Class Struggle Unfolds in in Antelope Valley Tracts

From a distance, they all look the same--endless rows of stucco structures blending into the desert, with their Spanish-style roofs, big picture windows and saplings struggling against the Antelope Valley’s harsh seasons.

But up close, along some streets of these newer suburban tracts, the contrasts are sharp, the divisions deepening.

In this most unlikely place, 70 miles north of Los Angeles’ urban core, a class struggle is unfolding, pitting those who have against those who want.

Once the refuge of mostly middle-income families, some Antelope Valley communities are becoming home to increasing numbers of welfare recipients taking advantage of plummeting real estate values and soaring vacancies.

The resulting culture clash has created harsh feelings and new obstacles in neighborhoods already plagued by financial hardships and domestic strains. Listen to the rancor of two women who share a Palmdale block convulsed by change:

“I equate lower income people with lower education,” says Marine Corps reservist Susan Kerpan, 29, who bought a house on East 13th Street four years ago when the area largely was composed of dual income families. “I don’t consider them as high quality as other people.”

Down the block, in a rented, 1,500-square-foot home with stone fireplace and mauve carpets, is Tammy Chambers, 33, and her extended family. “I think it’s racial the way they look at us,” says the African American welfare recipient of 15 years. “It’s like the niggers have arrived.”

Certainly, not all Antelope Valley neighborhoods are being torn by emotions so raw and unrestrained. Although many residents say they have seen and felt the jarring demographic changes, their own tracts have been spared the worst of the problems. The friction tends to get hottest in developments closer to Palmdale’s core.

Homeowners there--thinking they had found safe, upwardly mobile suburbs for their families--boil with resentment. After returning from work and round-trip commutes of up to four hours, some have a hard time feeling neighborly about people staying home all day collecting federal housing subsidies and welfare.

One renter turned a home’s double-car garage into a sweatshop, where Latino women sewed garments day and night. At another home, police used a battering ram to break down the door in a midday drug raid.

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The newer arrivals, for their part, bristle at being stereotyped as low-class freeloaders. They say they have every right to flee roach-infested inner-city hovels in search of upscale suburban homes. They say they are being unfairly blamed for the Antelope Valley’s economic woes and social problems, including rising crime and family breakdowns.

Mario Galvan, a stocky 41-year-old man with salt-and-pepper hair, used to live in a North Hollywood government-subsidized apartment complex so dangerous he wouldn’t let his two youngest girls ride their bikes there. Galvan, a former mason, hasn’t worked since 1979, when gang members in a bar beat his head so badly with a pipe they left him for dead.

With just $450 dollars down, Galvan recently bought a $77,000, three-bedroom home. His family’s sole monthly income: $1,500 from welfare and Social Security, plus $100 in food stamps.

“People on welfare also want to own homes,” Galvan says of his impeccably maintained residence. “Everyone wants to own something.”

The New Economy

Collapsing home prices are largely responsible for the demographic upheaval in Palmdale and other Antelope Valley communities. In the late 1980s, it was tough to find a hotter real estate market anywhere in the nation. But California’s crippling recession, coupled with huge layoffs in local aerospace jobs, brought the momentum to a crashing halt.

Palmdale now has the nation’s highest estimated foreclosure rate, according to DataQuick Information Systems Inc., a real estate tracking firm. Nearly 27% of homes there, roughly four times California’s average, have been lost to the bank or forfeited in other ways since 1990--some 6,300 of them. On some days, says local gas company worker Robert Godinez, he disconnects service at three houses, one after the other.

Some homes now are worth two-thirds, even half, of what buyers paid in the 1980s. Auctions have brought as little as $39,500 for three-bedroom residences that are practically new. Facing such substantial losses--and not wanting to risk a record of foreclosure--many owners are renting out or even selling houses for prices so low they can be covered by a welfare check.

And the word is out.

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In recent years, an estimated 25,000 people on public assistance have transferred their cases from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley. So many people now flock to the Antelope Valley welfare office that it often temporarily closes its doors by 9 a.m. because of overcrowding.

Nearly four in 10 children at Antelope Valley High School have parents on welfare.

