L.A. Public Housing Plans in Jeopardy : Development: U.S. funding cuts, City Council infighting and community opposition could delay or scrap 17 projects, officials say.

The blue-and-white apartment building on hilly North Tularosa Drive in the Silver Lake area is among the pioneers in what officials had hoped would be a new generation of public housing, small developments designed to blend into neighborhoods and escape old social stigmas.

But as families prepare to move into the seven-unit, Cape Cod-style complex next month, expected overhauls in federal housing policy instead may make it among the last new public housing buildings in Los Angeles for the foreseeable future. Both the new Republican majority in Congress and the Democratic Clinton Administration want to end funding for such construction.

At the same time, a Los Angeles City Hall dispute over sites of future projects that do get funded shows that better architecture and careful tenant screening cannot erase all the hostility to such subsidized apartments. “Not in My Back Yard,” the familiar NIMBY cry of neighborhood activists in the ‘70s and ‘80s, may escalate into “Not in My Council District.”

The problems remain, but not for lack of effort to avoid them. In look and philosophy, the new buildings represent a drastic departure from the massive and now troubled projects built in the ‘40s and ‘50s, said Charles Cofield, development director for the city’s Housing Authority.

“I don’t want to have a negative associated with public housing anymore,” he said. “I would like to have people say, ‘That’s a nice, interesting building.’ What I don’t want is for people to say, ‘Look what this agency brought to our neighborhood. Look how stark, how plain, how bland, how austere.’ ”

That’s why the Tularosa Drive townhouses, topped by peaked roofs and fronted with banks of new bushes on a steeply graded plot, look more like a pleasant condo complex than a stereotype of urban blight. After a decade of no new construction, the Housing Authority over the past two years has finished six such small buildings, strategically located far from each other to avoid oversaturation.

While the Tularosa Drive building is opening without strong opposition, plans for 17 similar projects throughout Los Angeles have become fodder for debate among City Council members over which council districts already have more than their fair share of public housing. No city funds are involved, but zoning issues and constituent complaints are.

As a result, housing advocates fear that construction plans for many of the 414 apartments could be delayed or even scrapped. Some of the $42 million in committed federal money could be withdrawn if Los Angeles does not choose sites in a timely fashion. And officials say the squabbling could affect expected applications for another 200 low-income units if Congress allows more.

Virginia Lopez knows that she is lucky to be moving a few weeks hence into a three-bedroom unit on Tularosa Drive with her husband and their three children. It will be a relief, she said, to leave Pico Gardens, the large and gang-ridden public housing complex where they have lived for six years. “I was afraid of my kids growing up here,” she said.

Lopez understands why some people might be frightened at the prospect of public housing tenants as neighbors.

“If you say you’re from the projects, people think the worst,” said Lopez, who is a supermarket cashier and whose husband is a maintenance worker. “But I think they’ll see we’ll be good neighbors. . . . I think when they see how we will live, how we dress, how we live, they’re going to feel better.”

A soon-to-be-released report by the city’s Planning Department shows that 73.5%, or 6,481 of Los Angeles 8,811 public housing apartments are located in just two council districts--the Eastside’s 14th, represented by Richard Alatorre, and the 15th in the Harbor and Watts areas, represented by Rudy Svornich.

Four of the other 13 districts have no Housing Authority apartments at all--the 1st, covering parts of Downtown and northeast Los Angeles; the 3rd, in the west San Fernando Valley; the 4th, in the Hollywood Hills and Mid-Wilshire, and the 5th, on the Westside and Sherman Oaks. Four other districts combined, including the 13th, where Tularosa Drive is located, have less than 1% of the total and the remaining five districts’ shares range from 2.1% to 7.8%.

“Our main concern is not only the housing,” said Tom Kruesopon, press secretary for Svornich, whose district contains 3,710 Housing Authority apartments, including the sprawling Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs projects. “It’s all the support systems that are needed to go with it--the police, the water, transportation, the schools. We are not saying that low income is not welcome. But we are saying that the city should look at doing it evenly among the districts so one part of the city shouldn’t be made to suffer.”

Land prices, ethnic and income segregation and 50 years of political tradition have all played a part in that pattern, analysts said. But if land costs are too high in some neighborhoods, the city should add its own money to the federal funds, suggested Alatorre and Svornich, who pushed the council to commission the still unfinished study last year.

