Face Lift for Atlantic Avenue : Long Beach Quietly Starts $12-Million Renewal Plan

The old-timers, those who came before 1970, remember Atlantic Avenue as a good street.

In 1933, when Aaron Cohen’s father opened Atlantic Florist at 20th Street, shops were bustling and buses from Los Angeles streamed past on their way to the beach.

By the time Lillie Mae Wesley bought a nearby Spanish stucco house in 1960, Atlantic had just about everything a neighbor could rightfully want.

“There was a nice drug store and a nice ladies’ dress store, a five-and-dime, a furniture store, and on one corner was a grocery store,” Wesley remembers.

“Then, it really started going downhill. The bank moved out and the hardware store. Everybody just closed up and went away,” she says. “All we got left now is what I call them little junk shops.”

Vacant Lots Appeared

Fix-it shops, vacant lots, boarded-up stores, burger joints and a smattering of small businesses have joined Aaron Cohen along a 10-block strip south of Willow Street and north of Pacific Coast Highway.

They advertise carne fresca, rib dinners and check-cashing. They serve the most basic needs of the increasingly poor inner-city neighborhoods that stretch east and west from Atlantic.

The old shops greet visitors who still sometimes venture down Atlantic to get downtown and patients from the towering Memorial and St. Mary medical centers that serve as visual bookends to this gap in city redevelopment.

And now--12 years after Long Beach’s downtown reconstruction efforts began in earnest and 14 years after a small redevelopment zone was established immediately south at Poly High School--the city has set aside about $12 million to try to revive Atlantic Avenue and spruce up nearby streets.

After studying the area for years, the city decided against declaring it blighted and setting up a redevelopment zone.

‘Not Like the Downtown’

To do that often causes property owners to think “they’re going to take my house and bulldoze the area,” said Community Development Director Roger Anderman, who also heads the Redevelopment Agency.

“This area is not like the downtown, where almost everything needed to be changed,” Anderman said. Three-quarters of its homes are single-family residences, aging bungalows occupied mostly by low-income renters, he said.

“The impression you get from driving (the area) is that the neighborhood itself is not in bad condition,” Anderman said.

So, without fuss or much public comment, community development officials, with City Council concurrence, decided last month to spend most of its $11 million in federal neighborhood rehabilitation grants on the newly created 10- by 13-block Atlantic Avenue / King Park Improvement Area.

In recent months, the city also has spent $3.2 million of a $5-million federal loan to buy 29 lots and empty storefronts along or near Atlantic Avenue. The remaining $1.8 million also will be spent in the area this year.

In previous years, neighborhood improvement money has been rotated among 34 low-income neighborhoods throughout the city, and the effect is hard to see, Anderman said. This year the focus has been narrowed in large part to Atlantic Avenue.

“We’re focusing here to try to really make a difference and to try to make maximum use of federal funds, with the thought that those funds may not be around for long,” Anderman said. “We wanted to give a sign that the city cares: that we want to replace the bad conditions even if we can’t replace them with good things right away.”

Cutbacks have been made in the home-rehabilitation grants and Washington has notified cities that the money may be lost entirely because of a tight federal budget, Anderman said.

A consultant’s recommendation on what should be done with Atlantic Avenue is expected within a month. However, the city already has ruled out apartment construction because of existing central city crowding, said Housing Bureau Manager Taufiq K. Rushdy.

Advice on Improvements

The consultant will recommend what shops and businesses the community needs and where they should be built, Rushdy said.

The improvement program that probably will draw the most community interest is a fix-it-up freebie that neighborhood leaders say is almost too good to be believed.

Through the program, owners of single-family houses will get $2,000 free to fix up dwelling exteriors. The $2,000 can be used not only for paint but also for porches, windows, shrubbery or fencing--”anything visible from the street,” said Neighborhood Improvement Officer Dennis Thys.

Nor is the program restricted to low-income owners who live in their homes, Thys said. Perhaps 75% of the Atlantic area’s 3,500 to 4,000 houses are rented and rentals qualify, he said.

As a designated improvement area, where most households must have incomes less than 80% of the regional median, Atlantic Avenue / King Park also qualifies for free use of large metal trash bins that will be hauled away by the city after cleanups. All homes are eligible for graffiti cleanup by city workers, and the city will provide additional paint for later touch-ups.

