Central Los Angeles : Public Housing Project Offers a Window of Opportunity

With their Cape Cod-style roofs and blue-and-white facades, the townhomes of the Tularosa Drive Community in Silver Lake are not what you would expect of a public housing project.

Instead, they are “integrated into the neighborhood, and they are probably the nicest building in the neighborhood,” says Don J. Smith, executive director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority.

The seven homes, which were displayed in an open house last week, are the latest in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Scattered Sites” program.

The program is unique not only in size and architecture, but also in its residents.

“All these families have been carefully selected based on certain criteria,” said Smith. “The majority of the residents are employed, they have a good rent-paying record and they are on their way to success.”

For Virginia Lopez, a supermarket employee who used to live with her family in the Pico Aliso projects on the Eastside, the new homes are a blessing in more ways than one.

“This is another world,” she said. “In Pico Aliso there were shootings all the time and the children couldn’t go out anywhere. Here, I only hear the crickets. And for the first time, my daughter has her own room.”

The Tularosa homes, which are wheelchair accessible, are the fifth Scattered Site built in Los Angeles. Residents pay rent based on income and tend to be families trying to make a transition toward home ownership.

Unfortunately, said Smith, Congress is cutting funding for this type of housing, “but we’ll continue to build under different types of financing.”