Battling Squatters Takes Time, Energy

It is an hour before dark and the action at the corner of South LaSalle Avenue and 27th Street, just west of the USC campus, is just heating up.

Several shabbily dressed men and two thin-legged women are standing in front of a boarded-up, two-story fourplex, using hand signals to direct a steady stream of foot traffic.

“What ya need?” one of the women asks a man who walks up just as Kerman Maddox, president of the LaSalle/Adams Block Club passes by with a visitor. The customer’s answer is lost in the wind, but the man rushes inside the derelict building with the woman trotting behind.

During the next hour, a reporter watches as more than a dozen people either drive or walk up to the corner and enter the fourplex and leave minutes later.

“And this is a quiet day,” Maddox said wearily.

He then recounted the days when drug trafficking is so heavy that it is difficult to pass through the clusters of people blocking the sidewalk, or worse, days when drug deals go bad and gunfire erupts.

For a year, Maddox and other members of his group have been battling to rid their normally quiet four blocks of neatly kept wood-frame houses of what they refer to as “the 24-hour drug supermarket,” a vacant building that has been taken over by squatters who deal crack cocaine inside.

The block club’s battle illustrates how much energy--and patience--it takes for even a well-organized group of homeowners to rid their area of a problem property, even when they have the support of police and government agencies.

Many property owners caught in the middle of the city’s crack cocaine plague complain about the high cost of evicting squatters and repairing the damage they have caused.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau, at the request of the block club, has officially identified the boarded-up fourplex in the 2600 block of South LaSalle as a crack house in need of special attention or “abatement.”

The building has been the subject of numerous police raids, narcotics arrests and scores of neighborhood complaints, said Officer Robie McIntosh of the South Bureau Abatement Unit. The special four-man team is assigned solely to pressure landlords into cleaning up their properties and evicting drug-dealing tenants.

Scores of people who live near the LaSalle property have signed declarations that police hope to use in a court case to force the owner to rid the building of drug dealers or face stiff fines.

According to Maddox, the building is a blight on the neighborhood. Gang graffiti have been spray-painted on sidewalks and nearby buildings, and a rash of car thefts and burglaries have occurred. After someone fire-bombed the building in September, some--but not all--of the drug trade moved across the street, he said.

The owner of the fourplex, Norma Jones Harvey of Los Angeles, said the fire was the last in a long series of setbacks that have kept her from rehabilitating the property she inherited when her mother died last year. The building had been vacant and trouble free for years, Harvey said, until her mother in 1987 rented to a man whose wife and daughter were addicted to crack.

Harvey, who said she was out of work most of last year and now survives on a clerical worker’s salary, said that as a result of complaints from Maddox and his neighbors, and at the suggestion of the police, she evicted all the tenants, boarded up the building and hired an on-site caretaker. If drugs are dealt from the building now, she said, she knows nothing of it and it is not her responsibility.

“I’ve been within the law,” Harvey said tearfully. “If someone is in there, they have no business being there. I can’t go over there and make them leave, and the caretaker doesn’t have a gun.”

Harvey said she cannot go to check on her property during the week because she works and would not be caught there at night.

“The people who live on the block who knew my mother have begged me not to come there after dark,” she said. “They said I might get my head blown off.”