New Life for a Barrio : Redevelopment Improves Buena Clinton’s ‘Hard Times’

The ice cream trucks actually sell ice cream these days and the prostitutes no longer solicit door-to-door. Such small victories are the measurements of progress for Buena Clinton.

Once it was hell in a very small place--just 38 acres on the Garden Grove border with Santa Ana, labeled the worst slum in Orange County. It’s still a small place, but police and social workers, residents and bureaucrats say Buena Clinton isn’t quite the hell it used to be.

“This isn’t a slum. This is just a low-income neighborhood now,” says Sgt. Bruce Prince, commander of a three-officer squad that patrols the neighborhood from a substation on its northern border, Westminster Avenue.

Granted, automobiles still get stolen from the carports. Some apartments still lack windows. There’s still a gang based in Buena Clinton. And drugs are still available.

Many of the residents don’t speak English--perhaps 70% are Hispanic, 30% or so Asian. Most get only minimum-wage jobs when there’s any work at all, standing on Westminster Avenue in the morning and waiting for someone to pick them up for construction work or gardening.

But as bad as things are, the consensus is that it was worse as recently as two years ago.

For years, Buena Clinton had the highest crime rate in Garden Grove. Residents called it “Barrio Hard Times” and told of ice cream trucks lining up on the streets, one behind the other, and selling drugs along with the Popsicles.

Just up the street was a liquor store that was off limits after dark to anyone except the junkies and the senseless, according to one tenant. A bar, since torn down, was a central market for drug sales. The city devoted 10 times the resources to Buena Clinton that it did to other neighborhoods its size, and spent much of it on police. Yet the crime rate was three or four times as great as in other areas.

“It was tough” in the neighborhood, said Joe Singh, assistant director of the Orange County Community Housing Corp., who lived there one summer more than a decade ago. “I remember seeing vans come in, packed with prostitutes, and they would honestly knock door-to-door and look for clients.”

Even two years ago, not long after Anne Rivera signed on as a social worker for La Amistad de Jose on Clinton Street, she would drive around the neighborhood, from Westminster Avenue on the north, south past Keel, Sunswept and Morningside Avenues, from Buena Street on the east to Clinton on the west.

“People who knew me as the social worker at the clinic would come out and walk right up to my car,” she remembered. “(They would) say, ‘What do you want, lady?’ ” offering to sell her any drug she chose. But recently “that hasn’t happened.”

“I think it’s a lot cleaner, nicer place to live than it used to be in respect to crime on the streets. I do feel the crime is still here, but it’s not out in the open.”

Why the change?

Everyone credits the on-site police presence, plus a crackdown by the city on building violations. But what many feel was the most important step in the improvement was a reduction in the overcrowding. Buildings were torn down; others were improved. And tens of millions of dollars are being spent on a small place.

Once there were 5,000 to 6,000 people in 101 buildings, all of them two-story structures seemingly produced by the same cookie-cutter. Most apartments had two bedrooms. The average apartment occupancy was seven residents; sometimes the number hit 15. And in some cases landlords charged each resident a monthly rent, rather than levying a flat rate for the apartment.

Rats scurried through buildings. Stairways crumbled. Roofs leaked and electrical wiring was hazardous. Landlords collected rents and profits, blaming tenants for many of the problems. Tenants, many of them illegal immigrants who were afraid that if they complained about conditions the landlords would turn them in to immigration officials, paid up or got out.

Although overcrowding wasn’t always a problem, housing experts say that from the time the first units started going up in 1961, as the county’s orange groves were bulldozed in favor of houses, Buena Clinton looked like a disaster in the making, a neighborhood born to lose.

A city report issued four years ago said the buildings were poorly designed and badly built. Allen P. Baldwin, executive director of the private, nonprofit Orange County Community Housing Corp., said the problems of Buena Clinton, in varying degrees, have occurred in other places where so many housing units have been built one atop another.

“If (the landlord next door) doesn’t keep up his building, my building goes down,” Baldwin said. And potential occupants “won’t rent my building because of the way his building looks.” As a sweetener, the landlord with the vacancy cuts the rent. But to get enough money out of the building to pay the mortgage and make a profit, he makes up for the cheaper rent by taking in more tenants, letting two or three families rent an apartment built for one family.

