Clubs Staying Alert in Effort to Halt Blight : 30-Year Fight in South L.A. Strives to Upgrade Area

It wasn’t long after the young man moved into a rented house on Ferdia Harris’ neat, tree-lined stretch of 94th Street in South-Central Los Angeles that she decided he needed a visit.

“I was driving past one day and there he was, out there in front of his house taking a car apart at the curb,” Harris recalled. “I got out of my car, marched right up to him and said ‘You know, you can’t do that here. You’re going to have to move that to your back yard.’

“He asked me who I was and I told him I was the deputy for the area,” she said, erupting into laughter about the title she made up on the spot. “He was very apologetic and said he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. We haven’t had a problem out of him since.”

No Room for Junk

What made the difference in that gentle but effective confrontation between neighbors last summer? “I think he may have had some respect for my age,” the 70-year-old Harris said. “But I also made it clear to him that we wanted him to stay, but we didn’t want his junk.”

Harris has been sending the same message to people who live near her for more than 30 years, since shortly after she moved into what was then a tiny box of a starter home on 94th near McKinley Avenue.

She first transmitted it through home improvement block clubs she helped organize in the 1950s when black families moved in large numbers into the southern part of the city, replacing whites fleeing to the suburbs. The main purpose of the clubs, some of them literally as small as one city block, was to encourage the new residents to build a stable community by maintaining and improving their property instead of moving away to more prosperous areas as soon as they could afford to.

Later, Harris’ message was condensed to “Don’t Move, Improve,” and became the slogan of the Council of Community Clubs, an umbrella organization that Harris founded in 1963 to make it easier for the block clubs to get what they needed from government agencies. Its functions have since expanded to include such things as employment counseling and job referral for residents and voter registration drives.

Although the council has shrunk from a peak of 78 block clubs in the late 1970s to 35 today, Harris and others think something like it--a large coalition of tiny neighborhood groups--may hold the solution to problems that plague South-Central and other areas of the city. Proposals now being offered by police and others that would organize neighborhood groups in the war against blight and crime are derivatives of methods the Council of Community Clubs refined years ago.

City Councilwoman Gloria Molina, concerned with the proliferation of street drug dealing in parts of her 1st District, has set aside $75,000 from her office budget to organize small neighborhood groups through a program called More Advocates for Safe Homes.

Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) has proposed that the Los Angeles City Council create a city commission that would oversee activities of already established block clubs and organize new ones throughout the city, block by block.

“Block clubs are probably the most viable concept for crime prevention,” said Waters. “The problem is that right now everything is hit and miss.”

As the council considers Waters’ proposal, which is in committee, the Los Angeles Police Department has ordered all its divisions to begin planning for a citywide program that operates on the theory that neighborhood improvement and beautification is a deterrent to crime.

Sgt. Christopher West of the LAPD Crime Prevention Unit said that through the program, called Police Assisting Community Enhancement, the department will help residents wade through bureaucratic red tape when they want to do such things as have abandoned cars removed from the streets or have alleys cleaned.

The program, West said, grew out of a Harvard University study in the early 1980s that concluded if a community would tolerate, say, abandoned cars, it would tolerate deteriorated buildings. If it would tolerate deteriorated buildings, it would tolerate loiterers on street corners. Eventually, he said, serious criminal activity would move into the area.

The study also concluded, West said, that evidence of destructiveness and neglect in neighborhoods, such as broken windows on a building, attract similar vandalism, if left unattended.

Harris understood that without the benefit of a scientific study.

“From the beginning we realized that you had to nip the problem in the bud,” she said.

Block club streets are not immune to crime, she said, but they have remained stable through the years even where they abut areas that have serious gang problems and widespread physical deterioration.

One of the tools used often by clubs affiliated with the Council of Community Clubs is a complaint form, designed by Harris, that club members fill out when they can’t get city departments to respond to their requests for service. The forms are sent to the City Council district office in question and, if necessary, followed up with phone calls or face-to-face meetings.

When those tactics don’t bring immediate responses, the problem is not left to sit.

“We have swept the streets ourselves,” said Harris, who holds the title of executive director of the CCC. “We have picked up litter and we try to influence others to do the same.”

Willis Pursley, the CCC’s 65-year-old president, said his Halldale Avenue Block Club simply pays a young man to keep its streets free of litter.

Laura Shur, an aide to Councilman Robert Farrell, whose 8th District is home to most of the block clubs affiliated with the Council of Community Clubs, said the clubs, during a one-month period last year, submitted 47 requests for aid. Included were 16 requests for alley cleanings or graffiti removal, seven for building inspections, four for the removal of abandoned cars and two for vacant lots to be cleaned.

The best proof of the success of the “block club movement,” as Harris calls it, is the appearance of the streets that have strong block clubs.

Those streets are filled with row after row of neat homes, clean-swept alleys, trimmed lawns and delicately clipped trees. Many of the trees, Harris said, were placed there, not by the city, but by block club members who pooled their money to buy saplings, then spent a Saturday planting them.

Harris organized four blocks on 94th Street, she said, shortly after she and her husband moved there. It is believed by many to have been one of the first, if not the first, organization of its kind in the area.

“The houses then were little cubbyholes, the area wasn’t very picturesque,” Harris said. “Our purpose was to make it better so people would stay.”

In a few years, the clubs had popped up all over South-Central, particularly in its southeast section. Harris formed the CCC in 1963 and in 1969 it became a nonprofit charitable organization. Affiliate clubs pay an $18 annual fee for membership and their presidents represent them at CCC meetings. Any expenses incurred beyond what the dues pay come out of the pockets of Harris and other officers.

The only government funding the organization has ever received, said Harris, was a two-year grant in the late 1970s to operate a federal Model Cities program. That was also the only time it operated in an office outside of Harris’ home.

Harris said the separate office made the Council of Community Clubs more visible and attracted more block clubs to it. After the office closed, she said, a number of the clubs broke away from the larger organization.

Pursley said that in recent years, a few clubs have disbanded when their most active members grew old or died. He estimates that in addition to the affiliates of the Council of Community Clubs, about 40 other block clubs operate in the 8th District. The organization also has some clubs in nearby districts.

The most active members in all the South-Central block clubs, Pursley said, tend to be older people who have lived in the same homes for 20 or 30 years. For that reason, he said, the Council of Community Clubs is trying to come up with ways to attract younger people.

Julia Lee, another member of the council, said that effort is sometimes difficult.

“You don’t find many young families that own their houses,” she said.

Others said that it also is difficult to find people who have the motivation that the all-volunteer block club work requires or people who have experience as leaders.

Harris, who moved to Los Angeles in 1939 from Texas at age 19, brought to the block club movement the skills she developed as a civil rights activist and as a union organizer at Douglas Aircraft Co. in World War II.

Much of what she knows about city services and the intricacies of city government was gained between 1968 and 1974, when she worked as an aide to her brother-in-law, Billy Mills, who was at the time on the City Council representing the 8th District.

Mills, now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, said he hired Harris, not because she is a relative, but because of her extensive contacts in the community through the block clubs.

“No one I know is able to get things done the way Ferdia does,” said Mills. “We used to pray for organizations like hers.

Councilman Farrell, a former Mills aide who succeeded him on the City Council, said he also maintains a close relationship with Harris and the CCC.

“When I need to get the word to the community out about something, they are always willing to do it through their network,” Farrell said. “By the same token, they let me know what’s going on in the community.”