COVER STORY : Life in a Beehive of Urban Woes : The Rent Is Cheap and the Walls Are Graffiti-Free. But Crime Has Also Found a Home in Carmelitos, the County’s Oldest and Largest Housing Project

At first glance, it looks like a fine place to call home.

In the Carmelitos public housing project in North Long Beach, working mothers take their children to day care at a community center filled with books and computers. Buildings are spotless, lawns manicured. Graffiti is nowhere in sight.

Many residents have lived there 20 years or more, enjoying comfortable apartments for prices that can’t be beat. Families today pay an average of $131 a month.

Yet behind its pleasant exterior, Los Angeles County’s oldest and largest housing project is a troubled place.

Drugs are sold openly day and night. Gunfire sometimes erupts within feet of the project’s playground, sending children scurrying for cover. The U.S. Postal Service at one time suspended mail delivery after a postal carrier was threatened.

Residents complain that the violence has grown worse in recent years. Some anxious parents now keep police scanners by their bedsides and equip children with pagers to summon them home when trouble flares.

“Survival is the name of the game,” said Vickie Rael, 46, who bought her 12-year-old son a pager recently. “When I page him, he knows he’s to be home in five minutes.”

Residents and police blame much of the trouble on gangs from Compton and South-Central Los Angeles who openly deal drugs in Carmelitos’ maze of parking lots and apartment buildings.

Authorities have identified six active gangs in the project--five from outside Long Beach--and more than 520 gang members. The gangs lay claim to different parking lots where they have been known to sell marijuana and cocaine to buyers, who also come primarily from outside the complex.

Police say Carmelitos’ two main roadways provide easy access to the 64-acre project. Acres of tree-lined areas and countless nooks between buildings offer ample cover for drug dealers, who are known to post children as lookouts.

“The reputation of Carmelitos is that you can come in here, score your drugs and leave,” said Betsy Lindsay, a security consultant for the county agency that runs the project. “It’s easy in, easy out.”

Residents have been reluctant to speak up for fear of being labeled snitches, which they say can lead to reprisals by the gun-toting drug dealers.

Community meetings on crime and other pressing issues frequently attract fewer than 50 people, a fraction of the development’s 1,815 residents. Just 14 people turned out for a meeting in July to discuss postal security. The gathering had been organized by activists in Carmelitos’ senior citizens’ complex after a letter carrier had been robbed in front of the central mail drop earlier this year.

To attract participants for a Neighborhood Watch, a group of tenants changed the name to the more benign Friends Helping Friends, and allows fellow renters to air problems confidentially.

“People know about shootings, but they don’t dare speak up for fear of retaliation,” said Wanda Flagg, a counselor who has worked closely with Carmelitos residents on job training and other programs. “They feel like they’re on front street alone.”

Carmelitos’ designers hadn’t envisioned such problems when the complex opened in 1941. At the time, they saw an affordable alternative for the poor, where struggling families could get back on their feet, then move on to permanent housing, said Sam Lucchese, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Community Development Commission, which owns the complex.

But plans didn’t work out as envisioned. Successive generations of the families settled into the complex. Gangs and drugs began to appear. By the late 1970s, Carmelitos earned a violent reputation, a place even Long Beach police were reluctant to enter alone for fear of being shot.

Veteran tenants say things took a turn for the worse, ironically, after the complex underwent a massive $24-million renovation in the mid-1980s. Parts of the project were emptied during three years of remodeling. As units reopened, several undesirable tenants moved in. These newcomers also attracted friends and relatives who caused more trouble, police and residents said. Officials said they screen new tenants, but are prohibited from asking about criminal backgrounds.

“When I first moved here, you could leave your doors unlocked,” recalled Margaret Mangahas, a 30-year resident who raised her six children in Carmelitos. “You never worried about anyone stealing anything. We had problems like any neighborhood, but it wasn’t like now.”

Over the years, the Community Development Commission has deployed various law enforcement agencies--including its own security force--to crack down on crime and protect residents.

The county now contracts with Long Beach police to patrol the project and provide undercover gang and narcotics investigations.

But it is a private outfit, Platt Security & Event Services, that spends the most time in Carmelitos. Two to four armed officers patrol the complex on daily shifts of eight to 10 hours, bolstered by bicycle patrols five days a week.

While Platt is widely praised by Long Beach police and other authorities, residents say they are reluctant to trust the security officers, contending that the guards ignore trouble in the complex and occasionally curse residents.

Residents mockingly refer to Platt personnel as “rent-a-cops” and joke that the letters in the company name stand for “Police Lacking Adequate Technical Training.”

“We call them jackasses,” said Ray Fox, an 18-year resident. “They don’t take us seriously. Our fondest hope is to get rid of Platt.”

Marc Platt, the company’s vice president, insisted that his staff of reserve and retired police officers has good relationships with most Carmelitos tenants. But the officers at times are overwhelmed by the amount of illegal activity occurring in the development, he said.

“We’re very active, but there are times when you might have to move past a (minor) offense to get to a more serious offense,” said Platt, who started bicycle patrols in July to help officers establish closer ties in the community.

