ANAHEIM : Team Effort Is Banishing Slum Label
Owners of apartments in a run-down Anaheim neighborhood are beginning to see the results of their combined efforts to put the place back on its feet.
The South Romneya Owners Assn., in an unlikely friendship with city code enforcement officials, has worked in recent months to bring living conditions in the crowded, tattered neighborhood up to standard.
“This place has run the gamut of just about every violation of the substandard housing code,” said Gary L. Moore, the city code enforcement officer for the neighborhood.
The area, nestled just south of Romneya Drive, is often called Citron-Hall because of the two main cross streets.
The owners group was formed about a year ago when a new landlord, Jim Connell, came to the area and was concerned about the way the buildings were managed.
An earlier landlords’ group was dwindling in membership and activity, and soon he was named president of the new organization.
“I was amazed at how lackadaisical some of these people are about managing their buildings,” Connell said . “They’d get their buildings up to code and then just sit back for six months and think that everything was fine.”
By chipping in $8 a month each, the owners group has raised funds for an on-site armed guard who is stationed there on weekend nights to ward off gang rumbles and thwart drug traffic. And landlords are in the process of using the $25 annual membership fee to hire two on-site managers to oversee the area and report residents’ troubles.
The area began changing from simply a poor neighborhood to a more violently troubled one when a neighborhood up the street received a complete overhaul a few years ago. Many of the poorer residents could not afford the accompanying higher rents there and simply crowded into the 58 nearby complexes.
Almost all the apartment owners are absentee landlords, and the complexes are small enough that they are not required to have managers. Consequently, most owners had little idea of the deteriorating conditions, and simply left the residents to fend for themselves, Connell said.
Even though the owners group boasts about 20 members, more than half of the approximately 50 landlords don’t want to get involved, Connell explained. That makes cleaning up the area and keeping it safe all the more difficult, he added.
“It’s disgusting because some of these landlords are just not interested. . . . They’re the ones whose buildings are really the problems,” Connell said.
But that’s also where the the partnership with code enforcement comes in handy, according to the city.
Moore said that he has more than a dozen pending criminal cases against landlords who have failed to resolve code violations.
Both Moore and Connell plan to keep working their respective ends of the improvement plan while hoping that offending owners get the message that landlords must be responsible for their properties.
“Some of the owners are realizing they need to do something,” Connell said. “I’m bound and determined that this thing’s going to work.”
