Boyle Heights

Public housing across the United States is entering a new era.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants 100,000 substandard American public units destroyed before century’s end. The hope: to end the warehousing and isolation of the poorest poor, while creating mixed-income communities where role models abound and stereotypes explode.

With demolition, reconstruction and remodeling planned, residents are being given the option to move into the private sector through Section 8 housing assistance. Some have seen enough, lost too much, and they will leave. For others, this is home.

Here, reports from Chicago and Boyle Heights.

*

Flowers overflow an old wooden fence, its skewed pickets shedding slivers and flakes of white paint. Two kittens, different colors, stare out from a window. Roses rise alongside front stoops. Some grow tall and hide walls scarred by earthquakes. Or deterioration. Or bullets.

It is the bullets we hear about, portraying the Pico Gardens, Aliso Extension Apartments and Aliso Village public housing projects clustered in Boyle Heights as an urban hell of street gangs and violence.

Why would anyone stay?

“This is my home,” says Anita Moore. “I love Aliso Village. I pray for Aliso Village. We used to stand on the four corners of this place and just pray. Just pray.”

Moore, 55, has lived here almost 25 years. She knows the people here, has worked to help them, as they have helped her. In midafternoon and sometimes into the evening, she sits with friends Charlene McCoy and Iola Henry in a corridor between their buildings, where they have had wedding receptions and birthday parties, christenings and baby showers.

She raised five children here and served as president of the Residents Advisory Council for 15 years. With bullets flying, she has charged into streets screaming to shooters and to God, “Please, please stop.”

Moore worked with gang members, trying to bring peace. She attended their funerals and wept until the hollowness inside her claimed her tears, and she could cry no more.

“I didn’t know that could happen,” she says. “I was going to two funerals a week for about two months. I believe that kids belong to everybody, and I thought we could save them all. I went to a funeral for a kid I had known since the womb, and I sat there, and I couldn’t cry.”

She will stay, she says, because this is her home. She works in the cafeteria across the street at Utah Street School. Her church, Christian Fellowship Church of the Foursquare Gospel, where she teaches Sunday school, is just around the corner.

Despite the different languages spoken here--Spanish, Vietnamese, Cambodian--people communicate in times of need.

“If you want to help someone, you find a way,” she says. “And that’s what people here do. We help each other.”

Mothers stood shoulder to shoulder in front of Dolores Mission Church last year when gang rivalry threatened to interfere with a funeral. The women formed a human wall, so gang members from a different area could safely attend the funeral Mass.

There are underlying truths about Pico-Aliso and Aliso Village. Yes, there is violence here. Yes, there are drugs. Yes, there are street gangs. And yes, there is poverty and despair.

Behind some doors, families live without furniture. Neighbors take up collections when they learn someone is without food. They have carwashes and sell food to raise money for those in need.

“Go through our garbage cans and see what you find,” Moore says. “See what our kids eat. You won’t find caviar or pate, but at least our kids eat. They may not get the best cuts of meat, but they have a little piece of chicken or something. Sometimes I tell my kids I’m going to take off and fly I eat so much chicken.”

Pending further funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 203 of the 685 units at Aliso Village will be demolished; the remainder will be upgraded. Funding already is in place to demolish the 577 units at Pico Gardens and Aliso Extension. Upon reconstruction there will be 421 units, including 60 senior citizen apartments.

When Moore came to Aliso Village, she did not intend to stay, but what she found here was a home, not an apartment. A home is not a building. It is a community with its churches and stores, families and neighbors.

It is plants growing on water and hope along a foot-wide stretch of haggard dirt between a street curb and freeway embankment.

It is laughter and visits from children in college--welcomed home by roses.

It is also Maria del Carmen Escobedo, who describes her home at Pico Extension Apartments as “a blessing from God.”

*

Escobedo, 48, came to the United States from Mexico 20 years ago and to Pico Extension Apartments five years ago, when she and her husband separated after a 15-year marriage. She took the children, he took the furniture.

She began anew, first saving up for a dining room table with eight chairs, which she scattered about the apartment. Friends gave her a bed. She then painted the interior to make it look homey.

For $60, she bought a small organ at a yard sale for her two sons, but she has never been able to afford lessons. Plastic flowers and a small statue of the Virgin Mary rest atop it. Friends have offered her $150 for the organ but she refuses to sell. She tells her sons, Ulises Zalapa, 10, and Anthony Zalapa, 13, that someday their luck will change, that they will learn to play the organ, and that they will fill the projects with music.

When she was growing up in Guadalajara, Escobedo had two dreams: to someday have a doll, a pretty one, not like the cardboard ones her mother would buy. Her second dream was for food.

“You may laugh,” she says through a translator, “but I tell my sons, ‘We may be without new shoes and things like that, but at least we have fruit.’ We have things to eat I never had as a child.”

In Guadalajara, her mother would lock the eight children in a room to keep them safe while she worked washing clothes. It wasn’t that she was a bad woman, Escobedo says, she just didn’t know the cruelty of her actions. Escobedo quit school after sixth grade to help support the family, and she worked steadily until two years ago, when medical problems resulted in three surgeries.

While she was in the hospital, neighbors from across the street watched her sons, fed them, made sure they were safe. She has done the same for their children.

It does take a village, she says, and this has become her village. So when her apartment, with three different shades of floor tile, is torn down, she will take temporary housing and remain in the neighborhood.

Her friends across the street fight the same battle: to raise good children, to keep them safe.

She has seen gang members leave Mass with their heads down in regret, and she has felt their heaviness. They, too, are sons. Like this place, they are not all bad.

She talks to them, asks if they are OK. Their reply often is that they are fed up with life. One came up to her youngest son one day and asked if he was going to join a gang.

No, the son said.

That’s good, you need to grow up and take care of your family, the youngster told him.

*

She has no dreams for herself, but for her sons she has many. Anthony wants to be a soccer player. Ulises wants to be a police officer. With what little public assistance she has received during her recovery, she pays $90 per month for one son’s tuition at Dolores Mission School. The other is on scholarship. She pays $40 a month for encyclopedias she bought to help them with school work.

Her health is better now, and she spends her days looking for work and doing volunteer work for Dolores Mission. She is anxious to be able to live in a new apartment. It will prove to her children that things can get better, that luck can change.

To move from here would be to face the unknown, and in her uncertainty lies fear that the next place could be worse. She has learned to see life in that light: No matter how bad things are, they can get worse.

She also is anxious for new job development and other programs that will accompany the reconstruction. She hopes to someday leave public housing, so her sons can have a dog, a better life. It’s hard to always have to say no. Her sons understand that and try to ask for little.

At night, the family often plays dominoes or cards. Sometimes Escobedo pleads with her sons to dance with her, but they say her music is old-fashioned. She takes them with her to Dolores Mission to help feed homeless people. That way, she says, they know how fortunate they are to have this home.

She sits on a wooden chair next to her dining room table, where there is a bowl of fruit, a dream come true.

“This,” she says of her home, “is like heaven.”