WEIGHING THE FUTURE OF Jordan Downs : A Vast Repair Job for a New Owner

A new owner of Jordan Downs would face a vast repair job, not only to the sagging porches and rat-infested townhouses in the troubled housing project, but also the mending of a community where families struggle to raise children amid gangs, drugs and severe poverty.

The physical problems, which the Housing Authority concedes were caused in large part by past housing officials who ignored mounting decay, carry an estimated repair tag of $14 million. They include wholesale replacement of 1950s-era kitchens that resemble something from an old movie set, and reconstruction of aging bathrooms that have tubs but no showers--a situation that presents constant problems to large families.

Wood floors worn down by decades of use, hundreds of stuck and broken windows, holes in walls--all are common at Jordan Downs. The individual units, each two stories tall with a small living room on the ground floor and bedrooms above, are plagued by rats that will swarm an entire building if just one tenant has poor sanitation habits, according to tenants. The 50-acre complex has no laundry facilities for the project’s 3,150 residents.

Tammy Reeder, a 28-year-old mother of three, said things are so bad that she plans to ask the Housing Authority to transfer her to another project. Not long ago, she asked the Housing Authority to repair a window that she could not properly shut, but nobody ever came and thieves broke in and burglarized her home.

“My car has been broken into four times in the past two weeks, and they took the battery twice and the stereo,” Reeder said. “The bathrooms don’t have showers and the sinks are real old and the kitchen cabinets are falling apart.”

There are 10 playgrounds for children--with weathered metal swings and slides that sit in patches of dirt. Rejecting the forlorn play areas, children often scamper inside the project’s many abandoned, smashed-out cars.

Last year, one city official privately told The Times that raising a child at Jordan Downs “is a form of child abuse.”

But beyond the glaring physical troubles, the human problems will present any new landlord with the greatest challenge.

“They’ve got to have some police or somebody come over to Jordan, not sometimes but all the time, to talk to kids about life and drugs,” said Adina Turner, 10, as she walked home to Jordan Downs from her school this week.

Adina, like other children in Jordan Downs, must brave a short but dangerous walk home from the 102nd Street School nearby. City and Housing Authority police cars regularly pass along these streets, but drug dealers are clearly visible, slowly cruising in expensive cars or even openly selling crack cocaine.

According to Michele Roth, executive assistant at the Housing Authority, about 90% of the families rely solely upon welfare or Social Security, and a large but unknown number of people make up a “shadow population” of boyfriends and relatives who illegally crowd into the apartments.

Rent, based on 30% of tenant income, averages only $172 a month in Jordan Downs, compared to $400 to $600 a month for privately owned apartments in Watts. But even at that low price, about 20% of the residents are usually overdue, Roth said. Some repay the rent immediately, but others never do, and it can take up to a year to evict them, Roth said.

Lacking any child care center, the single mothers who head up most families at Jordan Downs are trapped--even if they have skills and could get a job--by their inability to afford baby sitters. Moreover, few families have reliable cars or can afford car insurance that is among the most expensive in California because of the higher rates that insurance companies charge in and around Watts.

Officials of Project BUILD, a state-funded program overseen by state Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) that prepares unemployed residents for job interviews and links them up with potential employers, said that with a high school dropout rate of well over 50% in Watts, it is not unusual to find young parents who cannot read, write or compute numbers beyond a grade school level.

Warren Gilmore, a longtime resident of Jordan Downs, said the project has gotten worse--not better--since the Watts riots in 1965 left nearby streets in ashes.

“I was in Vietnam and this place is worse than that,” Gilmore said. “What private (corporation) is going to know anything about the unbelievable troubles we’ve got here?”