At the Vons supermarket in central Palmdale, checker Carol Ann Wagner says that a decade ago, food stamps totaled 2% to 5% of her daily register receipts. Today, she says, it’s 40%.

At a nearby Palmdale Boulevard mini-mall, where 10 of 11 stores have been unoccupied for a year or more, hair salon owner Martha Flores says the vast majority of her customers now collect public assistance. Many of them, she says, ask in vain to swap food stamps for $5 haircuts. “They have moved all the people on welfare from L.A. to Palmdale,” Flores complains with the kind of exaggeration voiced by many.

Meanwhile, the Salvation Army estimates that the number of homeless people has tripled since 1989 as word of beautiful abandoned homes has spread on the streets of Los Angeles. The most brazen arrive with moving vans and take up residence in the houses.

“We didn’t dream of this happening in the suburbs,” says Mike Dispenza, whose State Farm Insurance employees in Palmdale ask to leave before dark. “These are not problems created by Palmdale. They were brought to Palmdale.”

Joining the Urban Club

With the region’s falling economic fortunes has come a rise in crime.

Cynical cops have re-christened the Antelope Valley Freeway “the Sewer from L.A.” By 1994, Palmdale, with 104,000 residents, had a higher per capita rate of violent crime than Long Beach or San Francisco, much larger cities.

In the core of Palmdale, some parents cover their children’s bedroom windows with plywood to deflect gunfire. Women describe barricading their doors after a rash of home invasions, including one in January in which two men repeatedly raped and sodomized four women at gunpoint.

From 1989 to 1996, there has been a grim tenfold rise in Antelope Valley gang members to 3,500. The 1,000 gang incidents last year included a dozen murders.

At the glitzy, 6-year-old Antelope Valley Mall, numerous anti-gang measures have been instituted, including rules that no more than three youths can walk together and that baseball caps cannot be worn backward or sideways. Also, no one--including shoppers--can sit on the benches for more than 15 minutes.

“Everything that happens in L.A. happens up here, only less frequently,” says gang-detail Deputy Brian Schoonmaker, wheeling his black-and-white onto the streets of Palmdale.

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By 7 p.m. on one recent evening, a volley of gunfire erupts, and the similarities are evident.

Schoonmaker strides into the Antelope Valley Hospital emergency room, pulling back a curtain. A teenager lies on a stainless steel gurney. Schoonmaker carefully circles the dead boy, who is naked save for a pair of white sneakers.

He gingerly lifts edges of the white sheet covering the teen, using a flashlight to help pinpoint gang tattoos. The light stops at a gaping bullet hole in the chest, by the heart. The beam then moves to the left side of the 18-year-old’s face. Blood spills from his head.

“Major, major gangster,” Schoonmaker says.

He then rushes to the crime scene, where another dead youth is sprawled on the ground, body twisted like a pretzel, hands thrust upward, a bullet wound to his head, too.

“We get a lot of the crime increase because we get troubled kids from L.A.,” Schoonmaker says. “You bring a troubled kid up here, and they are still troubled.”

One Street, Many Problems

Just outside downtown Palmdale, less than a mile from City Hall, is the Poppyfield development. Built in 1985, it was among the first of the Antelope Valley’s new suburban tracts, with 208 homes. People camped out for the chance to pay between $67,000 to $86,900 for the houses.

The changes that have swept through some of Palmdale’s neighborhoods seem to have converged in this development, especially on East 13th Street. More than a third of the block’s houses have foreclosed or are in the process of doing so. One home has been sold six times.

At various times, abandoned houses on the street have been adopted by squatters, including a woman dubbed the “crazy lady,” who would sit naked on the front lawn, tending a temple she had made of wood and rocks. Before the mortgage lender booted her out, she went door to door with a petition blaming the local Vons supermarket for the desert’s sizzling temperatures and demanding that the parking lot lights be turned off at night.

In all, the 22 homes on East 13th Street are split about evenly between owners and renters, many of whom are minorities collecting welfare.

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The homeowners, most of whom are white, insist that the issue is not one of race but of pride and consideration. They fondly point to 68-year-old Wilma Collor, an African American who bought a foreclosed home in 1994 after retiring as a Thrifty Drug Store cashier.

