Why I Live and Build in Watts: It’s My Home

I was born and raised on 111th Street and Wilmington Avenue. I attended Grape Street School, St. Leo’s Catholic School (right across from the Nickerson Gardens housing project) and Verbum Dei High School. Watts is my home.

When I go through the neighborhood I know the people; I know the turf. I walked the streets of 103rd Street and Wilmington Avenue during the Watts riots. (The Watts riots started 25 years ago--Aug. 11, 1965.)

People ask me today why I continue to live--and to build--in Watts. It’s not hard to explain: Watts is my home. My mother and father live here and my wife, Yvonne, teaches at 102nd Street School here.

Growing up in Watts I never felt that I lacked anything. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I even knew there was a place called Baldwin Hills, where so-called rich blacks lived.

I never knew of swimming pools in the back yard. I had everything I needed. My mother clipped my hair and sewed my clothes until high school. It wasn’t until then that I knew there was an alternative.

In terms of gang violence, there wasn’t anything like that. It was a very close neighborhood. It was very harmonious. It was a family neighborhood. If my neighbor got sick, someone came over and helped him out.

If he was building onto his property, the neighbors pitched in. As a child in the neighborhood, if I did something wrong, it was very normal for someone else to take me and whip me and send me home--and then call my mother.

Watts has changed, just as other communities have changed. People are more distant. You may not know your neighbors that well now. Today, people are moving in and out a lot. Any time you have poverty, lack of education, lack of family structure with a strong male image and a personal relationship with God, you will produce violence and crime.

These things are started in the home. If there is no discipline in the home, then children will run rampant.

Yes, there is crime today and there is gang violence, but I see Watts as one of the last opportunities for a lot of families to get their start in the American dream without having to move two hours away from the city.

To have an opportunity to put your name on the title deed, regardless of whether it’s Watts or wherever, is an advantage. Tax write-offs, the appreciation of the land, collateral for credit are all advantages that are missing. When you get ready to apply for credit, they want to know what you own.

Most of the Watts properties are being sold to Latinos. Black people are trying to move out, but the Latinos are saying we want to own property and they are moving in. Latinos are looking at Watts as an opportunity, but for blacks it’s becoming a missed opportunity.

It’s amazing to me that more people, more individual builders like myself, don’t see the value and, yes, the beauty of Watts. It’s not like it’s some grand and glorious plan. It’s an economical plan. It’s opportunity to make money on property that has tremendous advantages.

Take location, for example. The new light-rail line runs right down the center of Watts. You can stand on the corner of Central Avenue and 103rd Street, the same place where the National Guard set up the command post during the riots, and look at City Hall. You can take the Harbor Freeway and be downtown in 10 minutes.

When the new Century Freeway is completed, Watts will be only 10 minutes from the airport. It’s also 10 minutes to the Los Angeles Harbor. Going east on the Century Freeway, I can get to Orange County in 20 minutes.

People who moved out of Watts 10 years ago to buy in places like Rialto and Colton, all those places way out, have to drive an hour and half to two hours in one direction to get to work in this city.

Many are starting to realize the folly of this and are moving back into the city. Ten years from today, they will not be able to afford the same land that they sold 10 years ago, because it will be so valuable.

In terms of getting wealth, there is nothing that turns money faster and that is more consistent than real estate. Was it Will Rogers who said that God just isn’t making any more land? What’s out there is all there is.

The very first piece of property I bought was in Watts. My mother encouraged me to buy it shortly after I started college with money I had accumulated. But she really managed it. She took the money and bought the land and told me, “Son, someday you’re gonna be happy that I did this for you.” I am very grateful she did it. That’s the house I live in today.

All the crime, the moving away and the desertion of property have created pockets of neglect in the community. But again, it’s all in the way you look at it. To me, they are also pockets of opportunity.

I almost missed the opportunity myself. As a youth, I dabbled in drugs. I did it in high school and while I attended Harbor and Southwest junior colleges. Then I transferred to Idaho State University in 1971 with Yvonne, my then high school sweetheart.

In Idaho during the Age of Aquarius and the hippie scene I was exposed to more drugs, including LSD.

When I returned from Idaho almost 10 years later, I was wide open to drugs. I became addicted to rock cocaine. Because of drugs I almost lost my family, my job, all my earthly possessions and, most of all, my life. I had started using in 1979 and used through April of 1984. I was delivered only by the grace of God.

After ’84 I was looking to get out of the financial dungeon that I had put myself in because of drugs. See, by then I owed everybody. So even though my wife works as a schoolteacher and I worked in the space industry, our two salaries weren’t enough to pull us out of the debt that drugs had put us in. I started looking for alternatives. Dealing drugs was completely out of the question because of my commitment to God.

I had to rely on what I was taught as a child. Every summer, from the time I was 12, my father would take me to work with him on construction jobs. He was a finish carpenter and would work the crews from tract to tract throughout Southern California. He would “finish” all the doors and windows.

My mother would take me around with her when she collected rent. I learned from her how to manage property. It was only natural that I fall back on what I had known as a youth.

In 1986, we bought a three-bedroom house in foreclosure for $5,000 and fixed it up and rented it. It was right on Central Avenue. It was nice piece of property and we still own it.

Then in ‘87, we bought a house for $29,000. It was a two-bedroom, one-bath, 700-square-foot house that the dope addicts, alcoholics and winos had taken over. The owners, a white couple in Downey, wanted to get rid of it. We paid them cash and spent about $5,000 remodeling the house and rented it out for $650 a month. We recently sold it for $79,000.

Then we bought a probated house for $30,000 and enlarged it from 700 square feet to 1,400 square feet, from one bedroom and one bath to three bedrooms and two baths. It’s been appraised at over $100,000.

We moved from that up to buying vacant lots. We bought a lot for $10,000 and built a two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath home. We sold that for $115,000.

We had one lot where a lady’s husband had died and she didn’t know that she owned the property. Alan DeRosier, my partner, already owned the lot next door, so he contacted her and made an offer on her lot. She chose to sell. We built two three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,100-square-foot houses on the lots.

Because the lady never knew she owned the lot, it had been allowed to become an eyesore to the neighborhood. It reduced Watts property values even more, and was a haven for rats and other vermin.

Drug dealers used it to stash and sell their dope. By us coming in and buying it and building, we improved the neighborhood, increased the neighbors’ property values, rid the neighborhood of rodents and of a stash for drug dealers.

In the process we made money and gave two families an opportunity to own a piece of the American dream, to put their names on a title deed. These were two families that were first-time buyers coming out of apartments.

My thinking is, it is better to improve Watts than to move away from Watts. Watts has afforded me an opportunity to put my life back together. In return, I’ve been able to give something back to the community that I came from. So there’s a parallel between Watts and me.

Watts was burned out by the riots; I was burned out on drugs. Like the Phoenix, I rose up out of my ashes. Watts is rising up out of its ashes.

Shepard is the owner of Shepard Property Development in Watts.