Graduation Day : Public Housing Tenants Complete a Year of Classes in Learning How to Take Charge

“We want to be able to run our own apartments, to show the city we can do it,” Andres Castellon, a tenant at the Estrada Courts public housing project, said as he tried on a rented cap and gown.

The outfit was for graduation ceremonies this weekend at Estrada, where tenants have pioneered a small but growing movement to run and eventually own their housing complexes.

More than 60 tenants from two of Los Angeles’ 21 Housing Authority complexes--Estrada Courts, which is predominantly Latino and located in East Los Angeles, and Nickerson Gardens, largely black and in Watts--have just completed yearlong, federally funded leadership training programs to learn how to take charge.

Sounding like leaders of Soviet Union republics seeking independence from their central government, the graduating tenants talk of empowerment and taking control.

“The Housing Authority has been telling us for years when to go to bed and when to get up,” said Nora King, the Nickerson Gardens tenants leader. “We want some kind of control over our own lives.” Her group will graduate in ceremonies next Friday.

The grants were made by the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department and are part of a trend toward tenant-powered reforms in public housing.

During the past year, both groups formed nonprofit corporations, set up a block captain system, and were taught how to organize and negotiate.

Tenants in public housing pay about 30% of their income as rent, and are often among Los Angeles’ poorest residents. According to housing officials, the average rent at the 413-unit Estrada Courts and Extension is $262, with $187 the average at the 1,061-unit Nickerson Gardens.

Over the years, tenants at both places have faced problems that include high unemployment, gang violence, drugs and crime, as well as lack of child care and job training. Tenants said that before they applied for these grants, they had already mobilized over poor living conditions.

Castellon, a 43-year-old building repairman, said one of the first things learned from trainer Bertha Gilkey was to avoid the word “project.” Gilkey is a professional consultant who got her start organizing the public housing complex where she lives in St. Louis.

“ ‘Project’ to me now means something real low,” Castellon said. “She taught us the word ‘project’ meant something that does not belong to us. The better word is ‘development.’ ”

Each group established goals. “We want to have our own homes,” said Alicia Rodriguez, a former teacher’s aide who is president of United Residents of Estrada Courts. “And we will have a child-care center. We already have a grant for a community center here, and we will try to put the day care there, and a clinic for babies and for senior citizens.”

At Nickerson Gardens, King said, ownership is an eventual goal, but for the immediate future her group wants to seek out businesses they can start and operate themselves.

King pointed out a weed-strewn lot where the tenant trainees envision a laundry facility and a market.

The group has set up a system to funnel tenant complaints to the housing managers, King said.

The tenant trainees want to go beyond that, King said. “We’re planning a big voter registration drive. We want to hold people accountable, not just HUD and the Housing Authority, but the city.”

King, who lives on general relief payments and has raised four sons, all now professionals, agreed that some outsiders might think low-income residents could not manage housing.

Not so, she said with a smile. “We have a mind.”

The training grants, which range up to $100,000, were also made to three other housing complexes, and those tenants are in the initial stages of organization, housing officials said. These are Jordan Downs in Watts, Normont Terrace in the harbor area, and Pico-Aliso in East Los Angeles.

The graduate groups from Estrada and Nickerson now move on to training in actual management of the housing developments, according to officials. Neither the price of the units, if they are sold, nor restrictions over resale, have been established.