it. It is our home.”

Filling Out Framework

The community’s opposition to “San Pedro 2000” and its drafting of a counterproposal were instrumental in the eventual demise of the chamber’s plan. But despite its erudite title, the “Barton Hill Master Plan” was a layman’s document that even its most enthusiastic supporters conceded was not the definitive word on Barton Hill.

The UCLA students have gone door-to-door interviewing residents and merchants, have walked the streets taking notes, have attended community and church meetings and have held extensive interviews with community leaders. The information-gathering phase of their project culminated several weeks ago at the Toberman workshop.

Spanish, English Groups

The “sharette,” as the students called the workshop, started with a short introduction about the plan, and then quickly broke up into four groups of 15 or so each--two Spanish-speaking and two in English. But the decision to divide the workshop along linguistic lines touched off a crisis, one that caught the students and most Barton Hill residents by surprise.

An elderly Mexican-American man with thick glasses who had been sitting quietly suddenly stood up and began to protest--in English. “I don’t want to be separated. I used to ride on trains in Colorado and we had to be separated,” he said. “It is hard to accept that even in this year that they are separating people.”

The protest came at an awkward time, just after Toberman Director Howard Uller finished a pep talk of sorts, telling the residents that their participation in the planning process showed that they were prepared to “take your community into your own hands”--that a united Barton Hill did not have to be the stepchild of San Pedro.

No Slur Intended

UCLA student Hassan Haghani, a native of Iran who was leading the workshop, assured the elderly man that the decision to separate into English- and Spanish-speaking groups was not a racial slur and did not indicate that one group would be treated differently from the other. “We just think some people prefer to speak one language over the other,” he said.

But the man was not satisfied. “It has happened to me in many places. It shouldn’t be happening here.”

Student Vincent Spenlehauer, a Moroccan, pulled the man aside. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he explained to the man in English. “So I would need to be at an English table.” As Dee Petty, who runs the Barton Hill Neighborhood Organization, moved in, Spenlehauer turned to another student and said quietly: “Well, he’s right.”

The elderly man eventually settled in front of a map at a Spanish-speaking table, where he soon set aside his objections and began to complain about crime, gangs and poorly maintained homes and buildings. Later, when asked his name by a reporter, he turned away, saying he did not want his name in the newspaper because he feared gang members might learn that he had attended the workshop.

Wary of Cooperation

The man’s initial distrust and his fear of being identified publicly illustrate what several UCLA students said has been a problem in their research: Some residents have been wary about cooperating, while others have expressed fears about being too public with their complaints.

Several residents at the workshop guessed that many people stayed away from the session because of fears similar to the old man’s. The UCLA students distributed nearly 2,500 bilingual flyers about the meeting, but only 60 residents showed up.

“This is probably a very good sign for you about the kind of effort that is needed to get these people to cooperate,” Estrada said. “There were a lot less people than you would probably get from West Hollywood or Santa Monica.”

One Spanish-speaking student said an unspoken skepticism among some Latino workshop participants made it difficult for them to open up fully. The residents were asked to mark things they did not like about the community with thick red pens and red stick-on stars--something that some of them were not eager to do.

“We told them that they could just do what they feel from their heart,” said Alberto Mejia, a graduate student from Mexico City. “We told them that they didn’t have to give your name. A lot of them have had bad experiences, and they were skeptical.”

Likes, Dislikes

Even so, many residents did write on the maps. They used blue to mark things they liked--such as their churches, a new mini-mall on Harbor Boulevard, a weekly farmers’ market and the Toberman Settlement House--and red to identify things they did not like--including bars along Pacific Avenue, well-know drug dealing and prostitution locations, congested streets, abandoned vehicles and several buildings they said pose health hazards.

The maps used by the Spanish-speaking groups were scattered with the words drogas, cantinas and inspeccion sanitaria (drugs, bars and health inspection) in red, while their English counterparts had red stars over bars and liquor stores on Pacific Avenue. In blue, designating what they would like to see were words such as “post office,” “grocery store” and “more police.”

The UCLA class plans to collate the various responses and attempt to weave them into its final report. Some of the students said they will be making additional visits to the neighborhood to gather more information.

In Barton Hill, meanwhile, many residents eagerly await the students’ final report. At the Toberman workshop, they had nothing but praise for the aspiring urban planners.

“They asked the right questions and stimulated the people to respond,” said Armando Sanchez. “One response then stimulated another response. I am very enthused about the interaction.”

Archuleta, the retired cannery worker, said the students may have done more than help Barton Hill come up with a blueprint for future development. Unwittingly, she said, they may have helped the community groom its future leaders.

“There are a lot of kids around, and there are a lot of drugs,” she said. “This may help other kids see that it is worth it to stay in school so that they can have a good job and do something with themselves.”