To Erase Blight, Some Rules Need to Change
Two apartment houses on 29th Street, south of downtown Los Angeles, are a perfect illustration of how hard it is to eliminate slum housing from the inner city.
It’s a neighborhood of working poor, mostly Latino immigrants who have jobs in the nearby garment district.
One of the apartment houses, now empty, was gutted by fire several months ago. The second floor is gone. A chain-link fence surrounds a yard littered with garbage. The faded green paint, covered with graffiti, is peeling.
Directly across 29th Street is a sparkling white 2-year-old Mediterranean-style complex, with families living in three- and four-bedroom apartments; a day care center and other facilities are also on the premises.
When I visited the place the other day, I walked past murals by the late Bill Granizo and into a child care center on the first floor, attended by about 40 poor children. Upstairs, adults studied for jobs in health care. That night, there would be English classes.
All this was built by the Esperanza Community Housing Corp., a nonprofit organization. Esperanza wants to buy the burned-out hulk across the street and turn it into something worthwhile.
But economics, budget cutting House Republican committees and a far-reaching action by state Treasurer Matt Fong have combined to stymie the effort.
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If it were left to market economics, livable, affordable housing would never be built in old inner-city L.A. neighborhoods. Land costs are high, making new construction prohibitive. Rehabbing old buildings is expensive. Yet the need is great, particularly in the vast flatlands extending south from downtown.
Here, in this low-income part of town, rent consumes a huge amount of people’s take-home pay, up to 80% for those earning less than $12,000 a year, according to a Los Angeles city study.
A number of government programs are designed to encourage developers to build in this spare market. One provides tax breaks to encourage corporations to help finance low-rent apartments.
Drawing on those breaks, Sister Diane Donoghue, executive director of Esperanza, raised the money to build the apartments on 29th Street, along with others in the area. Rents range from $350 to $475 a month for a three bedroom apartment, depending on the tenant’s income, and $405 to $525 for a four-bedroom. The child care centers and classes are included.
In contrast, two bedroom apartments in old, often overcrowded buildings are advertised at $575 a month. And you’re on your own when it comes to child care.
The tax breaks to encourage such construction are administered by state Treasurer Fong. When prospective builders want a break, they apply to Fong for funding.
Republican Fong was confronted with a crisis in the program when he took office last year.
Developers, hurting from years of a building drought, began building in poor areas, and applied for government help, flooding Fong with applications. At the same time, Fong said, the new, cost-cutting chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Archer, took aim at the tax break program, particularly at its heavy use in California.
“My strategy was to protect the program by showing we could cut cost,” Fong told me. So he revised the criteria, giving preference to developers who promised to build the most units at the least cost. In the new criteria, no provision was made for the cost of child care centers or other fringe benefits, such as those offered by Esperanza.
These decisions were ratified by a state investment committee. One committee member, state Controller Kathleen Connell, dissented. “Are we trading off quality for quantity?” she asked when we talked last week. Are we creating buildings, she wondered, that will soon become slums?
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The new criteria make it difficult for Esperanza to buy the apartment across the street and turn it into its kind of place. The bottom line requirements favor no-frills builders.
Connell is fighting to change the criteria. Fong said we can’t afford to do so. Meanwhile, Jess Mendoza, who owns the burned building, said he’ll either rebuild it or sell it--to Esperanza if it can put up the cash.
Maybe all our slums won’t be replaced by decent housing in the near future, but at least there’s hope of cleaning up the blight on a corner of 29th Street.
