Putting Down New Roots : 1,500 Moved to Make Way for Project

The decaying two-room apartment Laura Calderon used to live in was cramped and infested with rats and roaches, but for 10 years on Wright Street was a good home to her and her three children. She liked it there. The market was close by, and there was a kinship among the neighbors.

Wright Street is a long way from where Calderon, 32, lives now. Her new three-bedroom apartment in the 4000 block of South Hoover Street is one of 24 clean, freshly painted apartments with nice kitchens. Once a week a gardener comes to this beige stucco building and tends to the landscaping. There are two parking spaces for each apartment. And as was promised more than two years ago, her monthly rent is indeed cheap--$168.

“The old neighborhood was OK to me. I liked the neighbors, but not the building,” Calderon said. The arrival of gang members using drugs outside her old apartment only made conditions worse. “Then I found out I had to move. I was worried. Then I saw this place. I love it here.”

1,500 Relocated

Calderon is one of about 1,500 people being relocated from a poor, dusty downtown neighborhood in order to make way for a major expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Like her, most of the mainly Latino tenants express a combination of anxiety, appreciation and regret toward being uprooted from the ramshackle tenements many have called “my home” for more than a decade.

For about two years, 408 families and 60 businesses have been slowly leaving this area to make way for the $390-million Convention Center expansion. By next month, the last of these residents will be gone, and the buildings remaining on the 40-acre site south of Pico Boulevard will be flattened.

The massive project is displacing more people than the Bunker Hill development of the 1960s, said Barbara Kaiser, head of downtown redevelopment for the Community Redevelopment Agency. Other agency projects have affected several blocks at a time, “but we’ve never before taken 40 acres and just demolished it,” Kaiser said.

Yet the community exodus is running with surprising smoothness, due to state relocation laws, the hard work of the Community Redevelopment Agency and the intervention of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which fought for the tenants.

As a result, families who once lived in squalid conditions have the opportunity to live in newer, larger and cheaper housing. The relocation project is costing the agency between $3 million and $4 million.

“One way or the other someone was going to be affected. The greatest public good at the least public harm was to expand into this area,” said Donald Spivak, Community Redevelopment Agency director of operations.

Estela Covarrubias and her 18-year-old daughter lived in the same dilapidated building for 13 years. “I was worried,” Covarrubias admitted when she heard she had to move from her one-room apartment. When the Community Redevelopment Agency told her that she would live in more of a habitable place, she said she was suspicious.

Her rent used to be $180. She said she pays less than $100 for the new second-story, two-bedroom apartment on Hoover Street. “I like it here for now,” Covarrubias said with a little sarcasm, “but I don’t know about later.”

Most of the 60 dilapidated buildings in the area date from the 1920s and earlier. In between some of the bulldozed lots, there still stands a fading Victorian apartment building, a few decaying homes, decrepit office buildings, auto repair shops, furniture warehouses and the old Georgia Street police station.

The redevelopment area is bordered by Pico Boulevard on the north, Venice Boulevard on the south, North Figueroa Street on the east and the Harbor Freeway on the west.

Commercial tenants being relocated are entitled to moving expenses, storage costs and up to $500 toward finding new quarters. Other concessions include costs for packing, insurance, licenses and permits. For some though, these benefits cannot cover all the true costs.

“It’s very, very sad that it has to be taken away. This a landmark,” said Peter Teichmann, owner of the immense Hofbrauhaus restaurant and pub on West 15th Street.

Modeled after a 700-year-old beer hall in Germany, the 32-year-old establishment serves about 3,000 people a week, mainly a downtown business crowd for lunch and on weekends “people who appreciate good Bavarian ambiance,” he said.

‘It’s Not Easy’

With the vacancy deadline weeks away, Teichmann said he is not sure where he will go. “It’s not easy to find a location for this restaurant,” he said. “People know we have been here for years.”

The family run Holtzman office supplies company has been at the same location on 7th Street since 1969. Steven Silbert, the president, said he was told about the move two years ago.

“We were not happy about the move by all means . . . but they’ve (the Community Redevelopment Agency) been extremely fair with us,” said Silbert, who found a new location--four times bigger--just a few miles away.

The Community Redevelopment Agency is in charge of acquiring the properties, relocating the residents and demolition. But officials said they have another requirement, one they said they have taken painstaking steps to fulfill: to make sure the relocation proceeds with a minimum amount of hardship.

The Convention Center expansion, which will include an exhibition hall, 40 new meeting rooms, restaurants and parking, is one of about a dozen projects in the redevelopment of downtown. For every housing unit the Community Redevelopment Agency destroys, it will build a replacement home. The agency is in the midst of completing almost 5,000 apartment units and houses throughout the city.

Displaced residents have a choice of moving to a redevelopment agency housing project or choosing their own housing and are eligible for several types of relocation benefits. For instance, the agency will pay an allowance up to $500 for those wishing to move on their own. And several families have been able to purchase their own homes using a down payment assistance plan.

“This has been one of the best informed programs in the history of the agency,” said senior housing specialist Del Ramirez. “We were telling the residents about it when it wasn’t even a project yet. We put out leaflets, went door to door and held public meetings. We did a lot of grass-roots things to let them know what was going on.”

Meetings in Spanish, English

The meetings were in English and Spanish. An office at the project site was opened in early 1987 to provide tenants access to agency staff.

Ramirez works out of the site office, a 60-foot trailer that sits on one of the soon-to-be-demolished streets. “I try not to come with a tie or a suit,” he said. “That way they don’t see me as the Establishment but rather someone who is here to help.”

But Kim Savage, a Legal Aid attorney, said most of the tenants will live in better conditions as a result of the group’s assistance, not just because of Community Redevelopment Agency intentions.

“State law is minimal,” Savage said. “It doesn’t consider the cost or size of the new place.”

After threatening suit, Legal Aid and the Community Redevelopment Agency came to an agreement in 1986 for the agency to provide larger and less expensive housing for the displaced families.

“The agreement certainly is positive, but we had to shove it down the CRA’s throat. It took a lot of time and effort on the part of the CRA because we had to work it out,” Savage said. “Things are going well now.”

For the first time in her life, Claudia Valencia, 15, has her own room. Like many girls her age, the bedroom walls are adorned with posters of teen-age heartthrobs.

Her family moved into a rehabilitated three-unit Victorian building in the 1000 block of South Bonnie Brae Avenue from their grungy apartment on DeLong Street in September. “It’s calm here. I like it,” Valencia said. “And I still go to the same school.”

On the other hand, Sara and Ramon Lopez are still worried. They live in a squalid two-room apartment with a broken washing machine stuffed into a small bathroom. “It’s all been explained to us, but nobody here wants to move. We’ll miss the area,” Sara Lopez said. “I don’t need a bigger apartment.”

Maximiano and Marvella Rocha have lived in the same building for five years. Marvella Rocha said they are “content” there and have turned down Community Redevelopment Agency housing to find a place of their own. Rocha said she did not like the agency’s housing locations.