Livability Gap : L.A.’s $25-Million Bryant-Vanalden Renovation Fails to Fulfill Promises to All Tenants

For Guadalupe Aguilar, life in the Bryant-Vanalden area of Northridge has vastly improved since the city of Los Angeles began an unprecedented project three years ago to rid the mostly poor Latino neighborhood of crime and unsightly conditions.

“For us, this apartment is magnificent. It’s clean and beautiful,” Aguilar said, referring to her comfortable, newly carpeted and freshly painted unit. “We are happy.”

But for her neighbor Oscar Torres and perhaps as many as 150 others, city promises of safe, decent housing remain unfulfilled, Times interviews with city officials and more than 30 tenants have found.

Torres lives in an unheated, roach-infested unit. His carpet is tattered. Severe bathroom plumbing problems have so rotted his floors that they squish like wet sponges when he walks on them. His oven does not work.

“A lot was promised to us, but in reality there has been little for me,” said Torres, 45, a landscape worker. “Look at my apartment. For me it has been lies.”

City officials said the $25-million redevelopment project--the largest of its kind the city has undertaken--is nearly complete. They described it generally as a success and as a model for crime-ridden, run-down areas in other parts of the city.

Crime is down. Streets are cleaner. A new coat of paint covers the exterior of the once graffiti-strewn cluster of 60 apartment buildings, which have been renamed Park Parthenia. Hundreds of poor immigrant families live in decent housing and pay less rent.

But city officials conceded that some units remain in poor condition. Walter Clarke, city Community Development Department rehabilitation manager, said all violations of city health and safety codes will be corrected after the city completes its final inspection.

Clarke acknowledged that if those violations are resolved, disparities will remain in living conditions because the city and developer had underestimated the amount of rehabilitation work necessary and have almost run out of money.

The redevelopment plan was approved by the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley in November, 1986. Its purpose was to transform the blighted three blocks of apartment buildings into a well-groomed development more compatible with the surrounding fashionable Northridge community.

Councilman Hal Bernson, whose district includes the apartments, had originally proposed cleaning up the area by making it easier to evict the predominantly low-income Latino tenants so that a “new class of tenants” could be brought in. He abandoned the proposal because of a threatened veto by Bradley and protests from civil-rights groups.

A second plan, which was eventually approved, provided developer Devinder (Dave) Vadehra with $20.6 million from tax-exempt bonds and a $4.8-million loan to buy and fix up 453 apartments in the neighborhood.

All but 19 of the apartments have been renovated, a spokeswoman for Vadehra said, and work is beginning on those units. Within a week, she said, project officials plan to apply one of the finishing touches--an eight-foot-high wrought-iron fence surrounding the project.

“If we have ever done anything positive in the housing area in this city, this is it,” Bernson said. “We took a terrible situation, and we turned it around.”

“Our intent was to put all of the units in decent shape, to make sure there were no code violations, to secure decent management and to eliminate the crime and other problems, and that we’ve accomplished,” Bernson said.

In 1985, the area accounted for nearly one-third of drug-related arrests in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division. In 1988, the area had only 57 of 1,505 drug-related arrests.

“We have less calls for service,” Police Capt. Mark Stevens said. “The officers feel it’s a lot better. While there is some graffiti, there is not the amount that there used to be. You can walk around there and don’t see the evidence of overt narcotics sales.”

John McClure, principal of Napa Street Elementary School, which is next to the apartments, said the project has “gotten rid of the drugs and the violence that used to take place out in front of our school. There is not the fear element that many residents dealt with previously.”

Opinions are mixed among residents in the surrounding middle-class neighborhood.

“I don’t think it’s been successful,” Susan Spratlen said. “We still have thefts. They still paint graffiti on everyone’s walls. There are still people hanging around the streets.”

Jeri Jackola, who has lived in the area for 30 years, agreed that Bryant-Vanalden “has been cleaned up considerably. But I still think there is more work that needs to be done. I’d like to see the greenbelt,” referring to a landscape plan that officials said was scrapped for lack of money.

Social Price High

A city official who worked on the project said he likes some of the results. But the official, who requested anonymity, believes that “the price was disproportionately high economically. I think the social price was too. I don’t like the feeling that we took somebody’s neighborhood and destroyed it.”

Strict rules ban pushcart vendors on the streets. Children are no longer permitted to play in public areas such as courtyards and hallways. The turnover in tenants ended many longtime friendships.

“Most of my neighbors, my friends are gone,” said Angela Arragon, 54, a 10-year resident who is happy with the improvements to her apartment. “There is no more community here.”

There are about 1,600 tenants in the 453 apartments, down from about 4,000 in 1985, when city officials found two or three families living in some units.

To reduce crowding at the onset of the program, the city lured about 940 people into moving elsewhere with offers of federal Section 8 rent subsidies. With a subsidy, a low-income tenant pays 30% of his income toward rent. The government picks up the remainder.

The city believes that many tenants moved because they were undocumented immigrants who feared discovery when asked to sign a lease or subsidy application.

Federal Rent Subsidies

Many tenants who remained were allowed to apply for federal rent subsidies at Park Parthenia--a central element of the redevelopment plan because it ended the need for many tenants to double or triple up in one apartment to split high rents.

