Where Many Fear to Tread, Some Find Reasons to Stay : Cypress Park: Gunshots and gangs are neighbors. But for many near ambush site, home is where the heart is.

Ann sizes up her neighborhood with a raw accounting that leaves no room for self-pity: True, she can hear local punks bashing down the walls of an empty building at night, but on the other hand, no one’s shot at her car--not ever.

Joyce performs the same quick calculus: true, gangbangers have tossed motor oil, corn dogs and even a street sign into her yard, but on the other hand, no one’s ever shoved a gun in her face.

The bad, sad, scary moments wheel off both women’s tongues, starting with the late-night taggers and continuing through last weekend, when 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen was killed in an ambush right down the block on Isabel Street.

These women know they live in a tough neighborhood. They’re even scared to give their real names. And yet, they cannot leave.

They will not leave.

The ambush shooting shocked the city and nation, as the graffiti-pocked alley became a symbol of urban lawlessness. Neighbors told stomach-churning stories about tucking their children into bathtubs to shield them from random gunfire.

The recitation of horrors raised the obvious question: Why would anyone want to live on Isabel Street? Urban affairs experts give the obvious answer: Most people cannot afford to move.

But some who live there say money is just one reason they stay. For better or worse, Cypress Park is home.

And they will not turn it over to teen-age hoodlums with close-cropped hair and saggy-baggy pants.

Joyce may be scared to read on her front porch. Ann may spend nights praying for her baby’s safety. But they are rooted to this Cypress Park neighborhood. They have poured money into their houses and energy into their friendships. Each scrappy tree holds memories of a child’s hide-and-seek, or a romantic rendezvous.

“We’ve got to stand firm,” Ann says. “We can’t give in to them.”

From Joyce: “If we leave, that’s saying ‘OK, you win.’ ”

Such stubbornness sounds nuts to some families who live near Isabel Street. They would love to get out, if they could scrape up the cash or find jobs elsewhere.

Simple economics trap them amid the grime and graffiti. Where else would they find a three-bedroom house for $350 a month? Or even $500? Where else could they walk to an assembly-line job, or zip over the hill to a Downtown office? A soft-voiced college student, who lives with three siblings and his mother in an apartment owned by an aunt, explained bluntly: “We’ve got no choice. We have to live in fear.”

Scoffing at such sob stories, other residents along Isabel Street insist that they live there with pride. Their neighborhood, they say, is not nearly as dangerous as the barking guard dogs and barred windows make it look.

“Everyone makes it seem like all hell broke loose, but it’s not that bad,” one young woman said as she unclipped her laundry from a line within sight of the flowers piled high in memory of Stephanie. “I’ve lived here 12 years and if I didn’t like it so much, we would have left.”

Neither terrified, like the college student, nor cocky, like the young woman, Ann and Joyce find themselves lonely crusaders.

Where the fearful lie low and the brazen walk tough, these women are trying to forge a normal life.

That means reclaiming their streets from the swaggers and scowls of gun-toting kids. It means coaxing the garden into a bloom that taunts the ugliness of graffiti. It means relaxing on the porch even when a neighbor glares maliciously. It means giving in when you have to but standing up when you can.

And it means working largely alone. Both Ann and Joyce have badgered police and politicians for years. They have vowed to keep calling. Yet they hold out little hope for official intervention. Instead, they make plans to fight on their own.

“It takes a lot of courage,” Joyce said. Then she reconsiders: “Or stupidity.”

Their stubbornness springs from a gutty commitment to the neighborhood.

Even when Joyce had to ask her teen-age daughters to stop throwing back-yard barbecues out of fear that local hoodlums would crash the parties, she never thought of leaving. Neither did Ann, even when she and her husband had to scrape up $3,000 to paint over graffiti.

“My husband and I . . . could gather our little pennies together and move away,” said Ann, now pregnant with her second child. “But I can’t move away. These are my people, this is my neighborhood. This is our piece of land. If we let it go now, who knows when we’ll ever own another piece of rock? And we’ll be letting them take over for good.”

That dig-in-the-heels philosophy often emerges after a crisis like the Isabel Street ambush, according to Jacqueline Leavitt, a UCLA professor of urban planning.

Leavitt has studied families living in the troubled projects of Los Angeles and the sagging apartments of Harlem. Sometimes, she said, “when things get as bad as they have, [long-term residents] may be willing to make a stand. They say, ‘This is our community. These are our children. We have a stake in both and we want to stick up for them.’ ”

Born and raised in the slow-sinking neighborhood near Isabel Street, Ann fits that profile. She remembers playing “red light, green light” outside her house at dusk. She would love to see her 2-year-old daughter scampering down the very same streets.

