WESTLAKE : 2 Rental Complexes Offer Job Services

Following a trend begun two years ago with the opening of the Casa Loma housing facility, local developers recently opened two more low-income complexes offering shelter and social services in the MacArthur Park area.

The Mercedes and Marina apartments, sister facilities on Coronado and Carondelet streets, opened May 18. The buildings have 111 units and offer educational and job training for youths and adults, as well as recreation facilities for children and teen-agers.

They are the third and fourth such complexes developed in the overcrowded Westlake area, where impoverished working parents--many of them single mothers--sometimes find themselves losing control of their children to the influence of gangs and substance abuse.

“I refuse to call these ‘housing projects,’ ” said Gloria Ferias, director of the nonprofit Pico-Union Housing Corp., one of the two developers. “It isn’t just housing we should address, but the problems surrounding the buildings.”

Of 200 families that have been interviewed for vacancies in both buildings, 155 are headed by single parents, many of them young adults, Ferias said.

The Pico-Union development group teamed with for-profit Showplace Development to construct the two buildings, which offer one- to four-bedroom units ranging from $263 to $696 a month, accommodating very low, low and moderate incomes.

Educational services include computer classes for youths and adults and after-school tutoring for children and teen-agers. Training for residents in careers as diverse as maintenance, accounting and property management is offered at the Pico-Union Housing Corp. headquarters at 162 S. Toberman Ave.

Each building has a community recreation area for youths offering basketball, Ping-Pong, reading and other activities, run by a social director. Both buildings also have playground areas for younger children.

Although neither building offers child care, Ferias said her group is looking into constructing a day-care center on a nearby vacant lot to serve residents.

Ferias likes to personally interview each prospective tenant, but says they need not be the model tenants other facilities might seek.

“We’re willing to take on problem families,” she said. “When I interview them, I even like to interview the children, because that way we can concentrate on their problems from the beginning. Rather than evicting [a problem family], we would rather help them work out their problems.”

The two buildings cost about $16 million in public and private funds, with $5.5 million coming from the Century Freeway Housing Program, a state housing program designed to replace at least 5,700 of the 8,000 housing units lost throughout the Los Angeles area because of freeway construction.

This program also helped fund Casa Loma, constructed by nonprofit developers New Economics for Women, and its sister facility, Villa Mariposa, now under construction.

Marina and Mercedes apartments information: (213) 747-2790.