Looking to Buy : Housing: Lincoln Place residents hope to buy the complex from the owner, who they fear will demolish their rent-controlled apartments to build costly townhouses.

Hazel Winters remembers when Lincoln Place was nothing but a bean field. Her mother would drive out from the family’s shack on the canals to a farm stand on Lincoln Boulevard--right where Builders Emporium is today--and fill their jalopy with vegetables and a cantaloupe or two.

So she felt comfortable moving to the complex built on that bean field right after World War II.

These days Winters, 78, sits on that same earth in her lawn chair and chats with other old women who, like her, have lived at Lincoln Place for decades. “We blab about the old days. Better than watching the idiot tube,” she says. She tends the roses around her building as if they’re family. The other day, she even painted the ceiling above her stove, though she darn near broke her hip.

Hazel Winters likes living in Lincoln Place.

So it’s no wonder that she, like many of the 1,600 tenants there, is hopping mad about the current owner’s plan to knock her home down for a new apartment and condominium complex. “They need their heads cracked, trying to shove everybody out,” she says. “They better stop, or I’ll put a ball bat to them.”

Lincoln Place, a massive community of 52 apartment buildings with 795 apartments, 795 garages, 40 laundry buildings, 391 trees and lush lawns, has for years been home to large numbers of low-income people, single parents, handicapped residents, and elderly, like Hazel. It is the biggest hunk of affordable housing left on the Westside.

But the 40-acre complex is also the biggest and most valuable piece of developable land left in Venice.

In 1986, an Oakland-based real-estate firm named Transaction Companies Ltd. snapped up the property for what local realtors consider the remarkably good sum of $28.7 million, according to city records.

Transaction, which owns property all across the western United States, specializes in renovating and demolishing older buildings, although President Jim Coxeter said he prefers that what his firm does be referred to as “enhancing” property. A year after purchasing Lincoln Place, Transaction served 10 residents with eviction notices. Transaction officials said the evictions were to rehabilitate the units but tenants feared they were the first step in plans to demolish the complex.

In retrospect, thinks Transaction project manager Jim Merlino, the evictions were the worst thing the company could have done.

Outrage and fear instantly helped to mobilize a tenants’ organization at the complex. They successfully fought the evictions and persuaded City Hall to change the law that made them possible. The group, the Lincoln Place Tenants’ Assn., is now trying to figure out how to buy the complex with a combination of bonds and government subsidies. At one meeting tenants suggested they could pay $40 million and Coxeter replied it would take at least $80 million. Tenants figure they can pay for the upkeep of the apartment buildings with the nearly $500,000 that is paid in rent each month.

The organization is holding a rally in support of its plan at 1 p.m. today at the Penmar Park Senior Room. “Let’s Buy It!” has become their new slogan.

At the group’s head is Sheila Bernard, a single mother of three who says that her experience working at a food co-op has persuaded her that “people can run their own lives.” But many observers--even those who would love to see the tenants succeed--feel it is an impossible dream. “I’d love it if the tenants could come up with the cash, but I have to tell you in my gut that is an incredibly valuable piece of land, and land economics drives the machinery around here,” said Barbara Zeidman, assistant manager of the city Housing, Preservation and Production Department.

Tenants ask why an individual’s profit should override their welfare. “It’s wrong that somebody can make millions for the upheaval of hundreds of people,” Bernard argued.

City officials sympathize, but say there is nothing they can do. “There’s no way the city can force the owner” to sell, Zeidman said. What the city can do, Zeidman said, is to strike a tough deal during negotiations for Coxeter’s plans.

The housing department is studying a program that might require landlords to replace affordable housing that they demolish, Zeidman said. West Hollywood and Santa Monica have such requirements. But it may be years, if ever, before the program gets under way in Los Angeles. “We move incrementally,” Zeidman sighed.

The fight over Lincoln Place is symbolic of what is happening all across Venice, where escalating land values and gentrification are making mincemeat of the city’s efforts to preserve affordable housing.

“Venice is the most diverse beach community around. If we keep losing low-income housing like Lincoln Place it will become another Newport Beach,” warns Steve Cancian, an organizer with the Coalition for Economic Survival.

The median value of a home in Venice tripled between 1980 and 1990, from $120,000 to $361,000. At the same time, the median rent grew from $286 to $762 a month. According to those figures, rent in Venice was, in 1980, 117% of the median rent in Los Angeles County and 134% in 1990, said UCLA urban analyst Ned Levine. As rents and home prices increased, the number of elderly and children living in Venice fell sharply.

The trend is exacerbated because rents can increase to market rates after an apartment becomes vacant. Los Angeles rent control laws limit annual increases in occupied units.

At Lincoln Place, the manager estimates that 150 to 180 units become vacant every year. Coxeter estimated that half of the units are rented at market rate. Tenants dispute that figure, saying that Coxeter is boosting the number to make the loss of affordable housing appear less devastating.

Coxeter promises that 20% of the new construction will be low-rent units. He also says that some of the condominiums will be “affordable” although he did not explain what that means. His offer is more generous than many recent development deals agreed to by the city--but tenants say that is not enough. A recent survey by the tenants found that 57% of the residents at Lincoln Place are low-income households. Coxeter and tenant organizers are now engaged in a campaign to win the support of tenants.

The company’s project manager, Merlino, is a friendly young man who worked on presidential campaigns. Every month he sends out a newsletter to Lincoln Place tenants.

Days after tenant organizers posted yellow signs in laundry rooms for their rally Sunday, Merlino put up yellow signs for a picnic for residents on Saturday. Coxeter has held a series of meetings with tenants to discuss his plans. He hands out pictures of the proposed townhouses--two-story stucco buildings with balconies and plenty of lush foliage.

But all the company’s efforts appear to have done little to assuage the suspicions of longtime tenants. Residents complain of growing crime. They say their landlord is deliberately allowing buildings to deteriorate. “The first thing they did was to try and evict us. A lot of people believe they’re now trying to make us so uncomfortable that people will leave,” said Linda Young, who has lived in the apartments since 1976. Young said she can’t afford to leave her $430-a-month apartment.

“People are just too greedy,” said Hazel Winters one recent afternoon as she plucked the dead blossoms off her rose bushes. “The people that live here, that were born and raised here, it isn’t fair to push them out. Where are all of us going? Nobody cares. But what will be, will be. If God thinks we have to go, we’ll go.”