Now a part-time crossing guard and foster mother, Collor spends Sunday mornings at Mass and then weeds the front lawn in the afternoon with her two adopted and two foster children.

Collor recalls how one white neighbor planted her yard with sod and wouldn’t take a dime for a day’s backbreaking work. “You have to respect people,” she says, “to be treated well.”

East 13th Street homeowner Carol, who is fearful of having her last name used, looks shellshocked as she explains why many of the block’s residents haven’t rolled out the welcome wagon.

Carol and her husband, an editor of a small magazine, moved to the street eight years ago from a one-bedroom apartment in Burbank. She was pregnant with their first child.

They looked for a house in Los Angeles, but most in their price range were tiny boxes in predominantly Latino and black neighborhoods, where Carol, who is white, says she felt uncomfortable. In Palmdale, the family found a three-bedroom, two-bath model with baby blue carpeting, cathedral ceilings and a gazebo outside, all for $94,000 and 3% down. “It was everything we needed and wanted,” Carol says.

By 1991, the first renter, a woman on welfare, had moved in across the street. Soon, cars were dropping by every 10 minutes, particularly on days when welfare checks arrived. Carol began videotaping the comings and goings. She gave police one tape of a boy arriving in a limousine, then scampering in and out of the house, pausing only when he dropped a small white package.

Several times, an 8-year-old girl from the neighboring home frantically pounded on Carol’s door, pleading to make a 911 call. The youngster told the emergency operator that her mother was being beaten by a boyfriend.

Eventually, Carol says, she erected a fence blocking the pathway to her door after overhearing the girl whisper into the receiver: “My mom has the money. Can you bring the other stuff over?”

The troublesome neighbors moved after police plowed down their front door with a battering ram in search of drugs. Earlier this year, just two blocks away, police announced an $11-million drug bust of renters.

“We have people here who don’t belong here,” says Carol, who is in the process of renting out her house. “They are infiltrating our area. . . . We feel trapped. I want nothing more than to get out of here.”

Room With a View

Around the corner, Gene Mandel and his family would count drug deals while eating at their dining room table. Through a picture window, they could see three or four transactions before dessert. The next morning, syringes, butane lighters and balloons used to store drugs would be strewn on the street and a neighboring field.

A Raytheon Co. quality assurance inspector, Mandel led a successful neighborhood crusade to have the city erect red-and-white barricades at the end of the street to slow the narcotics trafficking.

Besides the druggies, Mandel says, are the squatters and burglars. One house around the corner, he says, has been broken into 27 times.

On Christmas Eve two years ago, Mandel chased three burglars he saw running from a neighbor’s house. Later that day, the same home was hit again. Fearful for his own house, Mandel sat that night in the kitchen--a .38-caliber revolver on the table--while his family delivered holiday presents.

Mandel now thinks back in amazement to that day 10 years ago when he slept overnight in his van to snag a Poppyfield home with a corner lot and big driveway. These days, he sleeps with his pistol on a night stand.

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Desert Storm veteran Susan Kerpan is fearful, too. “I don’t feel as safe as in L.A.” says the UCLA office manager, who used to rent a West Los Angeles apartment but couldn’t afford to buy anything larger than “a closet” in that neighborhood. She used a Veterans Affairs loan requiring no down payment to buy on East 13th for $110,000.

Five months ago, Kerpan put her house on the market for $79,500 and stopped making payments on the mortgage. Not one looky-loo has come through.

Rap Music and China Plates

Complicating the already tense relationships on East 13th Street is the great cultural divide.

Carol Ann Wagner and her Danish American mother, 76-year-old Oda Hutchison, sit primly over coffee and cookies--listening to rap music laced with vulgar lyrics blaring from next door. The thumping rhythm is so powerful it seems to rattle the ladies’ cherished collection of Royal Copenhagen plates lining their living room wall.

“It isn’t the welfare,” Wagner says of her neighbors, the Chambers. “It’s the attitude they carry.”

