Elderly Koreans Try New Lifestyle

Young Soon Yoon plopped a bundle of silk cushions in the middle of her living room. Alongside boxes, newspaper-wrapped dinnerware and an unplugged rice cooker, the 69-year-old grandmother sat and mused on the next chapter of her life.

“In Korea, this would be impossible,” she said of her new one-bedroom apartment on Bonnie Brae Street, where she plans to fiddle with her industrial-size sewing machine, entertain friends and just relax.

After working for decades--most recently in a Los Angeles garment factory--and rearing five daughters and eight grandchildren, Yoon said she looks forward to “personal time,” a concept not widely recognized in the crowded South Korean city she left in 1976.

She was among the first to move into Sangnok Villa, Los Angeles’ first subsidized senior-citizen housing project intended for Korean-Americans.

Sangnok, which in Korean means evergreen, is not in Koreatown, but in a largely Latino area to the east, near crime-ridden MacArthur Park. Three blocks to the north, barricades close off a neighborhood that has been targeted by police for a crackdown on drug-dealing.

The concept of senior-citizen housing is an unfamiliar one for many Koreans whose tradition dictates that the extended family remain intact. In South Korea, which has no social security system, the elderly most often live with and are cared for by their adult children.

Nonetheless, many were eager to be among the first to live at Sangnok Villa. For each of its 60 apartments, management has received more than a dozen applications.

“The thinking these days is that living separately is more comfortable for everyone,” said Yong Soo Kang, 71, who, after 10 years of living with her son in a condominium apartment in Koreatown, moved to Sangnok last week. “That’s how our lives are in America.”

Neighbor Yoon said: “After living in Los Angeles, it makes a lot of sense. Right here is near my family, my church and my friends’ homes--everywhere I want to go.”

The project was the product of nearly five years of planning, according to the Korean American Christian Evergreen Assn., which developed the concept.

The group received the $3.9-million construction cost from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Retirement Housing Foundation, a nonprofit developer specializing in housing for the elderly.

Because of funding guidelines, the apartments are open to anyone 62 or older, said the foundation’s rental manager Paul Frysak. But, he added, almost all of Sangnok’s 700 applications were from Korean-Americans.

The construction site was chosen by the redevelopment agency. The decision was based on the lower land costs there compared to parts of Koreatown, which to some of the organizers seemed a more logical location.

The complex was completed just last month, but already there have been some problems with vandalism. During construction, more than 150 windows were broken, and this week, burglars broke into three unoccupied apartments.

Residents and the building’s superintendent, Tony Hough, said they are seeking money from the management company to hire a guard and install security bars on ground-level windows and doors.

As residents were moving in, gang “tags” could be seen on the building’s peach-colored walls.

“It makes me so mad that people just have to go and mark it up so bad,” said a 61-year-old woman who stopped to read the graffiti spread across Sangnok’s front stairway.

The woman, who asked that her named not be published, manages a nearby apartment building on Westlake Avenue. She blamed the graffiti on a “certain element,” who, she said, vandalize and litter the area. She added that the elderly residents of Sangnok Villa should be wary when they walk the streets.

“I don’t go out much at night,” she said as she lowered her voice and scanned the street. “And I’m not really too keen about walking this way in the daytime.”

Others said that the Korean residents have been welcomed by many in the neighborhood. “We see that they don’t look like us, but most everyone around here understands that the elderly should be treated with respect,” said Manuel Torres, 41, who emigrated from Mexicali, Mexico, and has called this stretch of Bonnie Brae his neighborhood for more than 20 years.

Torres, who manages a parking lot across the street from the housing complex, said he hopes that his neighborhood, now divided by language and customs, will not become caught up in racial conflict.