Costly Houses, Crack Dealers in Uneasy Mix

When Francine Vanous recently bought and refurbished a duplex in the Oakwood section of Venice, one of the first people to greet her was the neighborhood drug dealer.

The young crack peddler approached the demure-looking high school art teacher as she rode her bicycle down the street.

“He asked me what I needed,” recalled Vanous, 38. “And I told him, ‘Nothing.’ ”

“You see that a lot here,” she said.

Street criminals in residence are not usually found in neighborhoods within walking distance of the beach. But in Oakwood, a cramped community of gang kingpins, artists, stockbrokers and petty thieves, such paradoxes abound.

High-cost housing units for upwardly mobile professionals are being built in the same area where a 9-year-old boy was gunned down in a gang-related shooting last week. People paying $1,400-a-month rent are living beside welfare families crammed into subsidized housing.

While police say Oakwood is among the most dangerous neighborhoods on the Westside--some say the recent killing of Jorge Gonzalez outside his home is an example of the precarious nature of life there--it is also becoming a popular place for a new group of renters and home buyers who are not sent running by the sight of curb-side criminals, abandoned cars and graffiti.

‘Everything Started Moving’

“Everything really started moving about two years ago,” said Larry E. Kincannon, a Jon Douglas Co. real estate broker who specializes in the area. “What happened was the surrounding areas were going up while Oakwood remained suppressed. And it reached a point where it became worthwhile for people to come in and fix it up, because there is only so much beach-area property.”

Gail Wronsky and Chuck Rosenthal, married college professors who have a 1-year-old daughter, recently purchased a spacious house with a loft in Oakwood for about $200,000 after renting in the area for a year.

Wronsky said that, as former Easterners, she and her husband are accustomed to an urban environment. On two occasions, she said, she has marched into the street with her daughter on her hip and ordered a drug dealer away from her house. Nevertheless, the couple considers Oakwood, for all its faults, one of the best values along the coast.

“We have been surprised by the amount of public drug dealing going on,” Wronsky said. “But we’ve liked it here from the start. We have a 1,400-square-foot house, and we’re five blocks from the ocean.”

Longtime residents, many of them poor blacks and Latinos, know all about Oakwood’s growing cachet, and some fear that the poor will be washed away in a tide of big bucks. They say it’s not uncommon to receive an inquiry a day from real estate brokers offering to put their houses on the market for as much as $250,000, twice as much as they fetched two years ago.

‘Yuppies Are Coming’

“The yuppies are coming!” said Pearl White, sounding like a modern-day Paul Revere. “And many are already here. They are buying up everything.”

Margarita Saenz and her family have lived in Oakwood more than 25 years. Saenz said she has felt pressure from real estate agents interested in moving the 13 members of her family out of their blue-gray Spanish-style house.

“I think what they ought to be doing is helping poor people to stay,” Saenz said. “Because if all of us are forced out, where will we go?”

Oakwood’s 10,000 residents are already hemmed in. To the west, on West Washington Boulevard, is a thriving business community. To the south lies the Marina Peninsula with its million-dollar homes and the bright lights of Marina del Rey. To the east is prime West Los Angeles residential property, and to the north is Santa Monica.

In the past, Oakwood stood apart from those places, as well as from the rest of Venice, because of its ghetto-like atmosphere. If Venice was a carnival, Oakwood would be its scariest ride. But the gap is closing, said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the coastal area.

“There has been much more activity in Oakwood in the last several years than there has been in a long time,” Galanter said.

In an effort to control Oakwood’s growth and calm community unrest, Galanter recently created the Oakwood Community Congress, a group to fight crime while encouraging cooperation between older and newer residents.

Galanter said she hopes that Oakwood will retain its mixed ethnic character.

According to the National Planning Data Corp., 56% of the neighborhood’s population is Latino, 24% black and 17% white.

But the statistical research firm also reports that, whereas 31% of the population was below the poverty line in 1980, that figure is now narrowed to 16%. And 25% of the households earn more than $40,000 a year, up from less than 5% earning $40,000 in 1979.

Oakwood already has one famous resident, actor Dennis Hopper, who lives in a modern silver fortress designed by Frank Gehry. Hopper’s home, which sits on one of Oakwood’s worst streets, was recently covered with graffiti.

Elaine Spierer, who works with the Rosenthal & Associates Realtors, said all types of people are purchasing Oakwood property, from members of the fashionable art crowd to middle-American families.

As Spierer wheeled her shiny BMW down the street, it was easy to tell where Oakwood’s borders begin. In the outer areas, the streets are lined with well-kept middle- and upper-class homes. In Oakwood, by comparison, many of the houses and apartment buildings are ravaged, and drug dealers dressed in black beckon to early morning commuters from most corners.

“The big negative about Oakwood is that it is still very hostile on the streets.” Spierer said. “You can feel it. I’ve had some buyers who are fearful.”

Peter Nott, who owns 48 apartment units in Oakwood, a fifth of them usually vacant, said many of his tenants have left because of the parade of drug dealers, muggers and homeless people.

“A lot of my tenants just split,” Nott said. “And now it’s difficult to get new tenants in. Many who come by are afraid of the big groups of people they see standing on the corners. . . . Others intend to stay, but after a couple of months of hearing gunshots, helicopters and sirens, they leave.”

Crime has long been one of Oakwood’s major industries. Residents periodically take to the streets to protest, as they did in 1986, when groups marched nightly chanting “Nope to Dope!” and “Ugh to Drugs!” But it’s an uphill battle. Capt. John R. Wilbanks of the Pacific Division said Oakwood still ranks as one of the city’s prime drug-peddling havens.

In the last 18 months, police have made more than 2,000 arrests without really making a dent in the drug traffic, Wilbanks said.

For many newcomers, the ultimate hope is that Oakwood will be fully redeveloped. But a major obstacle, from their viewpoint, is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which controls 246 federally subsidized apartment units in Oakwood.

HUD spokesman Scott Reed said the contract on Oakwood’s subsidized units expires in 1992, but no one seems to know what will happen after that. “That question is under review,” Reed said.

The loss of the 246 units would exacerbate a shortage of low-income housing on the Westside. Already there are long waiting lists for the few available units.