Ten, 12 or 15 people in apartments that were meant for three or four drove the buildings downhill in a hurry. Bathrooms mildewed because the showers were used so often; doors that were constantly opened and shut tore off their hinges; linoleum trod daily by a dozen pairs of feet wore through in no time.

There were more serious health hazards because of overcrowding, as well. Sewer lines buckled under the strain, occasionally causing raw sewage to back up onto the streets. Vermin showed up in apartments, and the large number of people made it more likely that someone’s baby would be sick when the exterminator came to spray, causing him to skip the apartment with the sick baby and give the insects a renewed lease on life for another week.

City officials said that nearly from the start, most of the buildings were owned by people who lived elsewhere and looked on their properties as investments, rarely keeping them in good condition.

Tom Bell, a partner in a company that two years ago bought 31 buildings in Buena Clinton and has started rehabilitating them, says: “This area here has had people come in, basically slum operators, to buy buildings and do no work, or minimal work, and raise rents and overcrowd units and sell the units and make money.”

The improvements started in 1984, when the city of Garden Grove gave up on its attempts to get Santa Ana to annex Buena Clinton and managed to get $12.5 million in federal funds to improve the neighborhood.

Twelve buildings on Westminster Avenue, each with eight apartments, were torn down and replaced with an industrial park. The Orange County Community Housing Corp. bought a building for $300,000 and spent another $80,000 fixing it up.

The corporation undertook the project “to hopefully set an example for other landlords in the neighborhood that good, caring management solves an awful lot of the problems of Buena Clinton,” said Baldwin, the corporation’s executive director.

Baldwin and Greg Devereaux, Garden Grove’s housing and neighborhood development director, said the improvements to the corporation-owned building helped the city to persuade another developer that it could buy buildings and fix them up, cut the occupancy to the legal limit, and still make money.

In one project, known as Grove Park, a private partnership bought 13 buildings and finished rehabilitating them two weeks ago. Bell, a partner in the firm, said that unimproved apartments in Buena Clinton generally rent for about $550 for one bedroom and $650 for two bedrooms.

The rents in the improved buildings are about $671 for one bedroom and $771 for two, Bell said. Because the project was a Section 8 rehabilitation sponsored by the federal government, tenants pay 30% of their income for rent while the government pays the rest.

Another project, known as Tudor Grove, is rehabilitating another 18 buildings, using federal funds, money from the first mortgage revenue bond issued by the city’s housing authority and a loan from the city redevelopment agency.

The removal of the buildings for the industrial park and the insistence that in exchange for federal funds the owners of the Grove Park and Tudor Grove projects keep apartment occupancy rates down mean that Buena Clinton’s population should drop to fewer than 4,000 when the project is done, probably by July, 1991, Devereaux said.

Baldwin, Rivera and others expressed concern that people are being forced to move, even if it is to better housing and even though the city is helping them find other places in which to live. Bad as it is, Buena Clinton is still home to some of those who are forced out, housing experts said.

Devereaux said that other federal funds are available to help other landlords fix up their buildings. By the time all the rehabilitation is done, more than half the remaining 700 units in Buena Clinton will have been rehabilitated at a cost of $8,000 to $10,000 per unit.

The spruced-up apartments, with their carpeting, new windows, improved electrical wiring and other improvements, mean the whole neighborhood “is much better now,” said Isaac Bernow, a gravedigger who lives in a neat, one-bedroom apartment on Sunswept Street. Five or six years ago, there were “big problems” in the neighborhood, he added, especially from the drug sellers. “Now it’s quiet, no problems.”

There are problems for Jose Sanchez, though.

A 20-year-old nicknamed Demon, Sanchez was stopped one recent night by Sgt. Prince and Officers Jaime Joyce and Mark Elizondo as he strolled down Keel Street.

Sanchez and the three policemen knew each other well. In fact, his first question to them was whether they could find out, before his next court appearance on drug charges, if there were any warrants waiting for him.

He told them he was still using cocaine and heroin and that he’d like to quit, but a detoxification program would be too expensive and stopping cold turkey would be too difficult.

