Gang Rules Valley’s ‘Worst Block’ : Blight: Officials have a plan to improve life on impoverished Blythe Street. But first they must deal with the Dukes.

City housing officials are in the final stage of reviewing a pioneering plan to combine public money, privately run housing and social services to attack the problems of one of Los Angeles’ most blighted areas, Blythe Street in Panorama City.

Expected to go to the City Council next month, the $8-million plan still lacks a major element: How to control a gang that dominates the street. If that hurdle can be surmounted, officials say, Blythe Street could be a model for the city.

The plan would immediately rehabilitate one-fourth of the apartments on the long block from Van Nuys Boulevard to a police barricade at Willis Avenue, across the street from the General Motors plant. Officials hope this will lead to a revival of the entire strip, home to about 4,000 people.

Financing for the experiment, called “Project Renaissance,” would come from public money.

The Latin American Civic Assn., a private agency that runs Head Start classes, would use it to buy 140 of the street’s 540 apartments, organize tenants and set up a social service center.

A second partner would be a small company called Casa Urbana Consultants Inc., which has already bought two buildings there. It would manage the 140 apartments plus those in its own buildings and 40 in another privately owned building on the street. By imposing strict rules, it would keep out problem tenants and limit the number of people per unit.

Still unresolved is what to do about the gang. The city has demanded more details on that issue from Casa Urbana and the civic association before moving forward.

“This is the worst block in the Valley,” says Paul Calvo, who owns four rundown buildings on Blythe Street. “Not one of the worst--the worst.”

The street has been known for at least 15 years as a place where poor immigrants could find cheap homes. It has steadily deteriorated into what newly arriving Latinos consider the “red zone,” the lowest of the low, property owners say.

According to the 1990 census, 63% of the apartments in the neighborhood are overcrowded, housing more than one person per room. This is more than double the countywide rate. Nearly one in five apartments are occupied by seven or more people.

Building inspectors have cited owners for bad plumbing and heating, broken doors and windows, rats, cockroaches and lack of electricity. But the city lacks the manpower to enforce the law aggressively, officials say, and can only respond to complaints.

“I have four inspectors covering almost all of the San Fernando Valley,” said Wayne Durand, a supervisor in the Department of Building and Safety. “Needless to say, everything doesn’t get the attention it may deserve. We do the best we can.”

Rents are low by Los Angeles standards--$375 a month for some one-bedrooms to as much as $800 for the handful of three-bedroom units. But for many families, even that is too much. Blythe Street’s problems include disease, teen-age pregnancy, hunger and illiteracy.

If Blythe Street can be turned around, there may be hope for similar parts of Los Angeles. The street is not alone in suffering from “cancerous conditions” of blight, said Gary Squier, head of the city’s Housing Preservation and Production Department.

Parts of Hollywood, South Central and East Los Angeles, near-downtown and the Pico-Union area have also seen a “total system shutdown” of government and private services, he said.

The strategy, developed for programs that house the homeless, elderly and mentally ill, assumes that local nonprofit groups can meet the needs of a neighborhood better than city bureaucrats.

The seed for the project was planted in 1990 when a developer proposed using city loans and city-backed bonds to acquire and renovate most of the strip’s apartments. The developer, Dave Vadehra, had done this in 1986 in the Northridge area known as Bryant-Vanalden.

Housing officials wanted more: social services and a gang strategy.

“It’s not enough to build housing,” Squier said. “You have to build neighborhoods. And neighborhoods are bundles of social services.”

In May, 1991, City Councilman Ernani Bernardi hosted a stormy meeting about Blythe Street. He blamed property owners for the street’s decline, and they blamed municipal neglect.

One outcome was that leaders of the Latin American Civic Assn. met Vadehra and representatives of Casa Urbana, his partner in his proposed venture.

The two groups assembled the package, with Vadehra as financial consultant, and submitted it last fall. It seeks part of $20 million in federal money available to Squier’s department.

If all goes as planned, the affected apartment houses by mid-1993 will be clean, well-run quarters for which tenants pay low rent--perhaps only 30% of their incomes.

Ricardo Torrez, 32, a minimum-wage factory worker, gives an example of how life might improve.

Unable to afford the $600 rent for his tiny two-bedroom apartment, Torrez, his wife and their children, ages 3 and 16 months, share it with another couple.

The front door jamb is broken away, allowing insects and cold air to stream in. Rats and insects make the kitchen cabinets unusable. Food is stored in plastic bags tacked to the walls. Water has been running into the bathtub since the family moved in two years ago. The bedroom has no lights or electricity.

Torrez’s wife worked until recently but quit because she was afraid her children were unsafe during the day.

Project Renaissance would put the family into their own spruced-up two-bedroom apartment for $312 a month. Their children would go to a Head Start center.

“They will become a regular American working family,” said Genny Alberts, a veteran low-income-housing manager who heads Casa Urbana. “The wife will go to work. The husband will go to work. And the children will have a proper place to be taken care of, and they will grow up and not be part of a group doing bad things on the street.”

After months of talk, some people are impatient.

“There are promises, promises, promises,” said Isabel Penunuri, an energetic community organizer. “But nothing is done.”

