A Rainbow in the City

Someone once described Compton as a city without a dream, but few will deny that its later existence has often been a nightmare.

The crime rate is high, its school system is in disarray, its citizenship impoverished and its leadership questionable.

I know people who would rather spend a week in hell than a night in Compton. They avoid even driving through it after dark.

Drugs and murder have been among the city’s major characteristics, overshadowing yesterday’s proud claim that Kevin Costner was born there and George Bush once made the city his home. They don’t seem to matter anymore.

If Compton needs anything it needs hope, a dream, not a glance backward. While serenity may lie in its 110-year history, calamity describes its present. Pride and stability are desperately needed commodities.

That’s where Sonia Sonju comes in. An engineer, a businesswoman, an ex-politician and a builder, they call her the Iron Lily partly because she’s managed to create an island of relative serenity in a sea of chaos.

Sonju came to Compton out of Orange County, at once an anomaly. Blond and blue-eyed in a predominantly black community, she stood out both physically and professionally.

What she set out to do was turn a run-down World War II project into an area of low-cost housing. What she created was a rainbow called Park Village.

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The term “projects” has come to represent a place of drugs and violence. In 1996 Compton had more murders, 72, than all but a few cities in California, and many of them took place in or around the projects.

When it was suggested in the late 1970s that Sonju and her land development company undertake the job of turning a war project called Victory Park into a rehabilitated area of affordable housing, she balked.

She knew the need for such housing was severe. HUD had announced that a record 5.3 million low-income families were without housing; 401,000 of them were in the L.A. area, including Compton.

There was an opportunity, Sonju realized, to simultaneously make money and fill a need. “But I took a look at the 250 units there and found the place dirty, in disrepair and torn by crime. I wasn’t sure it was worth it.”

Prevailed upon by the city, the Iron Lily finally took up the challenge, organized the financing, plowed through bureaucratic red tape, tore down many of the buildings, moved others and renovated those that remained.

What emerged from all that was a neighborhood of 164 units on 13 acres. Living in them are 900 men, women and children, a blending of blacks, whites, Latinos and Pacific Islanders.

With its diverse population and its multicolored units--purple, hot pink, gold, tan, gray and green--the place is a rainbow in more ways than one.

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I lived in housing projects twice in my life and couldn’t wait to get out. They were drab and inhospitable places erected for those who built Henry Kaiser’s liberty ships on the shores of Richmond, Calif.

I’m not sure what I expected at Park Village, but what I got had nothing to do with where I once lived. Here was a place of bright colors and well-tended gardens and children playing in the streets.

“What we’re trying to do,” Sonju said, striding through the project, a small, trim woman of 59 with carefully coiffed hair, “is create a sense of pride. You can’t trash your home and remain. You can’t engage in crime. Graffiti is painted out immediately. We have good people here and they want peace. I’m real serious about that.”

Rents range from about $650 to $1,000. The tenants pay 30%, the remainder is subsidized through HUD.

Park Village is often compared to the Wilmington Arms project. Both were purchased and renovated by private companies and both became models of the possible in Compton. Also in both cases, women were the driving force behind the change. At Park Village, it was Sonju, at Wilmington Arms Tonya Turner, a tough, no-nonsense manager who lowered a hammer on crime.

Housing is an essential need, a stabilizing factor in any community. Sonju entered the market for profit and ended up building a neighborhood. “I wanted to do some good beyond just making money,” she once said. “I wanted to leave the city better than I found it.”

By applying a capitalistic theory to a human need, she’s done just that. She brought Compton a rainbow and perhaps a few glowing elements of a dream.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com