An Uphill Battle to De-Sleaze South-Central

If somebody opened a motel in my West Los Angeles neighborhood, rented the rooms to prostitutes by the hour and called it the Foxy Fantasy, we’d have the place shut down in a day.

We’re high-turnout voters on the Westside. Our neighborhoods are organized into sophisticated, influential homeowner associations. Our more affluent people are big contributors to local political campaigns. So we’d clog the phone lines with our complaints to the police, Mayor Richard Riordan, City Atty. Jim Hahn and our councilwoman, Ruth Galanter.

The Foxy Fantasy would quickly be history.

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Such were my thoughts Wednesday as I rode through South-Central Los Angeles, past blocks filled with grimy, ramshackle motels patronized by drug-addicted prostitutes and their similarly afflicted customers. My guides were Karen Bass and Sylvia Castillo of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment.

We headed north from Broadway and Manchester Avenue. We passed a run-down motel, a liquor store, another motel and a church, all on the same block. Same story on the next block. And the next.

There weren’t any signs of real neighborhood commercial life, no pharmacies, bakeries, supermarkets, hardware stores, dress shops. Bass, who is executive director of the coalition, explained that some of the few businesses that appeared legitimate were actually fronts for drug dealers. We passed one such place, with signs advertising appliance repairs. There wasn’t evidence of any work going on except for a man poking around an old refrigerator. Five or six others sat outside.

“We’ve got ‘hardware stores’ without hammers or nails,” she said.

Bass and Castillo told me of another entrepreneurial twist. Some liquor stores sell small packets of baking soda, bits of Brillo pad and a glass tube--kits their customers use to cook their crack.

It was hard to fathom why so much illicit enterprise was permitted in this neighborhood. None of it would be allowed in mine.

Much of the answer lies in the political history of the area, part of the 9th District, and of its longtime representative, the late Councilman Gilbert Lindsay.

The 9th District extends from the poorest parts of South-Central through Downtown. Lindsay, a strutting little man with a huge ego, liked to call himself “The Emperor of the Great 9th.” But the emperor cared mostly for the Downtown part of his domain, neglecting increasingly impoverished South-Central.

This neglect established a history of indifference. The council member wasn’t screaming on the phone at the Sanitation Department when the garbage wasn’t picked up. Bureaucrats weren’t criticized when potholes weren’t filled or when drug dealers and homeless people took over a favorite park. Nor was he blasting the city attorney or the cops when motel owners rented rooms on an hourly basis.

There is another reason the 9th District has fallen toward the bottom of the city’s priority list. There is low political participation by a population increasingly composed of Latino immigrants ineligible to vote. Non-voters lose in the competition for civic resources.

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The Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment grew out of this political vacuum. Coalition members, including churches, anti-delinquency organizations, anti-drug groups, schools and community groups, complained that the police, the City Council and the mayor weren’t going after the sources of drugs.

The coalition’s first targets were liquor and convenience stores selling drug paraphernalia and allowing their parking lots and sidewalks to be used as shooting galleries and drug marketplaces.

The next targets are the motels. But this time the coalition will have help. Lindsay’s successor on the council, Rita Walters, wants to close them down too.

The coalition has sent teams around the neighborhood organizing African American and Latino residents. Youth teams, half of them African American and half Latino, are an important part of the organizing effort. Community meetings will follow, as will visits to City Hall.

On the legal front, the coalition will ask city zoning officials to impose restrictions on the motels, such as eliminating one-hour rentals. If the owner refuses, the city can go to court to close them.

Councilman Marvin Braude has used this process to force the closing of motels on the Valley’s Sepulveda Boulevard prostitution strip. But Braude had the backing of old, well-organized Valley homeowner groups, such as the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn. He and the homeowners knew how to apply pressure to slow-moving bureaucrats.

It will be much more difficult for the coalition and Councilwoman Walters to overcome years of neglect and close South-Central’s sleazy motels.