Subsidized Community a Comfort to Residents

For 29-year-old Lorena Dominguez, the San Fernando Gardens housing project is the only home she has ever known.

A resident of the 440-unit complex since she was 9 months old, Dominguez now lives with her husband and three children in a two-bedroom apartment with spotless wood and linoleum floors.

With Lorena staying home to mind the children, the family gets by on the $32,000 a year her husband Felix earns as a technician at a nearby factory. The rent--$397 a month--is about half what they could expect to pay for comparable housing locally.

“Before we were married, my husband rented a two-bedroom apartment with his friend and they paid $795,” Dominguez said. “There’s no way we could afford that now, with a car payment, and insurance, and everything else.

“I might move out some day, but not to another apartment,” she added. “Why would I? We’re within walking distance of our church and our school. Maybe if we can save enough money to buy a house someday, we’ll move, but otherwise, this is my community.”

To many people, “housing project” conjures up images of crime-ridden tenements. But residents say that without the publicly subsidized units, they would be hard-pressed to provide decent shelter for their families.

The housing crunch for low-income people is especially severe in the northeastern San Fernando Valley, said Jeff Farber, chief operating officer of Los Angeles Family Housing, a private, nonprofit corporation based in North Hollywood.

A 1999 United Way study estimates the unemployment rate for the northeast Valley at above 9%--about 2 percentage points higher than the rest of the region.

The same study shows about a quarter of the population earning wages below the federal poverty line, with the population density about a third greater than elsewhere in the Valley.

“What that shows is people doubling and tripling up to keep their housing expenses manageable,” Farber said. “We see people living transient lifestyles because they can’t afford to stay where they are when the rent goes up.”

Projects such as San Fernando Gardens can go a long way toward alleviating the problem, advocates for affordable housing say. The Gardens is home to about 1,500 people--but it is the only public housing project in the Valley, and it’s unlikely others like it will ever be built.

In 1950, Californians adopted Article 34 of the state Constitution, requiring a referendum by local voters before the construction of any housing project when half or more of the units would be government-subsidized.

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Because the San Fernando Gardens was already in the works, it was exempted from the law and opened in 1955. But Los Angeles residents have continued to fight new construction, said Donald Smith, executive director of the city Housing Authority, which operates San Fernando Gardens.

In 1995, neighborhood opposition forced the city Housing Authority to drop plans for widely dispersed, modest-size apartment buildings, six of them in the Valley, Smith said.

Critics of public housing, in fact, point to the Gardens as an example of how government’s good intentions can create new problems.

“It’s public housing that’s to blame with the situation Pacoima is in today,” said Marie Harris, founder of the Pacoima Property Owners Assn.

Of 14 stores and offices around San Fernando Gardens, six are locked at midday, with steel security curtains drawn across their dusty windows. Among those open for business is the neighborhood pawnshop, its canary-yellow facade glaring in the sun.

Harris lives in a tiny, immaculately maintained home about half a mile from San Fernando Gardens. Many of the homes in her neighborhood look weathered, and, here and there, spray-painted graffiti blooms against faded stucco walls.

“When we moved in, it didn’t look like this,” Harris said. “This was a place that had doctors and lawyers. It was a beautiful community. But it’s just turned down since we got the Gardens here. The people who live there seem to have low self-esteem.”

Local shopkeeper Maria Fuentes says she’s heard talk that the neighborhood is improving. She doesn’t believe it.

Last year, a gunman from the Gardens robbed her of $500 as she tended the counter at her convenience store, Miscelaneas La Luz. The man was arrested and convicted, but Fuentes, a Colombian immigrant, said she still starts shaking when she remembers that day.

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“In another four months, I’m out of here,” she said in Spanish. “Here I’ve worked all my life, never asking for anything. I always wanted to have a little business, and look what happened. Do you know what the detective told me when he came to interview me? He said, ‘If you don’t want bad things to happen to you, get out of this neighborhood.’ Well, I am getting out. And it’s because of San Fernando Gardens.”

