A Long Wait Is Over for City Project : Pacoima: After 36 years, San Fernando Gardens is getting an $830,000 community center. Officials attend the groundbreaking.

San Fernando Gardens in Pacoima is the only Los Angeles housing project built without a gym or social hall. Twenty-year resident Hilda Serrano remembers playing in the dusty streets as a child because there was nowhere else to go.

On Thursday, Serrano and other tenants watched city and federal officials symbolically correct that 36-year-old lack at a groundbreaking ceremony for a comprehensive community center, the first of its kind at a city housing project.

The $830,000 center will provide day care, classes in English as a Second Language and basic education, job training and placement, youth activities, meeting space and other services for more than 2,000 low-income residents--about 90% of whom are Latino.

When the 33-acre San Fernando Gardens complex was built in 1955, federal budget cuts prevented construction of a building for recreation and social activities. And over the past three years, residents and officials trying to get a proposed community center off the ground have also been frustrated by a lack of funding.

“The residents here have had a lot of disappointments over the years,” said Deputy Director Alonso Almeida of the Community Development Department, which provided $100,000 in funding and will operate the center. “They are used to hearing promises.”

The bulk of the funding--$660,000--comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, a longtime proponent of the center proposal, contributed $76,000 from his office’s discretionary funds.

“This partnership is a first,” HUD Regional Manager Charles Ming said as ground was broken at the grass and dirt construction site near the housing project’s entrance at Lehigh Avenue and Van Nuys Boulevard. “I know the services are very badly needed.”

The 27-year-old Serrano, who cradled her baby daughter at the back of the crowd as she listened to the speeches, sees the center as a refuge for her three children from gangs and drug dealers who prowl among the blue, flat-roofed buildings.

The day-care program “will be a great help for those of us who want to go out and work but are scared of losing half our paycheck to a baby-sitter,” Serrano said.

The educational and vocational programs are sorely needed by a population that includes many immigrant adults who do not speak English and have little education, Almeida said.

Four of the other 21 housing projects run by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority offer social service programs, but they are housed in makeshift facilities, such as the cramped one-bedroom apartment at San Fernando Gardens where counselors now work, Almeida said. That office will be abandoned early next year when construction of the 5,000-square-foot, one-story center is complete, officials said.

The groundbreaking came as workers were nearing completion of a security fence around the complex to cut down on crime and give residents a greater sense of control over their environment. Both initiatives are part of a larger strategy to improve life at low-income housing complexes in the city by increasing social programs, security and the role of tenants in management, housing officials said.

“This symbolizes what public housing is all about,” Housing Authority Director Joseph Shuldiner said. “It’s not just a place for people to live. It’s always been about creating an environment.”

But once the center is built, it will still be up to residents to take charge of their community and their lives, tenant leader Rosa Roman said.

“We hope there will be a change,” she said in Spanish. “There are a few people in the project who are active. But there are a lot of people who are negative, and that has to change.”