A Year Later, Home Buyers Settle In, Feel They Belong

One day last year, when my life seemed difficult and I had just come home from work, I found a bowl of gardenias on the doorstep, placed there by one of my neighbors.

I inhaled the intensely sweet scent and felt very much at home on Eldora Road in Pasadena.

When my wife, Milbre Burch, and I first moved into this house, we worried about crime. We worried about paying too much to buy the one-story, smoky-blue stucco three-bedroom. And we worried about settling in a gentrifying neighborhood where we knew no one.

Buying this house was the first step toward becoming members of a neighborhood and a community, and committing ourselves to living in Southern California.

Today, as relative newcomers from the East Coast, we’ve grown to enjoy our Northwest Pasadena neighborhood, a pleasant, microcosmic mix of suburb and city.

Since we bought our house, two others have sold on the street of 39 residences. A third is now for sale.

So, as Milbre pointed out the other night, “we’re no longer the newcomers.”

A year has passed since we first moved in. And now we look back on 12 months of adjustment, apprehension and joy.

To our relief, we were not victims of crime. Trouble did descend on surrounding streets, but apparently not on ours.

At night, I still wake to the thwap-thwap-thwap of police helicopters or the barking of neighborhood dogs that function as overly sensitive burglar alarms. But Pasadena Police Sgt. Don Forster told me, “As far as a crime problem on Eldora Road, there isn’t one.”

Nearby, though, he acknowledged, illegal drugs flourish. And spin-off crimes such as burglary and assaults ripple throughout the city.

As he said this, I was reminded of two drive-by shootings: one, soon after we moved in, to the south, and another, several months later, to the north.

For me, the crime spin-off shows up in the form of graffiti tagging on stores and even houses. And one day, less than two blocks from home, I was shocked when I turned a corner only to have my car blocked by three young men who had parked at an angle so that they could urinate without interruption.

A young professional who lives northwest of Eldora Road told me that he is concerned about how city leaders will oversee the delicate issues of gentrification in the city’s Northwest, a rich mixture of ethnicity and economics. “That’s going to be a real conundrum,” he said. “And it’s going to change local politics because there’s a whole new breed of us yuppies moving in.”

He is irritated by what he sees as a lack of city interest in coping with the problems. “The neighborhood is slowly getting better,” he said, “but there’s a crack house five doors away.”

To the southwest, 10 blocks away on Summit Avenue, Pasadena police and the Los Angeles County district attorney officially declared an apartment house a drug nuisance. That made the landlord more accountable, police said, and has resulted in improvements.

Improvements or not, Milbre and I don’t walk there. We stick closer to home or go in other directions.

Nor does my wife like to go to the place I call the “jailhouse mini-mart” because of its barred windows. She’s intimidated by what she refers to as “the Free-Will Drinking University” in the parking lot.

Nonetheless, last week she said: “I’m starting to feel more comfortable taking walks alone during the day. But I’m still not as comfortable walking at night as when we lived in our old neighborhood.”

Crime has affected us indirectly.

The tall, pencil-thin man with a big grin is dead. In his late 70s, he lived in a retirement home a short walk away.

I knew him only as Bill. We always said hello. Late last year, he was mugged. After a few weeks in the hospital, he died.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see him, cowboy hat bobbing on his head as he made his way down the street, going door to door looking for grass to mow, leaves to rake.

“He wasn’t much of a gardener. But I sure liked him,” said a neighbor who used to hire him. “Nobody deserves to die the way he did.”

Last week, on her first visit to our house, my mother and I took a walk. “I don’t see what you mean by gentrification,” she said. “This is a nice street.”

Around the corner, an elegant two-story stucco house recently sold for $400,000. And I’m always amazed at the army of weekend renovators, resodding lawns, installing irrigation systems, painting, and, in some cases, nearly rebuilding.

Then, as we walked to other streets, the picture shifted. She pointed to porches where tattered chairs sat, stuffing spilling out. We passed a lawn of not much more than dirt. We saw a dilapidated duplex that has been empty and undergoing repairs for the last year.

We’ve learned that such contrasts have contributed to the neighborhood’s reputation as an affordable haven for first-time home buyers. Although we worried that we paid too much, $225,000, we still see real estate agents cruising the street to take pictures of our house for comparative purposes. Prices continue to climb, though more slowly than during the real estate fever of 1988.

And I joined one couple on the street as they fantasized about becoming equity refugees. One day, as they complained about smog and crime, I looked through their real estate brochures from the Carolinas. They could exchange the Eldora Road residence, they said, for a plantation house on four acres. An intriguing idea, they said again recently.

“This neighborhood is rich with wonderful people. You’re going to love it,” a new friend, an artist who lives 12 blocks away, told us when we made a Christmastime visit to her bungalow. She spoke about two friends, a movie set designer and a scriptwriter, who live nearby.

One of the people we met the first night we visited our street, a teacher, has become a good friend. Through her, we have met others and shared garden tools and handymen.

When we first moved, we had a number of unsettling encounters with homeless and displaced people looking for work or help.

Lately, a Salvadoran handyman has touched my life. He’s an extraordinary day laborer, referred to me by a neighbor. Our friend first met him one day last year on a Pasadena street corner where many others like him seek work.

With his wife and three children still in El Salvador, he lives by himself in a small apartment hardly a five-minute walk from our house.

Over tuna sandwiches one noonday last month, we talked in Spanish about how he came to Pasadena nine years ago after crossing the border, alone and at night.

He speaks very little English, although he did take English and American history as part of his immigration amnesty classes. I asked what he knew about the United States. There were 13 original colonies, he said. Then he spoke of George Washington and the American Revolution. And then he made the sad leap to the bitter war in his own homeland.

When moments like this happen in our now not-so-new home, I am happy and do not want to live anywhere else in the world.