More than 6,500 Los Angeles families are on waiting lists for Housing Authority apartments and many of them now live in overcrowded or slum conditions. Public housing rents are pegged to 30% of household income and many tenants pay less than $200 a month.

The new Republican majority in Congress wants to quickly end most public housing programs, saying that they breed welfare dependency and drug use. While unlikely, it is possible that Congress retroactively will eliminate committed but unspent funding, including some for Los Angeles. The Clinton Administration, as part of shake-ups at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, recently proposed replacing all such construction and maintenance subsidies in five years with vouchers that tenants could use for private or public housing.

Land has been purchased or optioned for 10 more Los Angeles buildings, averaging about 20 apartments each. Unless the City Hall debate changes things, two of those will be in Svornich’s 15th District. Six are proposed for the Pacoima and San Fernando areas of the 7th District and two for Reseda in the 3rd District. Meanwhile, land is being sought citywide for six other buildings that have federal funds earmarked for them.

The Housing Authority’s governing commission is to decide soon whether “fair share” among council districts should be a formal part of its siting decisions, said Chairwoman Ozie Gonzague. Overconcentration in two districts “is an obvious problem and anyone who does not recognize it as a problem is not looking at it,” she said.

Ironically, the debate about where to put public housing comes at a time when planners contend that they have found ways to avoid repeating the social segregation and debilitating drabness that haunts projects such as the 1,057-unit Nickerson Gardens, completed in 1955.

Local rules limit projects to 30 units. Tenants in the new, so-called scattered-site developments must have records of good rent payment and maintenance at other authority projects and no history of gang affiliation or drug use. Federal regulations have been relaxed to encourage nicer designs, and new buildings incorporate such attractive details as window casings, attic gables and wood siding.

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Symbolizing that change, a nine-unit Housing Authority project that opened last summer on East Opp Street in Wilmington was given a prestigious design award by the National Assn. of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. That development, like the one on Tularosa Drive, was designed by Jones & Martinez Architects in Los Angeles and consists mainly of two-story townhouses with three or four small bedrooms. The units, between 929 and 1,126 square feet, are small by commercial standards but coveted by tenants.

“There I had one cabinet and a bunch of roaches. Here I have a lot of cabinets and no roaches. I love it,” said Isabel Quihuiz, comparing her new Opp Street apartment to the one she had for 14 years in Wilmington’s Dana Strand Village. For $334 a month, she shares the new development’s sole one-story unit with her handicapped daughter and three grandchildren.

The wheelchair-accessible kitchen and bathrooms were attractions, but so was the safer environment. “It’s real peaceful,” she said. “I can sleep at night because I don’t hear any bullets anymore.”

Some planned Housing Authority developments can be built without council votes. Officials of the independent agency are not eager to antagonize council members by proceeding on controversial developments without consultation. However, Don Smith, authority executive director, said he is determined not to lose federal funding because of delays.

“I think the Housing Authority has to be responsive to the concerns in the City Council in the same sense it has to be responsive to the needs of very low-income people,” Smith said.

Other construction requires council approval for zoning changes or variances that neighbors oppose. For example, necessary zoning changes for 7th District projects have remained stalled for three years because former Councilman Ernani Bernardi opposed them, as does current Councilman Richard Alarcon. The authority spent $1.6 million in federal funds for the properties.

Proposals for Osborne Street and Osborne Place would offer 45 rental apartments. Citing an existing concentration of troubled rental buildings, Alarcon wants the projects switched to a heavily subsidized home ownership program. The agency plans to offer 30 units for sale at a nearby site, but maintains that those subsidies are not available for the other two buildings.

“I’m a big champion for affordable housing, but I believe there’s a right way to do it. These would be less than desirable conditions,” Alarcon said.

His San Fernando Valley district has the 446-unit San Fernando Gardens and ranks fifth among council districts in amount of public housing. Among the six new buildings that the authority wants to construct there are two on Foothill Boulevard that do not require council review. At one, Smith and Alarcon are discussing a plan to mix the units with some financed by nonprofit agencies.

In the Tularosa Drive neighborhood, some homeowners remain concerned about possible crowding and crime at the new building. Smith sought to ease fears by explaining how carefully the new tenants have been screened.

Most Los Angeles residents, he said, “don’t know public housing people. They have an idea that those people don’t live normal lives, which they do. The bulk of our residents want the same things you and I want. The have the same values.”