Revitalization Plan Reduced in Scope : Blythe Street: Developer blames lack of support from councilman for the retreat. Officials call the new approach more prudent.

Los Angeles housing officials have significantly scaled back an $8-million project that would have brought social services and extensively rehabilitated housing to residents of a blighted part of Blythe Street in Panorama City.

A private developer who helped design the project said a lack of support from City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, whose district includes the street, has killed the sweeping effort as it was initially proposed. Two months ago, officials were calling the plan a potential model for addressing extreme social ills in run-down pockets throughout the city.

Bernardi has continued to argue for a sustained police crackdown to deal with crime and drug-dealing on the stretch of the street that runs west of Van Nuys Boulevard. Earlier this year, he went so far as to suggest, in apparent seriousness, that U.S. Army tanks no longer needed to protect Europe be deployed to Blythe Street.

Police officials say adding patrols and making more arrests are not the answer. They joined those calling for a more comprehensive effort to solve the street’s social and housing problems.

Project Renaissance, as originally proposed, was to have provided funds for the Latin American Civic Assn.--a nonprofit organization that runs Head Start classes in the region--to purchase and rehabilitate buildings that contain 140 of the 540 apartments on the street. LACA was to have provided a variety of social services such as job training, child care and parenting classes for the street’s approximately 4,000 mostly poor Latino residents.

A private company was to have managed the LACA units and others to bring a majority of those on the street under one umbrella. The managers were to have cleared the apartments of deadbeats and drug dealers and made sure the units did not become overcrowded.

Public money was to help lower rents on the street, now between $375 and $800 a month. And a plan was to be developed to combat the violent gang that sells drugs there.

The new plan calls for LACA to get city financial assistance initially to purchase only two or three buildings instead of the 11 envisioned earlier. Social services are still to be offered in some form. But LACA is no longer required to devise a plan to remove the gang members, who dominate life on the street by selling $20 rocks of cocaine around the clock.

The reason for the retreat was that “Bernardi never supported the project,” said Dave Vadehra, a developer who has been involved with low-income housing for 20 years and who put the project together for LACA. “If Bernardi is not supporting the concept, it’s not going to work. . . . His whole thing is police should take all these people and put them in jail forever.”

Bernardi’s staff has organized several meetings of city agencies to discuss how to improve services on Blythe Street and also has met several times with Vadehra. But Bernardi said in an interview that he was unaware of the details of Vadehra’s proposal for Project Renaissance. The councilman acknowledged, however, that he is concerned about using public funds on such projects.

“There’s been a history of public construction of these projects where the cost is completely out of line to where it should be,” he said. “I’m glad they scaled it down.”

In interviews earlier this year, city officials hailed the plan as a trendsetter whose tenets could revitalize neighborhoods while creating affordable housing in the city. But, in a turnaround, officials now say the Blythe Street project would have been too risky given the social ills plaguing the street, the costs involved and the fact that the organization proposing the project--LACA--has no experience in housing.

“It was very difficult the other way,” said Robert T. Moncrief, head of the city’s Housing Preservation and Production Department. “It’s more prudent to approach it this way.”

But Vadehra said the officials “got scared.” Without Bernardi’s support, he said, the project would have had little chance of succeeding and “they didn’t want egg on their faces.”

Vadehra also blamed what he said was the inexperience of the staff in the city’s 18-month-old housing department and the department’s preference for nonprofit developers over more experienced for-profit developers such as himself.

Also, he said, the smaller project now being pushed by the housing department is a waste of money, because the key to turning the area around is consolidating the ownership and management of as many buildings as possible on the street. A single owner of several buildings is better able to rid the street of problem tenants by imposing strict rules and enforcing them, he said.

Without such an arrangement, individual buildings will quickly be overwhelmed by the street’s problems with gangs, drugs and poverty and once again fall into disrepair.

“The city is being foolish with” its money, Vadehra said. “Two or three buildings are not going to result in anything better than what’s already there now. It’s not going to be any different.”

Indeed, that was the conclusion city housing officials had reached in 1990.

In a letter dated October, 1990, Susan Banks of the housing department’s Pacoima office analyzed the condition of the street’s housing and wrote that Blythe Street already had some apartment houses “in good condition and well-maintained.”

“However, given that the surrounding buildings and neighborhood are deteriorated, the well-maintained buildings cannot be expected to maintain their autonomy and not be adversely affected by the surrounding environment,” Banks wrote.