Other Loans Available

Low-income residents also qualify for up to $25,000 in low-interest home refurbishment loans that do not have to be paid back until the property is sold, Rushdy said. For a family of four, the qualifying income is $26,550; for a single person it is $18,600.

And, in another program, the city will lend apartment owners up to $5,000 a unit for renovation if the owners will match the city dollars with their own. No interest is accrued for five years and no payments are required for 10 years.

Between 1976 and June, 1986, Rushdy said, about $25 million was spent in Long Beach on such programs. About $17 million went to the 844 home-improvement loans, he said.

Historically, the biggest problem with the programs has been getting the word out about them. And that remains a problem, said Thys, who has given three presentations since June 24 to community groups and plans several more.

“I don’t think it’s been publicized enough,” said Doris Topsy-Elvord, president of the 100-member Central Area Assn. “The people have heard it once, but they’re saying, ‘I don’t know about this.’ ”

Failure to Communicate

“I have five neighbors in their 80s,” she added, “and some of them are saying, ‘It’s probably too late for me.’ They say, ‘They’ll slap a lien on my place when I die.’ And you cannot make them understand that they never have to pay the $2,000 back.”

To be successful, community development officials must recruit the help of central-city ministers, make presentations at the senior-citizen lunch program and take their message to the local welfare office, said Topsy-Elvord, a county Probation Department official.

“The consensus is that the city is finally making a commitment to the central city that it is keeping,” Topsy-Elvord said. “We’re cautiously excited about this.”

By Wednesday, the city had received only three completed applications to any of the programs, but another 100 or so had been distributed, city officials said.

Gloria Sosa, a 55-year-old bank employee, is an applicant. She and her husband, John, say they plan to take advantage of the $2,000 rebate plus borrow several thousand dollars to fix up their small home on the 2100 block of Elm Avenue.

‘Help Community Improve’

“We want to help the community improve,” Gloria Sosa said. “But most of the houses here are for rent, and you know how it is when houses are just for rent. And three or four neighbors, who are owners, have just moved out or are planning to.”

Indeed, city officials acknowledge that even with free and cut-rate home improvement programs--and the prospect of government-subsidized business loans in the future--it will not be easy to reverse the fortunes of the Atlantic Avenue corridor.

“If there was a huge demand for these properties, the area wouldn’t be blighted today,” Anderman said.

Frances Rains, a longtime central city real estate agent, says she has a difficult time selling homes in the Atlantic Avenue area.

“We have a young couple who can afford a $95,000 home. But they don’t want to live in the central area . . . There’s nice property but they’d be two blocks from the drug area (on 20th Street), and the young man said he wouldn’t subject his wife to that.”

‘Wouldn’t Think of It’

Nor, Rains said, would she consider moving her Willow Street office onto nearby Atlantic Avenue, which has 13 vacant stores and 15 vacant lots between Willow and Pacific Coast Highway.

“I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t even consider it,” she said, citing the street’s history of property depreciation and the desireable location of her current office.

Developer Larry M. Hathorn, who has built several central-city projects, said he is eager to find out more about the city’s plans for Atlantic Avenue. But, as Hathorn discovered in 1983 when trying to remodel a storefront,, business loans for that area are hard to get.

“I moved down there, but I couldn’t find the financing,” Hathorn said. “I talked to most of the major banks, and they said they were just not interested in doing anything in that area. Now, hopefully, the timing is better.”

Florist Cohen, who with his brothers Kenneth and Jack have run their father’s business for decades, said the city’s efforts have already changed Atlantic Avenue’s commercial strip for the better.

Better Than Before

Cohen, 64, stares each day across Atlantic at empty parcels, cleared by the city. “Even vacant lots are better than what was there,” he says.

Lillie Mae Wesley, a retired Recreation Department supervisor who is active on several community boards, says that while many area residents keep their homes neat and clean, she welcomes city programs designed to “get these folks to get up off their do-nothing stools and do something.”

And Topsy-Elvord, a 30-year Olive Avenue resident, recalls a time when Atlantic Avenue “was a wonderful place to be.”

“I’m hopeful we can regain some of that,” she said. “But it’s going to take a great deal of work--and cooperation with the city--so we can regain our pride.”