Task Force Formed to Fight Crime by Fixing Up Abandoned Buildings

The shabbily dressed old man stood in front of an abandoned, graffiti-scarred building on Normandie Avenue near 8th Street. He said his name was John. He said a half-century ago, as a Ukrainian boy, he’d been a prisoner in a German labor camp--and that even that existence was safer than the one he now leads.

“I had it better back in Germany,” said John, who said he is now 71 and afraid to give his last name.

In front of the building, Los Angeles city officials were pledging to make the once-proud Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, and others like it, safer and more secure.

They announced the formation of the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Task Force with the goal of ridding the city of its most troublesome structures.

The task force--in the planning stages for two years--has identified 600 abandoned buildings that are often are havens for drug dealing gang members and junkies. Owners will be given up to a week to board up their buildings or risk stiff fines and misdemeanor charges punishable by up to six months in jail. Owners who refused to work with city officials to improve the buildings could see them demolished.

“One house can ruin a whole neighborhood,” said City Atty. James Hahn, who spoke between City Council members Laura Chick and Nate Holden. “These places are magnets for criminals, and we will not tolerate them anymore.”

Members of the LAPD, the city attorney’s office, and the Building and Safety and Housing departments have formed two 15-member teams that will comb the city and contact owners of run-down properties.

Boarding up the buildings to keep out gang members and vagrants is just a first step, officials said.

“We will work with the owners to bring these buildings back,” Hahn said.

Chick first raised the idea of a task force through a City Council resolution in mid-1994. On Thursday, she suggested that such a task force could have prevented the tragic 1996 incident in which a 13-year-old girl was raped in an abandoned home in Watts and a 82-year-old grandmother, Viola McClain, was shot to death in an ensuing argument between the suspected rapists and a McClain family member.

“The sad news is that the task force took so long to get going, but the good news is that we have it,” Chick said.

The $750,000 for the program came from the city’s general fund, she said.

Shortly before the midmorning news conference, police found two men in the upstairs units of the building at 8th and Normandie and arrested them on suspicion of trespassing.

In the apartments, there was a nearly overwhelming stench of urine and excrement. The floors were covered with dirty clothes, cartons of rotting food and feces.

The building’s owner was notified Wednesday, Hahn said, and was given until Tuesday to properly board the building up or face charges.

The building is the only outwardly serious blight on the palm tree-lined street.

“Los Angeles slums are white, pink and peach, but they have the same activity that goes on in the tenements of the Bronx. There is sunshine and palm trees on the street outside here, but desperation and degradation on the inside,” Deputy City Atty. Ted Goldstein said. “We will get rid of one abandoned house because one abandoned house can lead to a whole abandoned neighborhood.”

Neighborhood resident and block watch captain Olga Santa Cruz was thrilled by the news that the building would be boarded up. “We are so all so happy. I love the police,” she said.

Not everyone on the block was so overjoyed.

“Hah. This place has been boarded many times before,” scoffed John, the former prisoner of war who has lived in the area for 40 years and now makes a meager living shining shoes. “The gang will be back. Last year they punched me in the nose and laughed about it. That’s no way to treat an old man.”