Plan to Sell Jordan Downs Project Killed

City housing officials said Thursday that they are abandoning controversial plans to sell the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts because there is no feasible way to do it. The Housing Authority’s commission immediately voted to ask the federal government for at least $15 million in funds to renovate the aging, troubled facility.

Gary Squier, acting director of the Housing Authority, said officials from the Housing and Urban Development Department have urged him to apply for the money as quickly as possible to begin a long-awaited modernization that was abandoned by Leila Gonzalez-Correa, the Housing Authority director who resigned last month.

“My belief is that it would be very difficult to (sell) Jordan Downs,” Squier said, given federal budget restrictions that preclude the Housing Authority from replacing the 700 apartments there with low-income housing elsewhere--a requirement of federal law whenever a housing project is sold.

“I have discussed Jordan Downs with HUD regional and local offices, and they have said, ‘Come to us with what you need for (modernizing) Jordan Downs, and we will do everything we can to find the money,’ ” Squier said.

Squier said he has been encouraged by HUD to ask for far more than the $15 million needed to renovate the sagging, World War II-era buildings, and he said he intends to apply for several million dollars beyond that to create badly needed social programs and services over the next few years.

No Laundry Facilities

The 3,150 people who live at Jordan Downs--the vast majority of whom are single mothers and children--have no laundry facilities or playgrounds. And residents have been forced to use hundreds of battered garbage cans scattered along the streets instead of being provided the large dumpsters that are required at apartment buildings elsewhere in Los Angeles.

No on-site vocational training centers or other services to help residents break out of the cycle of poverty have ever been created by the city there despite years of discussion by top city officials.

In fact, the only such program there now, a job-preparedness seminar to help people meet prospective employers, was conceived by state Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles). The program, known as Project BUILD, is funded by the state.

“We are just very, very, very happy about the new direction we see,” said Claudia Moore, a tenant leader who for more than a year had butted heads with Gonzalez-Correa over her failure to upgrade Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens and other slum-like projects.

Plan Fell Apart

Gonzalez-Correa resigned March 31 after her plan to sell Jordan Downs to a private developer fell apart. She had hoped to receive 700 federal rent subsidy certificates that could have been turned over to a private buyer to operate the dilapidated project, but Congress did not make the certificates available and, amid growing protests from tenants and others, her plan unraveled.

Her closed-door decision last fall to pursue the sale idea--which was backed by Mayor Tom Bradley but never revealed to the City Council--prompted HUD last fall to withdraw $5 million in promised modernization funds that Jordan Downs residents had anticipated.

On Wednesday, in a clear rebuke of the sale plan, the City Council voted 10 to 0 to oppose the sale of Jordan Downs, and to urge HUD Secretary Jack Kemp to reinstate the $5 million lost by Gonzalez-Correa.

Carl Covitz, Bradley’s new appointee as chairman of the Housing Authority’s commission, said Thursday that it is “certainly our feeling that this (decision to modernize Jordan Downs) is the best alternative at this time.”

Future Goal

Covitz noted that sometime down the line, there may be new discussion of selling the project to the tenants themselves--a priority of officials in Washington who eventually want to transfer most public projects nationwide into the hands of the people who reside in them.

Gonzalez-Correa’s departure has given residents such as Moore new hope that the Housing Authority will work with tenants on ways to upgrade life in the projects. Gonzalez-Correa had been mired in an adversarial relationship with the tenants for well over a year, and tenants last spring demanded that Bradley seek her resignation.