Start of Cleanup Along Troubled Street Celebrated : Panorama City: The community kicks off an urban renewal project in one of the Valley’s most crime-ridden areas.

Tenants, police, businessmen and community activists crowded into the courtyard of a shabby Panorama City apartment complex Saturday to celebrate the beginning of an urban renewal campaign on one of the San Fernando Valley’s most notorious, crime-ridden streets.

The project involves renovating 48 units in two buildings in the 14500 block of Blythe Street between Van Nuys Boulevard and Willis Avenue, said Genny Alberts, whose for-profit firm, Casa Urbana Consultants Inc., owns the apartments. The work could be completed by the fall.

The project celebrated Saturday is independent of Project Renaissance, an ambitious program that was to have rehabilitated most of the 39 apartment buildings in the two-block area, along with providing social services to its residents.

But even before it began, Project Renaissance, proposed by the nonprofit Latin American Civic Assn., was scaled back when it failed to gain the support of city housing officials.

Casa Urbana and the Latin American Civic Assn., working on that scaled-down plan, may start rehabilitating other buildings on Blythe Street as soon as this summer.

“Even though we can’t do this all at once, we’re here to show we can do it and it can work,” Alberts said Saturday. “We’re going to change Blythe Street one building at a time.”

City officials had expressed a far different view just a few months ago. They said the only way to permanently improve living conditions on Blythe Street was to attack the problems in every building simultaneously through a comprehensive plan using renovation and social programs.

Indeed, while some Blythe Street buildings have been rehabilitated through low-interest city loans, they eventually became gang-infested and are considered part of the problem.

Saturday’s event was an opportunity for Latin American Civic Assn. representatives, city officials and Alberts to celebrate the Casa Urbana project and to promote Project Renaissance as a solution to the street’s woes, albeit in a smaller form.

The Casa Urbana project is largely supported by $391,000 in city loans. Alberts’ effort continued even though plans for the larger Project Renaissance were put on hold.

Speakers at the event, which was conducted in Spanish and English, included Alberts, tenant leaders, Los Angeles police, city housing officials and representatives of the school district and the Latin American Civic Assn.

Significantly, Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who represents the area, was not in attendance. His lack of support for the original, more extensive plan to deal with the street’s social problems was blamed for the program’s failure to win the backing of city housing officials.

The original $8-million Project Renaissance proposal called for extensive city subsidies, and Bernardi has often opposed dipping into city coffers for such big-ticket programs.

After an hour of speeches, residents listened to Andean folk musicians and shared a large potluck meal. Later in the evening, about 75 people danced to music provided by a disc jockey.

“We need to take more pride,” said Isabella Penunuri, the head of a Blythe Street tenants’ group. “We don’t get many chances like this. We need to make this a good place to live.”

Penunuri, 27, a community activist and homemaker with four small children, was invited to move to the complex by Alberts to mobilize tenants to improve the street and their lives through education and job training.

In addition to organizing tenants, Alberts runs a tutoring program for youth and parenting classes. “If they want birth-control information, I’ll get someone in here to talk about birth control,” she said. “I’ll get them whatever they want.”

Alberts has also offered to give tenant Soledad Perez, 61, a $25 discount on her monthly rent if her son, Beto, would stay in high school and show the landlord his report cards.

If his grades are satisfactory, Beto also will be one of several youths at the apartments hired to work this summer on the four-month renovation, she said.

Alberts hopes the experiment in her building at 14555 Blythe St. will be repeated up and down the street.

Project Renaissance, as originally proposed, was to have provided city funds for the Latin American Civic Assn. to purchase and rehabilitate buildings that contain many of the 540 apartments on Blythe Street. The Latin American Civic Assn. was to have provided a variety of social services, such as job training, child care and parenting classes for the street’s 4,000 residents, most of whom are Latino.

Casa Urbana was to have managed the renovated units, clearing the apartments of deadbeats and drug dealers and making sure the units would not become overcrowded.

Public money was to help lower rents on the street, now between $375 and $800 a month. And a plan was to be developed to combat the violent gang that dominates the area.

The new plan for Project Renaissance calls for the Latin American Civic Assn. to secure city financial assistance to purchase, at least initially, only two or three buildings instead of the 11 envisioned earlier. Social services are still to be offered in some form by the Latin American Civic Assn., and Casa Urbana would still manage the site.

Police representatives at Saturday’s event said the current rehabilitation project, though not as comprehensive as the original Project Renaissance, was a good start.

“You can’t expect to see it change overnight,” Deputy Police Chief Mark A. Kroeker said. “But in a year you’ll see a whole different profile on Blythe Street.”

Robert T. Moncrief, head of the city’s Housing Preservation and Production Department, said he hopes the city will eventually help renovate the whole Blythe Street area, but that at first supporters need to show it can work in a few buildings.

“We’re doing it incrementally rather than all at once,” Moncrief said. “It’s an experiment.”

Alberts and her investment partners, Irvin B. Laxineta and Gerald J. Grudzen, said private for-profit companies need to lead the way in projects such as Blythe Street.

“There needs to be some investment from the private sector to pull up the whole neighborhood,” said Laxineta, president of Alpha Construction Co. in Van Nuys. “Someone needs to stick their neck out.”