Tenants Rally to Keep Manager : Housing: Residents seek to prevent transfer of Alexis Alexander to an apartment complex in Valencia next week.

For years, residents of the low-income apartments on Kings Road in West Hollywood have lived side by side in separate worlds--one Russian, one American--with little in common but advancing age.

That air of wary coexistence is being swept away amid a united campaign by residents to prevent county housing officials from carrying out the scheduled transfer next week of the popular resident manager, Alexis Alexander, to Valencia. In the process, they are seeing their neighbors as if for the first time.

Gertrude Ness said she had never felt welcome at the shaded patio tables where Soviet emigres gather daily to gab about relatives back home or simply to leaf through the Russian-language newspapers.

“For the first time,” she said, “Russians and Americans are putting our heads together--how can we make it work?”

Aided by resident Lida Rozenbaum, a former Muscovite who has become the movement’s unofficial interpreter, distressed tenants have circulated petitions, hounded county officials and even sought the attention of Gov. Pete Wilson.

They also are trading accounts of the various ways that Alexander has helped them during the five years she and her husband have lived at the 106-unit complex: Calling doctors for tenants who don’t speak English; checking up on residents she hasn’t seen in awhile, settling spats that get as petty as who runs their water too loud.

“A lot of people here would be at each other’s throats. It’s not a congenial bunch,” said resident Lou Brooks, who praised Alexander’s patience. “She keeps it together.”

Bunya Sverdlova, an 85-year-old emigre from St. Petersburg, said in Russian through Rozenbaum: “People are sick here, and old, and she’s like a mother to everybody. That’s why they’re afraid.”

Alexander, who does not speak Russian, said, “I’m leaving sort of like all my babies. . . . We do have that rapport. We seem to understand each other.”

Alexander is resisting the transfer and might refuse it, she said, because she doesn’t want to relocate her husband, Ron, who works part time at the complex and for a Los Angeles security firm.

“My home goes with my job. If I turn it down, I lose my job and my home,” Alexander said. “I’m scared. I can’t go. I just can’t go up there. I can’t ask my husband to move.”

The couple is being reassigned to a larger subsidized development in Valencia as part of a series of cutbacks of resident manager positions at some of the 55 properties owned and run by the Los Angeles County Community Development Commission, said Bobbette Glover, the commission’s assistant executive director. She said the cutbacks were needed to pay for job benefits recently extended to resident managers for the first time.

As the only couple currently tending a county project on the Westside, the Alexanders were the sole choice for officials seeking to assign two people to fill a manager’s vacancy at the 183-unit Valencia complex, Glover said. The 13-year-old Kings Road development will be tended by a manager transferred from Santa Monica, she said.

“In lieu of laying people off, we’re trying to use our staff efficiently,” said Nelwyn Orange, director of the commission’s owned-housing division. Managers’ contracts permit the county to relocate them with 10 days’ notice.

“It’s not to upset the tenants. It’s the last thing we want,” Glover said. “We’re very sorry they have to be relocated. We understand the difficulty of this.”

Housing officials were confident that the Alexanders’ replacement would be kind and capable, and they said the county’s resident manager program has been so effective in training professional managers that it is being considered for a national award.

Maria Badrakhan, a commission manager, said that of seven recent transfers, the Alexanders’ was the only one to prompt resident opposition. She suggested that the couple might have promoted it by leaking word of the impending transfer earlier this month before officials had the chance to announce it.

“There’s always somebody who has a small number of followers who they can incite,” she said.

But the Alexanders’ backers numbered more than a few at a recent gathering at the two-building complex. About 30 residents turned out for a meeting organized by Rozenbaum. Many sought to be interviewed by a reporter. Even the normally guarded Russian emigres were eager to join in, names and all, though one worried openly if speaking out would mean the loss of her apartment. An American tenant told her not to worry.

In heavily accented English, David Volodarsky painted the cause as nothing short of democracy put to the test. “We are the people and we have right to protest, to demand,” said Volodarsky, who emigrated from the former Soviet republic of Moldova. “They have to ask the people.”

Rozenbaum voiced humbler expectations.

“In Russia’s, there’s the same bureaucracy,” she said. “In this bureaucracy, maybe it’s better.”