It is hard to imagine such a carefree future, however, when she cooks dinner to the sound of young toughs smashing down the walls of a tumble-down apartment building with a sledgehammer. Or when she hears the pop-bang-blam of weekend revelry--guns fired in the air, at street signs, or maybe at passing cars. “I just lie in bed praying, ‘Please God, don’t let that bullet hit anyone,’ ” she said.

To many mothers, that level of fear may sound unbearable. But in the stark system Ann has developed to measure bad against good, it is merely a nuisance.

“It’s not like that every weekend,” she explained. “Just in the summer, people become a little loco. “

Friends tell her she is crazy to stay. “But I think I sound pretty sane,” Ann said. “If it was like that every weekend, I would have moved out long ago for the sake of my daughter. But it’s not.”

Joyce’s husband, Dave, uses a similar scale to weigh the merits of his neighborhood. Hoodlums shooting in the air have bounced bullets off his roof. Yet, horrifying as that sounds, he quickly noted: “It’s only on the holidays, mainly.” Kids once torched a neighbor’s car that had been parked in gangster-only turf. He took it as a lesson: Now he knows not to park there himself.

Much as he rails against the scowling youngsters who urinate on his lawn and toss firecrackers into storm drains, Dave cannot believe that he would find more peace elsewhere. His brother, he pointed out, owns a home in West Hills--and has been frightened by a surge of child molestations and a shooting at the local mall. His neighbor’s son lives in Highland Park, and walks in fear of local gangs.

“Where are you going to go?” he asked.

Dave works at a Downtown tattoo parlor, just a seven-minute drive from his house. He has three more $200 payments to make until he owns his house free and clear. He is 53 years old, and cannot see starting over.

“For God’s sake, Provo, Utah has got Crips chapters,” he said. “It can’t be any better in any other neighborhood.”

A few miles down the road, Maria Oliveros refuses to buy into that attitude. She is eager to escape her home on the far end of Isabel Street, where her 8-year-old daughter plays with sugar packets in a scruffy scrap of a lawn behind a chin-high iron fence. Oliveros worries about rats in the garbage, gangsters on the street, chaos in the schools. She wants to get out.

The family can afford $400 a month rent--perhaps enough to lift them from their grubby surroundings--but Oliveros has no idea where to move.

“I haven’t asked anyone,” she said in Spanish.

Her confusion is typical of many low-income families, said Barbara Zeidman, who helps put together financing packages from the Los Angeles office of the federal Fannie Mae mortgage program. Zeidman calls it an “information gap”--families feel stuck in scary neighborhoods because they do not know where to turn.

Traditional real estate brokers may not know about cheaper homes or low-cost financing, Zeidman says; community groups and churches often have better resources.

Just last week, Zeidman learned of three dozen homes on the market in Inglewood, Compton and Carson with prices from $85,000 to $140,000. “They’re in very safe, stable neighborhoods,” she said. Zeidman reports a similar glut in the San Fernando Valley.

And with the right financing, buyers can move in with 5% or even 3% down payments. Meanwhile, apartment owners, desperate for tenants, have been offering super-cheap move-in deals, waiving the usual requirements of two months rent plus a hefty security deposit.

“There’s more product at reasonable prices than we’ve ever seen before,” Zeidman said. “People . . . have to realize, they don’t have to be held hostage to truly bad living conditions.”

Joyce and Ann turn that reasoning around: They refuse to be held hostage, but rather than flee, they are standing firm.

Toting up their income, Ann and her husband have figured they could move to Montebello, to a comfortable house with a $200,000 price tag. “Sure, we could do that,” Ann says. “But if we do, we’re going to be living day to day and that’s stupid. We like to live well, take our trips to Mexico, own nice cars.”

They also like to live near family. Ann’s mother still lives down the street, still sits out in her garden greeting other old-timers. Her godmother lives nearby, too.

“If I move away, I’m leaving my life,” Ann said. “I’m proud of living in this neighborhood. Yes it’s gone down, yes it has.” But she has resolved to bring it back up. “And I’m not going to get involved in vain.”

From her office at the nonprofit Home Loan Counseling Center, Director Gloria Ancira cheers such resolve. Her job is to help low-income families finance new housing. She will arrange deals for anyone fleeing Isabel Street. But she would rather they stay.

“There’s a time when you have to stand up,” Ancira said. “That doesn’t mean you have to confront a hoodlum with a gun, just start cleaning the place up a little at a time. Why should [the gangs] hold you prisoner?”

Ann agrees. Her philosophy is simple, and she intends to prove it right.

“Good always has to win over evil,” she said. “Always.”

* SLAYING ARRESTS: Police arrest three suspects in shooting of 3-year-old. B1