Hutchison, her silvery gray hair neatly pinned back, remembers when she chastised one of the neighbors’ girls for throwing garbage over the back fence, and the girl screamed in response that she was prejudiced. Others on the block recall the children responding to criticism with a simple, “Get back into your house, whitey!”

A year ago, Wagner, who used to live in Torrance, installed an alarm system and had a heavy black iron cage constructed around her front door with another locked gate across the front walkway.

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Tammy Chambers acknowledges that her family is less traditional than many on the block. For starters, while her mother rents the house for $600 a month, Chambers and other relatives use it during the day for family child care. At any given time, she says, as many as 20 children and adults stay at the four-bedroom house.

At night, Chambers, her five children and various nephews and nieces head over to a Palmdale apartment to sleep. The East 13th Street house then reverts to Chambers’ mom--who commutes to a county job in downtown Los Angeles--and her four foster children.

Despite what others may think, Chambers says, she and her children don’t do drugs or drink and aren’t in gangs--although her 17-year son says he was expelled from Palmdale High School after being suspended “about a dozen times” for fighting. A nephew who occasionally would stay at the house served jail time for an Antelope Valley assault.

Chambers, who is black, attributes the neighborhood hostility to people who fear the darkening complexion of Palmdale; the city’s white population dropped from 84% in 1980 to an estimated 60% last year. Earlier this year, a black Antelope Valley High School student was seriously stabbed with a screwdriver in the back while on campus, part of a disturbing wave of skinhead-related incidents.

Before moving to the Antelope Valley, Chambers was renting a small and more costly apartment in South-Central. The higher rent meant less money to feed the children. Her oldest boy, then 14, was terrorized by gang members, who one day chased him home with guns drawn.

In her new neighborhood, Chambers says, there is less crime and temptation, and her children, who have reading problems, get tutors at schools far better than anything back in the inner city. In Palmdale, she says, the county’s monthly allotment of $926 in welfare and $300 in food stamps for her family stretches much further.

“Here, it is better,” says Chamber, sitting in her living room beneath portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. “If this whole block is on welfare, who cares? Long as they pay their rent.”

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East 13th Street resident Mike Lyle says it’s unfair for the block’s non-welfare families to demonize anyone surviving on tax dollars. “There are a lot of good people on welfare who need a little help until they can get off of it,” says Lyle.

He’s one of them.

Lyle, 26, moved to Palmdale from Valencia earlier this year after losing a construction job. Lyle, his girlfriend and their three young children share a three-bedroom house on East 13th Street, living off $675 a month in welfare, $400 a month in unemployment benefits and $150 a month in food stamps. They also get some help from Lyle’s grandparents.

Standing in his garage, decorated with two U.S. flags, Lyle says he, for one, isn’t interested in long-term handouts. Every month, Lyle, who is white, dials dozens of plumbers looking for work. He is mulling a move to employment-rich Las Vegas.

“For me,” he says, “welfare isn’t a way of life.”

From Bust to Boom?

On East 13th Street, optimism isn’t always easy to find. But a glimmer of it can be seen at the end of the block, at Mike Ribancos’ place. Although he’s had to call the police to roust squatters moving in across the street, he’s satisfied with his suburban life.

Ribancos, who bought his house new in 1987, says he has left his garage door open overnight and nothing has vanished.

“I’m not bothered by the rentals,” he says, “as long as they are quiet and the kids are disciplined.”

Some civic leaders see the social and economic struggles of the Antelope Valley as part of a difficult but cyclical transition. They say the region has been through bad times before, and good days have followed.

There are signs, for instance, that the overheated foreclosure rates might cool somewhat this fall, says John Karevoll, financial editor of DataQuick Information Systems.

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Both Palmdale and its neighbor, Lancaster, have been working feverishly to diversify their aerospace-dependent economies.

Business leaders and residents alike point to the transformation of Orange County, which in the 1960s lacked jobs and was mostly a bedroom community of Los Angeles. Now, four in five Orange County homeowners are employed locally.

As Palmdale’s mayor since 1992--and a resident for nearly three decades--Jim Ledford says he’s gotten an earful from homeowners who blame almost all the city’s problems on the newly arriving welfare recipients. Ledford says he’s sympathetic to the sentiments, but not to the generalities.

