Reviving Pride in the Projects

Claudia Martinon’s new home is only a block from her old apartment, in the same Boyle Heights public housing project where she has lived for seven years. But the beige and gray stucco townhouse seems like a world away.

Broken pipes and loose cabinets plagued her apartment in the Pico Aliso project, 50-year-old barracks that are the largest public housing development west of the Mississippi. Martinon, her husband and their two daughters had no shower or doorbell. Cockroaches and rats scurried across the floor. Gang members lurked in the stairwell.

Their new two-story townhouse--a spacious, airy place with two bedrooms and two bathrooms--would fit in many suburban neighborhoods. Inside, the walls are a gleaming white. There’s a shiny new oven and refrigerator in the kitchen, and a washer and dryer in a hallway closet.

“This place is beautiful,” Martinon said happily on a recent afternoon, looking around her 2-month-old home. “It’s changed our idea of where we live.” Martinon and her family are among the first residents of new townhouses along South Clarence Street, part of the $145-million federally funded demolition and rebuilding of Pico Aliso and adjacent Aliso Village housing projects.

The very name Pico Aliso once evoked images of the rival Eastside gangs that used to dominate the place. Now, residents no longer say they live in the projects--they call their homes “Las Casitas,” an affectionate reference to the “little houses” that represent a big shift in national policy.

A New Approach

Federal and local officials acknowledge that past approaches to public housing for low-income families failed by isolating generations in large projects that became pockets of poverty and crime. Though public housing developments in Los Angeles like Pico Aliso may look tame at first glance compared to the high-rise slums in Eastern and Midwestern cities, residents in these more horizontal, landscaped projects struggle with the same urban problems.

The new efforts aim to weave safer public housing back into the surrounding communities and to create mixed-income communities by attracting working-class residents. In the long run, these new communities will encourage people to succeed and even move out, housing officials say.

“It’s about transforming the lives of the people, not just the real estate,” said Elinor Bacon, deputy assistant secretary for public housing investments at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s a whole new way of looking at public housing.”

For about a third of their monthly income--less than $200, on average, the same as their old rents--residents can lease the new apartments and townhouses being built in Pico Aliso. In addition, about 40 townhouses will be sold for around $120,000 to bring in families of different income levels. The development, run by Los Angeles’ Housing Authority, also features a new senior citizen housing complex, child-care facility and community center. Officials hope to attract a supermarket and other businesses to the area.

The question is: Will ripping out the old blue cinder-block buildings of Pico Aliso rid the neighborhood of its gangs, drugs and violence? Will sparkling new townhouses change how residents feel about their homes--and their hopes?

Some skeptics wonder how much new architecture can affect entrenched poverty and other social ills. The new developments across the country also have been dogged by protests from affordable housing advocates, who worry that more units are being demolished than replaced. By 2003, when the Pico Aliso and Aliso Village overhauls are to be completed, the number of units will have dropped from 1,250 to 905.

But the general concept of lowering density and mixing incomes has been applauded. Although some residents fear they are losing the sense of community of the old projects in exchange for more suburban-style privacy, most early reaction has been promising.

In Pico Aliso, residents were awed by the freshly painted townhouses that rose up this year across from shuttered warehouses covered in graffiti. The new homes stand out in the gritty neighborhood, wedged between the Santa Ana Freeway and the Los Angeles River, just east of the downtown skyline.

“I’m finally at peace,” said Esperanza Rica, 79, whose family settled into their new three-bedroom townhouse this summer. “We live like people here.”

Rica and her daughter, Blanca Castaneda, felt practically imprisoned in their old Pico Aliso apartment, barricaded in against the gang members doing drug deals outside their door. A haze of marijuana smoke hung in the air. The walls were scrawled with graffiti. Needles and other drug paraphernalia littered the ground.

Rica would scold the young men not to smoke. They just laughed at her. “Have a toke, abuelita,” they would reply.

Rica lucked out. Hers was one of 42 families living in old buildings scheduled to be demolished that were moved into Las Casitas this summer. Other residents will remain in the old apartments until new units are ready, and then the old ones will be ripped down.

Rica is so proud of her casita that if neighbors cause any problems, this time, she vows, she will call the authorities. She never did before--but these homes are worth fighting for, she said.

“God should make these in heaven,” she said.

The bulk of the redevelopment is being funded through HUD’s HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) VI program, an effort to revamp the country’s most distressed projects.

By the end of this year, the federal government will give out 124 HOPE VI grants, a total of $3.7 billion. Bulldozers have already razed rundown projects in Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and other cities to make room for new complexes.

As Don Smith, director of Los Angeles’ Housing Authority, said: “This is the only way we’re going to be able to save public housing in the city of L.A.”

