HUD Comes Through for Seniors Affected by Earthquake : Assistance: Van Nuys apartment building is the first recipient of housing program funds. Residents look forward to the repairs.

The Thursday afternoon bingo ladies at the Vistas retirement center have never met the folks doling out federal earthquake relief at the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But thanks to the HUD people, the avid bingo players--and other residents of the Van Nuys apartments--are looking forward to repairs being made to their damaged building in record time.

For once, government worked.

The Vistas got a low-interest HUD loan for about $152,000 Thursday, becoming the first recipient of some of the $100 million of earthquake relief set aside for HUD-assisted apartment buildings damaged in the Jan. 17 temblor.

Most residents of such buildings are low- to middle-income seniors.

The funds, earmarked specifically for multifamily housing damaged by the quake, are part of a total of $8.6 billion of federal disaster relief Congress has appropriated for Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange counties.

The Vistas’ management company--the nonprofit, Long Beach-based Retirement Housing Foundation--applied for the special HUD funds after the earthquake left the six-story apartment building on Sherman Way without water and electricity.

All 90 residents of the 7-year-old building had to evacuate for six days until it could be made habitable again. Some Vistas residents, whose average age is 78, stayed with relatives in the area, while others moved into another seniors apartment building less than a mile away.

Now, Sara Hatcher, 86, and the other bingo ladies are happy they won’t have to look at the cracks in their apartment walls much longer. Pointing to a web of cracks over her living room sofa, Hatcher said that without the HUD loan, “I know I would have had to live with this quite a while.”

It could have been worse than that if the company had not had reserve funds that it could use for some emergency repairs, said Richard Washington, director of management and development for the apartment management company.

“The Vistas residents definitely would have been relocated more than six days,” he said. “And, we would have had a project struggling just to meet its bills.”

The management company has already put $90,000 of its own reserves into repairs at the Vistas. The work included replacing three rooftop water heaters that toppled in the quake, sending 400,000 gallons of waters pouring down the building’s elevator shafts.

Part of the grant will reimburse the management company for those post-quake expenditures.

“To get us a check in little more than six weeks is just phenomenal,” Washington said. “If this is an example of new government, it works.”

Washington said the 15-year HUD loan, which carries a fixed 1% interest rate, also will pay to repaint all of the Vistas’ apartments and re-carpet the halls.

When she heard the news, Vista resident Elizabeth Cohen exclaimed: “Oh, I’m so relieved . . . the damage was bad, bad, bad.”

Cohen said she lost a lot of antiques in the quake. But she and other Vistas residents have maintained a remarkably good attitude through it all.

One of the Thursday afternoon bingo players, who call themselves “The Gamblers,” smiled and shrugged when she recalled the early morning of Jan. 17.

“You have to laugh about it now,” said 84-year-old Marie Feliciano. “What else are you going to do?”