An 8-foot steel fence surrounds the complex at Van Nuys Boulevard and Lehigh Avenue. It was erected at the request of residents who hoped to keep out marauding gangs.

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Inside the fence, several of the concrete-block apartment buildings have been newly painted in pastel shades. Construction crews are doing extensive renovations on three buildings, and there are plans to remodel all the apartments.

Bettye Moore, a San Fernando Gardens resident for 23 years, says it’s wrong to characterize a whole community by the misdeeds of a few.

For two decades, Moore has led a children’s drill team. Team members train each afternoon in the yard outside her three-room apartment. Inside, the bookshelves and tables are crowded with trophies, stacks of team photos, commendations and letters of congratulation, including one from President Clinton.

“This is a little town here, and that’s the way I try to act, like it’s my home,” Moore said. “There are people here I’ve known for 10 years and more, and they do the same. So it really depends how you look at the place.”

City Housing Authority policy sets rents at the Gardens based on ability to pay, but rates are capped in an effort to retain tenants who get jobs, but still can’t afford market rents. Top rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $337, rising to $639 for five bedrooms.

“If you have people working, that sets a standard for everyone else,” said Lucille Loyce, assistant director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority. “It helps minimize the social ills that go with community housing.

“When you go there during the day, you don’t find people standing around,” she added. “They’re at work. It’s just a normal, working community.”

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There is a waiting list of about 10,000 for the city’s 8,200 public housing units. Although lists are not kept for individual complexes, Loyce said a person might wait six months for a one-bedroom apartment, and even several years for a three-bedroom home, in a location like San Fernando Gardens. For people in need of public housing, she notes, San Fernando Gardens is considered a good location in a relatively safe community.

Police say that in the last year, serious crimes--from homicide to car theft--dropped by more than 25% in the neighborhood surrounding the housing project.

Los Angeles Police Officer Nick Ramirez, who works on an anti-gang task force, said he’s seen life in San Fernando Gardens improve markedly since mid-1998, when the department received a federal grant to pay the salaries of eight additional officers and a supervisor under the Community Law Enforcement and Recovery program.

“You see people using the parks in the neighborhood now and kids out playing on the sidewalks,” he said. Everything is returning to normal.”

Maria Arellano, vice president of the elected Residents Management Corp., says her organization deserves credit as well. In addition to lobbying for more police, Arellano said, corporation board members helped win a grant that supports computer classes, arts and crafts, soccer and a children’s dance program at the local community center.

Another mainstay of the community is Guardian Angel Church, a Roman Catholic parish that was founded on Lehigh Avenue in 1929 and remained when the housing project took over the adjoining blocks.

The parish priest, Father Juan Enriquez, said the church has a seating capacity of about 400, but draws twice that number to each of six Masses on Sundays, about half from inside the housing project.

The church grounds include a parish school. Most of the 250 students live in Pacoima and San Fernando because families in the Gardens can’t afford tuition--even though, at $1,480 per child, it’s the lowest parochial school tuition in the Valley, Principal Ruben Cortez said.

Next year, Enriquez and Cortez hope to offer five scholarships to children who live in the housing project. And they say programs for which church officials don’t have to charge, from youth groups to religious education classes, are overflowing.

“People are proud of who they are here, and they see publicly funded housing as a realistic alternative,” Enriquez said. “Still, sometimes it’s hard for people here. I’ve had people tell me that Guardian Angel is a ray of hope.”

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Cortez says residents need that hope. Each day when he drives into the Gardens, his eye is drawn to the huge, army-green plastic trash buckets lined up on plastic pads adjoining the street.

“If I lived here, I’d want those trash cans out of sight, behind the buildings,” he said. “But the people who live here don’t have that choice. That’s where the government wants the trash cans, so that’s where they go. And you see that lack of personal authority in a lot of other things about this place too.”