Housing Agency Sheds Light on Neighborhood Crime Problem : Residences: Bulletproof street lamps will be tested in Roscoe-Schoenborn as city makes effort to address living conditions in troubled areas.

Just as some epidemics can be traced to a single infected person, a sole drug dealer is being blamed for sparking a flare-up of violence and gang intimidation in a square-block area known as Roscoe-Schoenborn.

Police and city officials say the dealer moved to a small apartment building in the 17900 block of Schoenborn Street about a year ago and within months the incessant trafficking drove other tenants away. Then the illicit action moved to the back alley, which became a busy nighttime market for drugs, guns and stolen property. Gangs from nearby neighborhoods started hanging out there. Graffiti spread like a virus.

Now, as a first step of an effort to ease the block back from the brink of abandonment, property owners and city officials have come up with a simple and relatively cheap cure: bulletproof street lighting.

Los Angeles Housing Department General Manager Gary Squier said the Roscoe-Schoenborn area is a key testing ground for the department’s new emphasis on addressing living conditions in bad areas and halting the slide of deteriorating ones. Although some neighborhoods require expensive investments in new housing or other services, others need only minor help.

“With a little bit of help from the city . . . we could take a situation that is ready to become a disaster and regenerate,” he said, referring to Roscoe-Schoenborn.

The lights, protected by hard plastic covers, would illuminate the alley that runs behind 38 buildings on the parallel streets of Roscoe Boulevard and Schoenborn Street between Zelzah and Lindley avenues. The housing department’s slum abatement unit helped persuade the property owners on those blocks to pay $30 annually for lighting costs, and is pressing the Bureau of Street Lighting to install them quickly.

In addition, most of the building owners already have put up carport gates to take away the gang’s alley hide-outs. Many also are considering erecting tenants-only locked gates to shut off escape routes used when police cruisers roll up unexpectedly.

The department’s new attention to neighborhoods grows out of the observation that the combined effect of crack cocaine, gang violence, joblessness and the resulting high vacancy rates for rental housing is ruining growing numbers of apartment buildings. Left unchecked, those trends could make much of the city’s low-income housing stock unlivable and worsen an already crisis-like lack of affordable housing.

“Los Angeles has enough slums; we don’t need any more,” said Charlene Groff, supervisor of the housing department’s slum abatement unit. “This is not a bad neighborhood. The area around it is nice . . . But in about six months you couldn’t go there.”

Police and property owners said the small apartment buildings of Roscoe-Schoenborn began declining more than five years ago, soon after the city took over a group of crime-infested apartment buildings in the nearby Bryant-Vanalden area of Northridge. A number of people moved from there to Roscoe-Schoenborn, and what had been a group of modest working-class apartments surrounded by well-kept suburban ranch houses started going downhill.

Periodic police sweeps kept things under control, but in the past year graffiti, drug arrests and assaults have been on the rise. Then, members of the Parthenia Street gang began using it as a hangout.

Housing officials, working with police and the Department of Building and Safety and other agencies, surveyed the Roscoe-Schoenborn buildings recently and found that most were marred by graffiti. But only two were not up to code, and only one--the six-unit building on Schoenborn where the drug dealer moved in--was seriously damaged.

That building, Groff and others said, is a compelling illustration of what happens when owners do not select tenants carefully. Groff said the building’s elderly owner was intimidated by her new tenant and failed to understand the impact he was having on the building. Later, afraid to confront the tenant with eviction, housing officials said she stopped paying the mortgage and let the lender, Glendale Federal Savings, foreclose on the property.

The building “was lost because the gangbanger . . . and all of his friends were coming in and terrorizing the other tenants,” said Les Lovatt, the Los Angeles Police Department’s senior lead officer for the area. “He was bringing friends from Pacoima and Van Nuys and San Fernando, shooting guns, breaking into cars and beating up people.”

The dealer moved to another nearby building but was evicted and left the area. When the bank took the building back it had few rent-paying tenants, and squatters had ripped out fixtures, broken windows and filled its rooms with trash. Later, it was boarded up and is now for sale.

City officials say there are private buyers interested in purchasing the building without public funds. If city efforts to reduce drug dealing and graffiti are successful, it would become an even more attractive investment.

Glenn Blackshaw, who owns a building across the alley, said some owners will allow anyone in just to keep their apartments filled. “They are seeing that that doesn’t pay in the end,” he said.

Blackshaw has been trying to get all of the Roscoe-Schoenborn property owners to take greater care in selecting tenants. He alerts other owners, as well as police and city agencies, of problems in the area and is confident the new alley lights will make a big difference.

“I’m sure the neighborhood is not lost,” he said.

But he acknowledged the problems. Several prostitutes have set up shop on Schoenborn, and there is a drive-up drug window at the back of one of the buildings. Gunfire is heard nightly, and stolen guns and property are sold out of the trunks of cars in the alley.

Moreover, some residents are afraid to get involved by calling police when they witness crimes or become victims. Housing department officials organized a residents meeting last month to talk about plans for the area, but only a handful of people showed up.

Several said gang members who hang out in the alley warned them not to come. “They told us that if we came here we would die,” one woman said. “We are very, very afraid.”

A mother of four children added, “I do not let my kids put one foot outside the building.”

Another resident said that five months earlier he had encountered a neighbor lying on the sidewalk who had been beaten nearly to death. In recent years, he said, there have been at least four killings. Fights occur almost nightly.

All of the residents agreed that carport gates and lights will make the alley and the whole neighborhood safer. But permanent improvements will take the involvement of the property owners and residents, as well as city agencies.

Lovatt of the LAPD said the department does not have enough officers to station a patrol car in the area every night to keep crime under control. Therefore, the landlords and the tenants have to help by calling police to report crime, by renting to only reliable tenants and by rapidly evicting those who begin dealing drugs.

“We are trying to get the community involved in taking care of their own areas,” Lovatt said. “We want to organize the tenants, as well as the landlords, and let them know what’s expected of them.”