Last year, in a separate project, the Los Angeles agency redeveloped the crime-ridden Normant Terrace project in Harbor City, changing the World War II-era military housing into a mixed-income community of new townhouses and single-family homes. Next, officials plan to use HOPE VI money to redesign Dana Strand, a San Pedro project.

Pico Aliso and other HOPE VI projects have been shaped by New Urbanism, a design movement that aims to restore elements of traditional pedestrian-oriented cities, replacing the sprawling and often alienating landscape of much of post-World War II America. The new housing developments, officials say, create more neighborly environments and help people feel ownership over the place where they live.

“If you live in a place that is seamless with the rest of the community, then you’re going to have a sense of personal pride and respect,” said Shelley Poticha, executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an association of architects advising HUD.

New Urbanists have designed HOPE VI projects to reflect the architecture and neighborhoods around them. In Washington, D.C., they’re building brick row houses; in Seattle, bungalows with timbered accents. They added city streets back into developments that once were cut off from the grid. They built porches and frontyard fences.

In Pico Aliso, the shared courtyards formed by sets of six facing townhouses help neighbors control who comes near their homes. To give them some privacy, residents have their own back patios and carports. In addition, the small clusters of homes, linked by gardens and lawns, are designed to be safer by eliminating spaces such as alleys and dark stairwells where people can hide.

“You feel all this privacy,” said Lupe Loera, a longtime resident, sitting in her new townhouse. “It feels like a real house. It feels like mine.”

Some, however, said they fear they’ll miss the old, tight sense of community. Women who used to spend the afternoons hanging laundry on the clotheslines together now have their own dryers. Residents no longer pass each other on the stairs every day.

Josefina Padilla, 56, said she cried when they tore down her old building and the shady tree in front. But she quickly cheered up when she saw the size of her new townhouse.

“The bedroom is so big I can put a Christmas tree in front of the window,” she said.

Changing the Neighborhood

But not everyone will be so lucky. In an effort to reduce the projects’ populations, only about two-thirds of the public housing units demolished across the country are being rebuilt. Residents who don’t get a spot will receive Section 8 vouchers to subsidize their rents in private housing elsewhere.

Some advocates worry that those tenants will have trouble finding rental units in crowded markets and may flounder without the support system they had in the projects. Such relocations have triggered a series of protests, including one Friday by some residents who don’t want to leave Pico Aliso.

The emphasis on design has raised another question: Will people change their behavior because of their surroundings?

“I don’t buy it,” said Janet Smith, an assistant professor of urban planning at University of Illinois, Chicago. “I know we respond to our physical space, but I don’t think you can design a space that will make people behave in certain ways.”

Advocates say they aren’t counting on design to transform people--just to influence them. Other factors, such as job training and apprenticeships, will help, they say.

Poticha of the New Urbanism group cites Diggs Town, a public housing project in Norfolk, Va., one of the first projects redeveloped in the early 1990s. Porches, streets and frontyard fences were added to the decaying row houses. In a survey a year later, residents reported that the physical changes drastically improved their attitude toward their neighborhood and their future.

Already, Pico Aliso resident Dora Sandoval says her new townhouse has changed how she feels. She used to have to push past gang members congregating at her door to get into her apartment. Shots echoed nearly every night.

Now she leaves her doors and windows open. Her 11-year-old son, no longer afraid of gang members lurking at the door, isn’t afraid to come downstairs for a glass of water at night.

And Sandoval said her new house makes her more excited about taking computer classes at a nearby job training center and applying for work.

But neighbor Felix Garcia, who is Martinon’s husband, says, “It’s not just the casitas that are going to change us.

“We have to change ourselves,” he said. “It depends on us to change our neighborhood.”

So far, the neighbors seem to be doing just that. They hold regular block meetings and exchange phone numbers. They plant roses outside their homes and take turns putting out the garbage. Another positive sign: No graffiti has yet marked the stucco walls.

On a cool summer evening, about a month after the first tenants moved in, the first Casitas residents hosted a block party to welcome friends.

Teenagers hung streamers and balloons in the courtyard, while neighbors piled an outdoor table with carne asada, tostadas, rice and beans. Mariachis arrived, singing and strumming guitars.

“This party is about being together and getting to know each other,” said Martinon, as her neighbors milled around her. “It’s the beginning of a new community. We have high hopes.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rebuilding

The Pico Aliso public housing project, consisting of Aliso Extension and Pico Gardens, is being revamped. Above is the status of each section of the housing project.

Aliso Village: Residents are being relocated. New housing expected to be completed by 2003.

Aliso Extension: Residents have moved into 42 casitas.

Pico Gardens: Old buildings are being demolished and new townhouses are going up.

Source: Los Angeles Housing Authority