2 Cities Target Decaying Neighborhoods : Antelope Valley: Similar programs are funded to flush drugs, crime and violence out, and to restore residential areas of Lancaster and Palmdale.

Lancaster and Palmdale, Antelope Valley cities best known for their sparkling new homes and suburban sprawl, are launching campaigns to clean up rental neighborhoods so rife with crime, drugs and violence that they resemble urban ghettos.

Lancaster and county sheriff’s officials gathered near four looted and abandoned apartment buildings in the northern part of the city Wednesday, promising a multifaceted program to be called “Operation High Desert Storm” to restore the neighborhood at a cost expected to exceed $1 million.

To the south, meanwhile, Palmdale officials are gearing up to tackle a similar blighted neighborhood just a mile from City Hall under the “Partners Against Crime” program, which will include increased sheriff’s attention, building code enforcement and rehabilitation loans.

“It’s exactly the same problem in both areas, and it’s being dealt with in the same ways,” said Capt. Tony Welch, commander of the Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Station. Deputies plan to work with both cities and other agencies in coordinated efforts to restore both neighborhoods.

Officials in both cities insisted that their blighted neighborhoods are trouble spots that do not reflect the broader, mostly homeowner-based communities. But they said the cities have spotlighted both areas, hoping to keep them from growing worse and dragging down nearby areas.

Both cities picked the team approach for tackling the areas after recognizing that just having deputies constantly make arrests not only sapped sheriff’s resources but also did not solve the problems or get rid of the criminals.

“We leave and they come back,” Welch said.

In the Lancaster neighborhood, centered on a block-long stretch of Cedar Avenue between Avenues H-8 and H-12, the city plans to buy, help rehabilitate or demolish substandard apartment buildings; help organize and aid property owners with loans and push to eliminate blight.

City Manager Jim Gilley said Lancaster will fund the rehabilitation efforts with redevelopment money that state law says must be spent to promote low-to-moderate income housing. City officials promised they will continue to focus on the neighborhood until it is restored.

Debra Pilkinton, a 31-year-old mother with two sons who was preparing to move out of one of the abandoned buildings, said they fell victim to a cycle of decay that she said began with neglect by owners and led to tenants leaving and being replaced by transients and drug dealers.

“This whole block’s infested from one end to the other,” Pilkinton said, adding that she had had to warn her 5- and 8-year-old sons to run into their leaky, cockroach-infested apartment whenever they hear gunfire. “It’s sad you have to teach your kids this,” she said.

Welch said sheriff’s deputies have swept through the area three times in the past year, making more than 100 narcotics arrests and 29 arrests for other felonies, including 47 arrests during the most recent operation last month. He said most people arrested there live in other areas.

In the Palmdale neighborhood--from Palmdale Boulevard to Avenue Q and from 3rd to 12th streets East--nearly a dozen apartment buildings stand rotting with broken or boarded windows, their interiors vandalized and looted. They had been hot spots for crime until recent arrests and sweeps calmed the area.

Under a $200,000 program to start, the City Council last month agreed to hire an extra sheriff’s deputy and city code enforcement officer to focus exclusively on the neighborhood--inspecting buildings, citing and pressuring owners and coordinating efforts by other agencies.

In addition, the city is considering a law making it illegal to loiter in areas with identified drug problems, another law forcing landlords to evict tenants involved in drug activity and a possible program to send warning letters to owners of cars seen lingering in the area.

A Palmdale woman who did not want to be identified stood barefoot Wednesday with her three children outside the ransacked apartment building where she is the lone remaining tenant, saying her building and two others nearby have been repossessed by a bank that wants the tenants to leave so it can make repairs.

In recent months, residents who own their own homes interspersed among the apartments said the drug dealing, marauding gang members and nighttime violence were so bad that residents simply avoided driving on certain streets for fear of being shot.