“I think sometimes we need to look at ourselves as well,” he says of the city’s more settled residents.

Yes, he says, there are some “families from hell” with “no regard for the neighborhood or community.” But there are many families receiving public assistance, Ledford says, “who have a basic desire to live a life that is productive.”

“If we have a sense of community,” he says, “I think we can overcome just about any issue that comes our way.”

Still, skeptics abound.

Palmdale Police Sgt. Kevin Wright Carney--who also serves as an elected trustee for the local high school district--expects more trouble to come rolling over the mountains from Los Angeles.

“Things haven’t bottomed out,” Carney says. “Anyone who tells you that is fooling themselves.”

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Public Aid in the Antelope Valley

Although the number of people on public assistance in Los Angeles County has declined since 1994, the number in the county’s Lancaster office, which serves almost all of the Antelope Valley, is on the rise. Public assistance includes Aid to Families With Dependent Children, general relief, food stamps and Medi-Cal.

Antelope Valley Public Assistance

* Jan. 1, 1994: 45,681

* Jan. 1, 1996: 49,289

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A look at the ethnic breakdown of people on public assistance in the Antelope Valley region.

* White: 48.7%

* Latino: 31.8%

* African American: 17.2%

* Asian: 1.5%

* Native American: 0.2%

* Filipino: 0.8%

Source: Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services

PALMDALE

A Story in Numbers

S tatistical snapshots from the Antelope Valley community of Palmdale on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert:

POPULATION EXPLOSION

Palmdale has experienced galloping growth in population.

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1980 1990 1996 2000 proj. Population 12,277 68,842 111,980 136,551

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ETHNIC MAKEUP

Palmdale’s ethnic mix is changing rapidly .

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1980 1990 1995 est. 2000 proj. White 84% 67% 60% 52% Latino 9% 22% 27% 33% Black 3% 6% 7% 8% A.I./Eskimo/Aleut 2% 1% 1% 1% Asian/P.I. 1% 4% 6% 7%

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Notes: A.I. is American Indian; P.I. is Pacific Islander. In 1980, Latinos were counted as “Spanish origin.” Numbers do not necessarily add up to 100% because of rounding .

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THE HOUSING FACTOR

Since 1980, the number of housing units in Palmdale has skyrocketed . . .

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1980 1990 1995 est. 2000 proj. Housing Units 8,337 24,400 37,409 47,598

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. . .but the vacancy rate now hovers around 10%.

Total housing units Jan. 1, 1996: 37,736

Total housing units occupied: 34,034

Total of housing units vacant: 3,702, or nearly 10%.

Housing fact: Of cities with populations of at least 50,000, Palmdale was the fastest-growing in the nation, according to the 1990 census. Now, it has the country’s highest estimated foreclosure rate.

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CRIME ON THE RISE

The overall crime rate in Palmdale has worsened in the last five years, particularly in the areas of larceny and assault. Major crimes are up 25% since 1989-90.

Palmdale Crime--Cases Handled

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July ’89 -- July ’90 * 1991 1992 1993 1994 Criminal Homicide 3 4 13 10 10 Forcible Rape 32 40 44 50 37 Robbery 129 154 212 250 240 Aggravated Assault 636 701 812 935 859 Burglary 920 1,027 1,059 1,030 990 Larceny Theft 1,486 1,755 1,945 1,887 1,818 Grand Theft Auto 687 554 638 761 871 Arson 24 24 29 57 64 TOTAL 3,917 4,629 4,752 4,980 4,889

1995 Criminal Homicide 7 Forcible Rape 39 Robbery 290 Aggravated Assault 828 Burglary 1,073 Larceny Theft 2,138 Grand Theft Auto 788 Arson 52 TOTAL 5,225

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* Note: In 1990, sheriffs’ figures were calculated on a fiscal year basis; later figures were calculated on a calendar year basis.

The total number of cases handled by police in Palmdale is up 21% since 1991.

1991: 12,117

1992: 12,755

1993: 11,796

1994: 11,725

1995: 14,919

Sources: U.S. Census; Claritas Inc.; DataQuick Information Systems; Calif. Dept. of Finance; Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Management Information Services.