Neighborhoods’ Turnaround Offers Hope : * Revitalization of Buena Clinton and Former Commodore Circle Show Change Is Possible

It is not easy to turn around a slum. Unemployment, drugs, overcrowded housing and crime all have to be fought in what can be painfully slow battles. But cities have the tools if they have willpower, as Garden Grove and Huntington Beach have shown.

The Buena Clinton area of Garden Grove was considered Orange County’s worst slum in the 1980s. Ice cream trucks lined the streets of the small, 38-acre neighborhood on summer nights, selling drugs as well as sundaes. Vans filled with prostitutes rolled through the streets, stopping while women went door-to-door, offering their services.

In some Buena Clinton apartments built for three or four people, 10 or 15 lived. Overused showers caused mildew; overused toilets sent raw sewage into the streets. Vermin ran rampant.

But then the city cracked down. After 10 years and millions of city and federal dollars, Buena Clinton is not even in the top 20 of the city’s highest-crime areas, according to police. Most apartments no longer are overcrowded. An industrial park within the neighborhood provides jobs. Residents feel safer, happier.

A combined effort by city officials, including police, nonprofit agencies and developers, helped the turnaround. The city wisely continues to keep a close eye on the area. It inspects properties to guard against overcrowding and dangerous conditions. It is offering help to landlords willing to improve properties. It is soliciting other nonprofit agencies to buy houses and rent them to tenants at affordable rates.

Huntington Beach too deserves credit for its work with Commodore Circle, now so spruced up that the name has been changed to Amberleaf Circle. There too community policing made a big difference. Neighbors gradually overcame their wariness of police and started to view them as allies. Building inspectors enforced codes, giving residents a feeling they no longer were living in dangerous rattraps.

Although rehabilitation was expensive, so was providing city services to slums. Police spent a disproportionately large time in the run-down areas, only to see conditions deteriorate as soon as they turned their backs. Now officials say they are trying to maintain conditions, rather than being forced to overhaul everything.

Better-looking buildings and lower crime rates benefit the tenants of the immediate neighborhoods, but they also make a big difference for the entire city, as a slum improves to the status of a livable neighborhood.