WESTLAKE : Youth Soccer Field to Replace Vacant Lot

For years, the vacant lot on 3rd Street between Bixel Street and Lucas Avenue lay fallow, hostage to a sluggish economy and the site of makeshift homeless encampments.

Few were happy with the arrangement. Not the neighbors. Or the police. Or the development company that owns the property once known as Crown Hill before its elegant homes were razed to make way for office buildings, apartments and a hotel--projects that exist now only in blueprints, awaiting an upturn in the real estate market.

But neighbors, a police officer, the property manager and a nearby YMCA have teamed up to make the local children who have no place to play come out winners.

Within weeks, work is expected to begin to turn the approximately three-acre lot into a temporary soccer field to serve as many as 3,500 youths a week, said Mark Young, executive director of the Ketchum Downtown YMCA, which will supervise the site and develop a free youth recreation program there. Play could begin as early as July.

“The kids will go crazy when they see this field,” Young said. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

Cathay City Development, a Hong Kong-based company, agreed to the temporary soccer field since it has no immediate development plans for the site, said Terry Lee, the property manager. The site will be fenced to prevent the re-establishment of homeless encampments. In the past, Lee reluctantly asked people living on the site to move, but they usually returned.

Amanda Serrano, senior lead officer in the Police Department’s Rampart Division, was instrumental in mobilizing neighborhood support for the field and bringing Lee and the YMCA together, with an assist from City Councilman Mike Hernandez’s office and the Community Redevelopment Agency.

“It seemed like a waste of space at a prime location,” Serrano said. “In the Rampart area, there aren’t many places for children to play and there aren’t many outlets for organized sports.”

The YMCA is talking with World Cup officials about sponsoring and paying for the field, Young said. If the two fail to reach an agreement, he said, the YMCA will raise the $300,000 to make it happen, although that could take a year.

Once work on the field begins, it should take about six weeks to grade the property, put in the synthetic surface and lights and erect the fence.