Neighbors, City Lock Horns Over House of Ill Dispute

With rakes, brooms and plastic bags, members of the Palm Grove Ferndale Neighborhood Watch finally took matters into their own hands. Half a dozen descended on Palm Grove Avenue’s greatest eyesore--a sagging, run-down house owned by the city of Los Angeles--and cleaned the yard themselves.

John Jebb raked leaves and described the dozens of calls he had made to complain about the place--to mayoral and City Council offices, the Police Department and countless bureaucrats who inspect, maintain or administer the city’s real estate.

Bums and gang members often hang out at the vacant three-bedroom house and neighbors say drug dealing goes on there. But city officials pay little attention. “None of them want to do anything,” Jebb said.

Suddenly the front door opened, and a tall, unshaven man stared in bewilderment at the bustling crew. “Uh, oh,” he said in a groggy voice. “What are you from, the city?”

“Who are you?” asked Keith Goldsmith, a 28-year-old watch club leader, as he pushed a broom across the front porch.

“I’ve just been staying here a couple of days,” the man said. He casually ambled down the street, the neighborhood group silently watching his retreating figure.

The tiny wood-frame house at 2612 S. Palm Grove is probably one of the city’s smallest and least valuable holdings. But to residents of this small working-class community just south of Adams Boulevard, it is important--a highly visible sign of creeping decay that could destroy their neighborhood.

The history of the house is a tale of bureaucratic drift. City officials say the Community Development Department once used it for a now-forgotten program. Then the General Services Department leased it to a tenant who did not pay rent for nearly two years. The tenant did nothing about the peeling paint and dead shrubbery, and neither did the city. At some point the tenant left and the house has remained empty. When vagrants and gang members began hanging around--even scrawling graffiti on the trees in front--residents called the police. “Nothing happened,” said Jebb, who is a sculptor.

Leaders of the 45-member Neighborhood Watch said they were promised a police-community partnership when the club was formed three years ago. Now, said Goldsmith, members are “fed up.”

“The majority of the drug dealing here is in the vicinity of that house,” said Goldsmith, who is an accounting clerk. “Police have told us, if you see drug dealing, get license plates, get a picture, it makes our job easier. Then what happens when it’s time for them to act, there’s no response. Or when they finally do show up, everybody’s gone.”

Police say they are aware and have taken steps to resolve problems at the house. “We do make arrests there, and do all the things they say we’re not doing,” said Robert Kimball, patrol captain for the LAPD’s Southwest Division. “But we don’t do enough of it.”

The blue line is stretched too thin to do more. “There’s too much to do and we’re overburdened,” Kimball said. “The people in that community would like to see two officers walking their neighborhood 16 hours a day, but we don’t have the people to do that.”

Other agencies and officials also say they have responded. General Services evicted the tenant and boarded up the property. One supervisor estimated that department maintenance crews have been there half a dozen times in the last year.

City Councilman Nate Holden, who represents the area, asked that the property be sold, figuring that the house had deteriorated too much for the city to repair it. “We’re getting it off our hands,” he said.

But the community will have to wait.

The house is now under the jurisdiction of the city’s Bureau of Engineering, which is preparing to sell the property at auction. That won’t take place for “a year or so,” said the bureau’s real estate officer, Carl Goss. Procedures must be followed, he explained, to meet various code requirements and gain approvals from five city agencies, commissions and the City Council.

In the meantime, Goss said, cleaning up the property is not the department’s responsibility. “All we do is maintain records,” he said.

So the property is in limbo, “like everything else here,” Goss said. “I think we all live in limbo.”

“You see how it looks now,” Goldsmith said. “In a year’s time, the bulldozers will need to come.”

Neighborhood Watch captain Rose Blake said the house poses a threat to residents. “It’ll run the neighborhood down.”

From his Adams Boulevard real estate offices across from Palm Grove, broker Bruce Campbell said he has a clear view of what goes on there: “I see drug dealing all day, every day. . . . In my opinion, the city is out of control.”

Jebb wants to move. “I can’t take it,” he said. “Here we are trying to do something. There’s no way citizens can clean up a neighborhood by themselves. It’s like a cancer eating everything away.”