Transformed Apartment Building Is Star of Party
La Estrella. The star, in Spanish. Certainly, the name is appropriate for an apartment building that was reborn out of combustible forces--negligent landlords, lurking gang members, encroaching vermin--and now stands like a beacon, calling back displaced residents.
Once an infamous example of the city’s worst slum housing, the apartment building at 1979 Estrella Ave. was transformed into a model of low-income housing by a nonprofit developer armed with public and private funds, creative architects and community support.
On Saturday, La Estrella was the star of its own block party. Mariachis played as the refurbished building was unveiled and supporters were thanked. The tenants, mostly low-income residents who lived there when it was a bug-infested wreck, will start occupying it in about two weeks.
“The colors!” exulted Sister Diane Donoghue, executive director of Esperanza Community Housing Corp., sweeping her arm as she eyed the three-story building, now painted Tuscan red with yellow on the deep recesses around the windows. Gleaming blue tile squares climb nine feet up the front wall.
Alice Salinas of the housing group brought the architects books on color in Mexican architecture. On what they estimate was a $1-million budget, Mark Billy and Richard Warner turned the building’s 25 units into 11 two- and three-bedroom apartments. The units are 900 and 1,200 square feet of airy white-walled space with lots of windows. Floors are an attractive ochre-colored linoleum--and there are no cottage cheese ceilings.
It wasn’t the most generous of budgets, “but the spirit’s great and the people are great and it’s worth doing,” said architect Warner, who along with Billy will renovate three other buildings on the block.
Late this year, a building at 2141 Estrella Ave. (Senderos, meaning “shining”) will be ready. Early next year, two buildings connected by a courtyard, at 1953-1959 Estrella Ave., will be ready for occupancy. They will go by the name Amistad, which means friendship.
Together, there will be 46 new units, all two- and three-bedroom apartments. They will rent for about $475 to $525 a month.
“It’s a start,” said Donoghue, the executive director of Esperanza, who wants to make housing affordable to low-income working families who generally cram themselves into tiny apartments. (Three-bedroom apartments in Los Angeles are rare and very expensive.)
Though the glistening La Estrella shares the block with shabby Victorians, gentrification is coming to this swatch of Los Angeles just west of the Harbor Freeway and south of the Santa Monica Freeway. So are rising housing prices.
“One of the things Esperanza is concerned with is buying up as much property as possible and keeping it for low-income people,” Donoghue said.
Once, the buildings on Estrella Avenue were notorious for violations of housing and health codes.
“It was the worst you can imagine,” said one former resident of what will soon be Amistad. “Rats, roaches, a lot of gang activity.”
She and her husband and 21-year-old son have been living four blocks away and came to look at La Estrella for a sense of what Amistad will be. She worries that no renovation will remove gang activity that plagued the buildings before.
“The building is nice,” she said as she looked at an apartment, “but I don’t know what the neighborhood is like.”
Gang members who had lived in the building were evicted and won’t be allowed back, said Yadira Arevalo, director of community education for Esperanza.
“We are very committed to keeping this street clean,” she said.
Ledis Ayala, 27, and her husband, Edwin Villalta, 26, surveyed the refurbished apartment in La Estrella where they once lived. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
In Spanish, they explained to Alice Salinas the contrast between then and now. Salinas translated the gist into English. “It was like they were asleep and woke up,” she said.