County officials are now taking additional measures to make Carmelitos safer.

The county recently directed all tenants to remove back-yard canopies and overgrown foliage to cut down on hiding places for illegal activity.

Later this year, the county plans to impose a nightly curfew on minors and to close Carmelitos to through traffic at night by installing gates on the project’s two thoroughfares, Via Wanda and Via Carmelitos. The curfew times have yet to be decided.

Six-foot fences will seal areas between buildings to eliminate hiding places. A fence will also be put up along the complex’s western boundary, an alley that offers an open door to trespassers from Atlantic Avenue.

Already, three-foot fences extend out from apartment buildings to keep passersby from walking across tenants’ front yards. County officials believe the fences, along with front-yard gardens, will provide renters with a “sense of ownership and pride,” motivating them to report criminal activity around their units.

“We want to establish territories so families will care about what’s going on,” said Carolyn Hutchinson, one of Carmelitos’ property supervisors.

So far, the new measures have received mixed reviews.

Some residents complain that they are being barricaded inside Carmelitos and worry that clever drug dealers will still find a way around the fences and gates. Others contend that the barriers will hinder security and police, as well as ambulances and other emergency vehicles.

“They’re locking us in with the people already doing the damage,” complained Joyce Blake, a 23-year resident.

Blake and others also say they doubt that the small front-yard fences will engender pride or prompt residents to be more vigilant. And some say the overall approach will inconvenience visitors and intrude on the parklike atmosphere of the complex.

“They want to take our life away and make this a concentration camp,” said Valeria Tariq, a 25-year resident and chairwoman of the Carmelitos Tenants’ Assn.

Officials said that Tariq’s sentiments are shared by only a handful of residents. The officials said they decided on the new measures only after receiving strong support from about 200 tenants who attended meetings over the last year to discuss the security issues. Many at the meetings asked the county to take firm steps to rid Carmelitos of drug dealers and other criminals, residents recalled.

“They’re trying to save the children from this gang violence,” said Marcella Thompson, 31, a mother of five and an ardent supporter of the county’s efforts. “They’re trying their best.”

County officials insist that the new measures will make the complex safer and won’t hinder residents, guests and emergency vehicles.

“I think people have difficulty with change,” said Maria Badrakhan, who oversees Carmelitos and other housing projects for the Community Development Commission. “Every time we have made improvements, we have encountered resistance at some level.”

The new measures appear to have strong support among the project’s vocal senior citizens, who live in a 155-unit complex on the Carmelitos grounds and have an active Neighborhood Watch of their own. Many say that opposition to the new security comes from a handful of outspoken tenants who regularly complain about county policies but refuse to take action on their own.

“The majority of these people will not tell management what they want, but once management does something they are very willing to challenge and criticize,” said Mae Lane, 52, an eight-year resident who is president of the Carmelitos Senior Complex Board.

Lane and others say, however, that Carmelitos gets an unfair rap as a violent place and that its honest families and many positive aspects are often overlooked amid the attention paid to lawbreakers.

“We are fenced in by stigma,” Lane said.

Indeed, housing officials and police say the crime rate in Carmelitos has remained about the same the past seven years. Police also say Carmelitos is no more violent than dozens of other areas in Long Beach, although they do not keep crime statistics by neighborhood.

Tenants and county officials point out that the $24-million renovation in the mid-1980s drew national recognition, including an award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

They also talk about the vast network of services at Carmelitos that allow residents to earn high school diplomas and learn computer, landscaping and other job skills.

They also speak of new recreation facilities, including a new tennis court at the complex where tournaments are occasionally held.

Youths will be able to play soccer on a new field that will open soon in the complex and tenants will be able to plant their own vegetables in a new urban garden.

“We’re trying to provide alternatives,” Badrakhan said. “This is much more than any private landlord would offer. We are investing millions of dollars in improvements.”

Despite its problems, some tenants say Carmelitos is the best home they have ever known--a jewel of public housing that provides low-income families--three-quarters of whom earn less than $10,000 a year--with reasonable rents and comfortable dwellings. In this tightly knit melting pot, residents of different races mix comfortably and say they enjoy racial harmony absent in the world around them.

“When you mention Carmelitos on the outside, everybody says, ‘You live in that place?’ Lane said. “But there is nowhere you can live that is so economical and so well maintained. Carmelitos is too clean to look like a project.”

Carmelitos

* Fast Facts

Population: 1,815

Units: 713

Size: 64 acres

Median household income: $7,007

Unemployment rate: 38%

* Racial Breakdown

African American: 60%

Latino: 19%

White: 14%

Asian: 6%

Other: 1%

Source: Los Angeles County Community Development Commission

On the Cover

Behind the pleasant and well-tended exterior of Carmelitos, Los Angeles County’s oldest and largest housing project, is a troubled place. Drugs are sold openly and gunfire sometimes erupts near the project’s playground. Much of the trouble is blamed on gangs from Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. Officials are taking steps, such as screening new tenants and ordering stepped-up security patrols, in an effort to make Carmelitos safer, but not everyone agrees that enough is being done.