Making the Most of Bad Times

At a time when many Southern California localities are suffering through retrenchment and cutbacks, two Antelope Valley cities are managing to combine community policing with state redevelopment funds to make life better for their residents. The goal in both Palmdale and Lancaster is to clean up blight, restrain crime and preserve or create low- to moderate-income housing. Their efforts to date are worthy of note.

Lancaster city officials have recently made a deal to buy a failed housing project and the abandoned portion of another with plans to have affordable housing built or completed at both sites. They were purchased from the federal Resolution Trust Corp. for $3.1 million. In a separate plan last June, the city agreed to spend another $4.2 million to purchase a 121-unit mobile home park and a pair of four-unit apartment buildings. About $200,000 of the funds were set aside for down payment assistance to help lower-income families buy townhomes.

Lancaster has also agreed to buy the 120-space Desert Sands Estates Mobile Home Park. City officials said one of their goals is to limit annual space rent hikes at the mobile home parks to just 60% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index to ensure that opportunities for affordable housing continue to exist.

Meanwhile, the city of Palmdale is using similar techniques to tackle a blighted neighborhood of rotting and vandalized buildings after its officials realized that repeated police actions had failed to arrest rampant crime there. Both cities are using particularly thoughtful approaches in these difficult, recessionary times.