For six months the city has been scrutinizing the Latin American Civic Assn.’s lack of housing experience. Fed up with delays, Calvo said he is ready to sell to the highest bidder.

Alberts says community organizing is going slowly too.

In a group she has been nurturing, tenants have picnicked, painted out graffiti and started an after-school child-care program. Meetings attract up to 50 people, but the faces keep changing, Alberts said.

One reason is that the street is already organized, after a fashion.

The gang, called the Blythe Street Dukes, deals drugs around the clock, except when police officers are present. The gang has been around for at least 10 years. About a third of its 100 or so members live on Blythe.

Authorities say the gang members rob pedestrians, burglarize apartments and vandalize cars. Gunfire can break out when a deal sours or an intruder appears.

Miguel Gasca, 30, said residents “are afraid they’ll be killed” if they demand changes. He is one of few who attend tenants’ meetings.

“I don’t think we can do much if there aren’t more people in the group,” he said.

The gang keeps ordinary people indoors and deters the helping professionals--a big threat to a plan built on social services.

Staffers of the anti-gang New Directions for Youth used to visit Blythe Street. That changed after several incidents including the stoning of its van.

“It’s just not safe for the staff to be there,” said the group’s director, Sally Thompson.

The plan submitted to the city is unspecific on ending the gang’s dominance. It says decent housing and social, educational and health services will help by raising the standard of living. It also says job training will give the gang alternative occupations. Bothered by the vagueness, the city has requested more work on the plan.

“We just have to start chipping away at that structure they have,” said Ralph Arriola, executive director of the civic association. “Certainly the activity they have going on the street now has got to stop, or it’s got to move away.”

Casa Urbana’s Alberts said residents can attack the gang by reporting drug trafficking to landlords committed to evicting them. But she said fighting gangs is mainly a police responsibility.

Robert T. Moncrief, the city housing director, said progress is impossible with the gang so entrenched. The problem is the central topic in every discussion between city officials and the proponents of Project Renaissance, he said, with no concrete answers emerging so far.

“The two basic methods are: You can go in and try to bust their heads and lock them up, or you can try to work with them,” he said.

“The strategy to handle the gang problem has to be done before we commit funds.”

Thompson of New Directions for Youth thinks gang members should become planners.

“We have to let them be a part of the change,” she said. “They’re a large part of the problem. . . . They have to buy into it.”

Property owners take a different view. Many want a fierce, sustained police crackdown.

“We can’t try to win the hearts and minds of these gang members,” one property owner said. “This is their life. They sell drugs, get loaded and destroy things.”

Police Capt. Sidney K. Mills, commander of the department’s Van Nuys Division, does not believe the street’s problems can be solved by adding officers.

“There’s so much narcotics at this point, it’s beyond the ability of local police to resolve the problem,” he said. Some residents want “to have us there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The reality is we simply do not have enough personnel. We can’t provide that kind of protection.

“I don’t think any effort can be effective until the community is involved with us in a partnership.”

On his own, Mills is trying to organize a neighborhood attack on Blythe Street’s woes.

“I’m convinced we can take gang members and try and get them a job” through the Chamber of Commerce, he said. “I envision sports events between gangs and the police. Maybe we’ll play them in basketball.”

Whatever happens, it seems unlikely that the Dukes will be wished away.

Ruben, 19, thought about the situation one day recently as he used the back of a book of word puzzles to list the members whose turn it was to make a rock sale.

“Most of us live in the streets, and we’ve got to have some way to eat, some way to get clothes,” he said. “No matter what they do here, there’s still going to be people selling drugs here.”

Blythe St. Profile

A plan to rescue this blighted Panorama City neighborhood will go to the City Council.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

* Buildings: 41, most built in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some are merely expanded houses. The largest on the street has 40 units; the smallest, four.

* Number of apartments: 540, mostly 1 and 2 bedrooms, with a few 3 bedrooms and a few studios. The rents range from about $375 to about $800.

* Age breakdown: nearly 40% of the residents of the area are under 18 years of age.

* Population: Estimated at 4,000, a 54% increase since 1980; 96% Latino.

* Gang activity: The Blythe Street Dukes openly sell drugs except when police officers are present.

* Crime: Police say that although Blythe Street is undoubtedly one of the highest crime areas of the San Fernando Valley, statistics are misleading because as much as 90% of the crimes go unreported. They are working on getting more cooperation in reporting crime from the street’s residents.

OVERCROWDING

Percentage of rental housing units considered by the U.S. Census definition to be overcrowded, having more than one person per room.

Blythe Street: 63%

Mission Hills, Panorama City, Sepulveda: 20%

L.A. County: 28%

PROJECT RENAISSANCE

Elements of the city plan to save the street:

* Latin American Civic Assn. purchase, with public loans and city-backed bonds, of buildings containing 140 apartments. To City Council in March.

* Management of those and other buildings by private Casa Urbana Consultants, Inc., which already owns or manages three Blythe Street buildings.

* Taxpayer-subsidized rent to make apartments affordable to the poor.

* Strict apartment rules to reduce crowding, drug dealing, noise and non-payment of rent.

* Head Start, English and parenting classes, anti-gang services, immigration counseling, referrals to mental health and medical services.

* An active residents’ committee.

* Stepped-up health and safety inspections.

* Elimination of gang activity and drug sales.