To date, about 300 of the 453 units have been rented to tenants who receive subsidies, Clarke said.

“Before, we needed two other families to pay” the $650 monthly rent for a three-bedroom apartment, said Carmen Chavez, 33. The mother of four who works as a housekeeper for Northridge homeowners said she pays $193 for a two-bedroom unit.

“It is a good feeling for me to be able to pay all my bills every month,” Chavez said. “And it is better for the children to sleep in their own room.”

Guadalupe Aguilar, a mother of five, proudly said she manages to save about $20 a month on her husband Armando’s minimum-wage salary and “now we can buy plenty of food.”

The Aguilars pay $140 a month for a three-bedroom apartment with a spacious living room. Before, the family squeezed into two bedrooms, paying $568 in rent.

Cleaner Neighbnorhood

From the vantage of their renovated apartment, the Aguilars are pleased with what they said is a cleaner, quieter neighborhood.

In addition, many tenants take a keener interest in keeping up the neighborhood, said Bob Djatschenko, Park Parthenia’s resident manager.

“Every unit is visited three times a year as part of upkeep,” Djatschenko said. “We examine if people are keeping them in a sanitary manner. We also check to see if anyone has moved in.”

The manager rewards tenants who keep up their units with a bottle of champagne, a “good housekeeping” certificate and their picture in the Park Parthenia newsletter.

But many tenants interviewed by The Times view the project differently. They said that managers or city inspectors have not visited their apartments and that their repair requests have received no response.

Those tenants are living in apartments without basic necessities such as working heaters, stoves and ovens. They have tattered carpets and kitchen floors worn to cement foundations. Plumbing problems have rotted walls and floors, especially in bathrooms.

During recent rains, one second-story unit had severe roof leaks and the tenants did not own enough containers to capture the dripping water.

The number of apartments in poor condition is not known. A Times reporter who randomly checked 30 units found 17 with apparent code violations. In every case, the tenant had not sought a rent subsidy, which meant the apartment did not have to pass strict inspections by housing officials before it could be rented.

City officials offered a lengthy explanation for the variance in living conditions. The quality is poorer in many of the 150 units rented to unsubsidized tenants because those apartments had been given lower priority in the redevelopment plan, Clarke said.

First priority went to units the developer hoped would attract middle-class tenants or to units that would house tenants with government housing subsidies, he said. Units rented to subsidized tenants were upgraded with new appliances, carpet and kitchen floors because they had to pass “a higher standard of inspection by housing authorities,” he said.

City officials said that because the city and developer had underestimated the required work, they did not have enough money to improve all units equally. The original cost projections had been based upon visits to just a sampling of units because some tenants had denied access to project officials, Clarke said.

“We never intended to turn it into a Leisure World,” said Ralph Esparza, director of the Community Development Department’s housing division. “It’s basically safe, decent and affordable housing. That was our objective.”

City officials said some units The Times visited were probably among the 19 not yet renovated. They said residents damaged some renovated units and refused to let workers in to make improvements.

Many tenants deny those claims.

Jose Gonzalez, 38, came to California from Guadalajara in 1979. He pays $547 for an apartment he shares with his sister and her family. Gonzalez said he has repeatedly asked management to replace his crumbling kitchen floors and fix the leaky bathroom plumbing that soaks his floors.

He is angry that repairs were done to other units while his was given only a coat of white paint, which is now peeling off the bedroom doors. “It’s not fair that they have new apartments and the people who pay more get nothing,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez did not apply for a rent subsidy because the rules involved “would break up our family.” Section 8 regulations allow only immediate families to live in each apartment. Other tenants refused to apply for subsidies because they feared that their amnesty applications would be jeopardized.

Ofelia Ramirez, 38, a mother of five, two of them toddlers, said workers fixed her peeling vinyl floor by nailing the old flooring back on the cement floor. But, she said, they left the nailheads sticking up. She does not have the special tools required to pound them deeper into the cement or to remove them.

Despite her attempts to keep the nails covered, her children have stepped on them several times, piercing their feet, she said.

“I’m afraid to let the baby crawl,” she said.

Ramirez’s carpet is tattered. Paint applied last summer is already peeling from doors. A rusty metal shell that once held an air conditioner protrudes from her living-room wall. She fears her children will crawl into the sharp-edged casing and cut themselves. She keeps an oven shelf across the hole.

“I don’t understand why dangerous things such as this are not repaired,” said Ramirez, who has lived in the complex 13 years. Frustrated with the conditions, she said, she reached for a city flyer that advised residents to call the city’s rent stabilization office to complain.

“When I called, no one there could understand Spanish,” Ramirez said. “Then I became afraid to complain. What if we are evicted?”

Calls to Vadehra were not returned. Lorraine New, who works for Orange County-based CIB Development, Vadehra’s project partner, said all code violations will be corrected. She said problems reported by tenants to managers would be resolved.

Djatschenko, the Park Parthenia manager, blamed tenants for some of the poor conditions.

“People here like to warm up their tortillas on the flame over the stove,” he said. “It smokes, and the smoke detector goes off. It’s annoying, so the people disconnect the smoke detectors. They’re not going to come in and report a broken smoke detector because they just broke it.”