For Once the System Worked

“It’s like graffiti,” said Sister Diane Donoghue, casting a disgusted look at the old tires, wine bottles and beer cans in the South Los Angeles lot. “You just can’t let it sit there.”

So, on Saturday, Sept. 28, Sister Diane and residents of the working-class neighborhood southeast of downtown will clean up the big lot at 28th Street and Maple Avenue and remove the graffiti from the walls of an adjacent home. Extra help will come from members of the California Conservation Corps.

She brought me there Monday to tell me good news, a success story unusual for this era of unrelenting bad news about failures in government and business.

Next August, construction workers will arrive and start building a 41-unit apartment complex, with three- and four-bedroom units for poor neighborhood families. Most of them are Latino garment industry workers, earning between $12,000 and $16,000 a year. Many are crowded into single-room slum housing costing $450 a month. The neighbors have vowed to keep the lot clean until construction begins.

It was complicated putting together the financial package to fund the construction, but state and local government, business and people from the neighborhood got together and did it.

Here, said Sister Diane, is something that is actually working.

That’s not the way it seemed when she and residents of the neighborhood first got involved four years ago.

You might call Sister Diane the Street Nun. For this brisk, cheery woman, clad in the plain skirt, blouse and sweater of the Sisters of Social Service, does her work in the streets of South L.A.

Driving from place to place in an aging brown sedan, she organizes the poor to press government and business for a share of L.A.’s wealth. Sister Diane, for example, was one of the clergy and residents who formed the South Central Organizing Committee a decade ago and helped it become an effective fighter for better schools, police protection and other services.

The old neighborhood around 28th and Maple was part of the “Central City Enterprise Zone.” Businesses in enterprise zones are given tax breaks, low-interest loans and other aid if they build plants in poor neighborhoods, all with the goal of creating jobs.

The idea is admirable but it ran into trouble when a veteran apparel maker, Ben Kluger, needed more space for his garment business.

He bought the property at 28th and Maple, leveled six houses and a construction yard and got ready to build a new factory. With the backing of the powerful councilman of the district, the late Gilbert Lindsay, city officials quickly arranged enterprise zone assistance.

The well-intentioned scheme collided with another priority, the preservation of working-class residential neighborhoods and their stock of low-cost housing. Residents feared their houses would be replaced by garment factories.

They lobbied City Hall so persistently that Lindsay caved in and the factory plan was killed.

That’s how this story might have ended, with a victory for the homeowners. But they decided winning wasn’t enough. They wanted to rebuild homes.

That’s not easy to do, if you’re a minimum wage garment worker. But deep in the black hole of government are a number of financial aid programs designed specifically to help build housing in poor neighborhoods.

The trick is to figure out how to get them. Applying for government housing aid makes filling out your income tax seem easy.

First, you need an organization. The neighborhood residents started a nonprofit corporation to build housing. They called it Esperanza--Spanish for hope.

Sister Diane went to school, back to Baltimore, to a class designed to teach nonprofit organizations how to cut through the maze of forms and procedures to get the money.

It takes months for the applications to be approved. But Esperanza got a break. Officials of a major land development company, Catellus Corp., which owns Union Station, visited Mayor Tom Bradley at City Hall.

No doubt hoping to smooth the path for big plans ahead, the officials asked the mayor how they could help some needy Angelenos. We are, they said, good corporate citizens.

Fine, said Bradley. Spend some money in South L.A.

Catellus loaned Esperanza $950,000 at no interest to buy the lot from Ben Kluger and begin construction until the government money came through. Sister Diane and the rest of the Esperanza board lined up financing from private sources to supplement the expected government funds.

Even Kluger is happy. He bought a lot nearby and put up his new plant.

As Sister Diane said, sometimes the system works.