He said he now had to buy drugs in Santa Ana because “there’s nothing here any more.”

As early as 1976, police were conducting periodic sweeps of Buena Clinton, cracking down night after night on crimes big and small. But as soon as they would pull out, the problems would start again.

As a result, the city decided to set up a substation six years ago in Buena Clinton and coordinate police activity with frequent building inspections, according to Sgt. Prince.

First, Prince said, the police tried to reduce the number of violent crimes. Then they tried to trim the drug-dealing. And they also tried to improve the neighborhood’s image.

The city also put a six-officer squad on foot patrol. The squad has been cut back to three but still patrols on foot as well as in cars.

In both 1983 and ‘84, the number of crimes such as murders, robberies, rapes and burglaries in Buena Clinton totaled more than 300, Prince said, and the area ranked worst of any police district in the city. In 1988 the number had dropped to 189 and the neighborhood had dropped to eighth worst of the city’s 90 police districts.

Police say it took them a long time to earn trust in the neighborhood and to get people to call them when they saw a car being broken into or a drug sale going on. They’ve since gotten to be well enough known in the neighborhood to be magnets for children, whose invariable greeting is, “Any stickers?” The objects of the children’s affections are stickers of “McGruff,” the cartoon bloodhound in the trench coat that has become a symbol of Neighborhood Watch programs.

Police said that the use of informants helped them arrest and convict several major drug dealers who lived in Buena Clinton, and that in the last few months a main problem has been noise, especially from young men who gather in groups of three, four or half a dozen in carports next to the buildings, drinking beer, playing radios and urinating next to parked cars rather than climbing up to their apartments. The stench of dried urine in many of the carports is overpowering.

The city has no immediate plans to end the police patrols, Prince said, even though the crime rate has gone down. He said officials are considering putting gates at the only two entrances to the neighborhood, one at Buena and Westminster and the other at Clinton and Westminster, and having the landlords hire a private security firm to man the gates and patrol the streets inside.

For years it was understood that “if you wanted some dope you could go down to Buena Clinton and buy dope,” he said. Well . . . you can’t come down to Buena Clinton any more and buy dope. And the violence isn’t there, as far as you’re not going to walk down the street and get shot or get robbed.”

County health officials nearly a decade ago said that Buena Clinton was the worst slum in Orange County. But the people who know slums say that’s not so any more. Baldwin says he thinks Minnie Street in Santa Ana or the Chevy Chase neighborhood in Anaheim are probably worse.

“I like to present Buena Clinton in as positive a light as I can, because I don’t think it’s always been done,” said Anne Rivera, social worker for La Amistad de Jose. The phrase means The Friendship of Joseph, and La Amistad is operated by the Roman Catholic nuns who run St. Joseph Hospital in Orange.

Yet, Rivera adds, “I cannot ignore that there are still some very negative things here. I just hate to emphasize them.” She says drugs “are present, they’re a definite threat.” She worries that Hard Times, just a loose collection of youngsters a few years ago, is becoming more of a traditional gang. She is concerned by the family violence, especially husbands beating wives, that goes on.

But Rivera believes that “the majority of the people in this neighborhood are just working-class folk.”

She points to the children swarming up the stairs of La Amistad after school to reach a second-floor room that houses computers; teen-age volunteers from Buena Clinton teach the younger residents of the slum how to use the machines. She mentions the English classes packed with Hispanics trying to learn the new language. She cites a new confidence caused by the amnesty program that has made residents less afraid they will be deported to Mexico or Central America.

Tom Bell, the developer who with partners has bought 31 apartment buildings, insists he’s not like some of the other landlords who owned property in Buena Clinton before him, quick-buck artists who did nothing for their buildings, just collected rents, sold the structures at a profit and left.

Bell says the partnership does get tax advantages from owning the buildings in Buena Clinton, receiving tax credits for rehabilitating low-income housing. He says his company owns about 1,000 apartment units in Southern California, many of them in Los Angeles, and knows what it is doing in low-income housing.

“We believe this is an area that is in transition,” Bell says. “We believe the buildings are sound structurally, and we believe some day this is an area where a profit could be made. But it’s a long-term investment.”