A letter sent that same month by another housing official to Ralph Esparza, who was then assistant director of housing, recommended that the solution to Blythe Street’s problems lay in what had been done in 1986 on a crime-ridden three-block stretch in the area of Bryant Street and Van Alden Avenue in Northridge.

That letter from city staffer Walter Clarke also stated that the street would only be turned around if Bernardi supported the project as City Councilman Hal Bernson had done in the Northridge case.

“The Councilman and the Council office staff played the key role in coordinating the various elements needed to change the face and image of that community. I submit the same type hands-on participation by the Councilman and the Council office is essential if there is going to be any hope of reclaiming Blythe Street,” Clarke wrote.

Blythe Street suffers from a multitude of problems similar to those once faced by the residents around Bryant Street. That area is now a calm, gated strip of apartment buildings known as Park Parthenia.

The mostly Latino residents on Blythe live in dilapidated, often poorly managed buildings. To afford the rents, two or three families crowd into one apartment. Crime is rampant. Graffiti covers virtually every surface. Hunger and health problems abound.

Unlike Park Parthenia, Blythe Street also has the problem of an established gang that has dominated the street for more than a decade.

Gang members have repeatedly thwarted efforts by apartment owners to clean up the street, including a plan last summer that brought in a cadre of security guards and bail agents to take control of the street from the gang. The gang members retaliated by knocking down walls and security gates, threatening apartment owners and residents and shooting at the security guards. The effort ended quickly.

A street barrier installed in 1987 to help police arrest drug buyers had the effect of consolidating the gang’s hold on the street. It was removed earlier this year at the request of police.

As a result of past failures, the street’s residents are still gripped with fear, which hinders efforts to organize neighborhood watches or other projects.

Faced with such formidable problems, city housing officials suggested that only a turnaround effort on the scale of the Park Parthenia project could make a difference.

The largest project of its kind ever authorized by the City Council, Park Parthenia involved the sale of $20.6 million in tax-exempt bonds and a $4.8-million loan to cover the cost of purchasing and renovating 48 of 60 buildings on the strip. Bernardi cast the only no vote on the project.

Although some residents of those buildings complained about being displaced and about delays in the renovations, the project is generally viewed as a success. Crime dropped dramatically and the majority of the street’s residents received decent housing for less than what they were paying before.

“The only hope we have to preserve affordable housing is to do these types of projects,” Bernson once said. In addition to pushing for City Council approval of the financing, Bernson brought in police and other city agencies to clean up the street.

The project is not perfect, Bernson aide Ali Sar conceded, but “it’s a tremendous improvement from what it was before. It was a run-down, out-of-control housing development.”

Park Parthenia also was developed by Vadehra, who said he approached Bernardi in the fall to gain his support as he had done with Bernson before starting the Park Parthenia project.

But Bernardi’s response to Project Renaissance for Blythe Street was much different from that of Bernson to the earlier project, Vadehra said.

Vadehra said he told Bernardi: “We will have to do it like we did Park Parthenia. That’s the only way it will work. . . . I will not do a Band-Aid approach. . . . We have to do the whole block.”

Bernardi said he does not recall meeting Vadehra. He said he “was aware of the rumblings” about Project Renaissance, “but no one ever fully discussed it with me.”

“My primary concern is in the construction part of it,” he said. “I think as far as the other social programs, the housing department” and Community Development Department “have enough experience to know when they’re getting a good deal or when somebody’s making a big profit. With the construction it’s another thing.”

Moncrief said Bernardi supported the idea of cleaning up Blythe Street but never gave his support specifically to Project Renaissance. He rejected Vadehra’s assertion that the staff’s inexperience or fear contributed to the decision to downsize the project.

The Housing Production and Preservation Department was created in 1990 to cope with the city’s housing affordability crisis. Much of the staff was transferred from the housing division of the Community Development Department.

In less than a year it has “committed over $20 million to housing production,” Moncrief said. The highest previous amount spent in one year to produce housing was $1.3 million, he said.

“The housing production program is a new program, but we have hired some very capable consultants to work with us to make the program work,” Moncrief said.

With the scaling down of the plans for Blythe Street has come a change in the city’s expectations with regard to the gang there.

During initial discussions with LACA, housing officials were concerned that the proposal for the street did not contain a specific strategy for dealing with the gang and its pervasive influence.

“The strategy to handle the gang problem has to be done before we commit funds,” Moncrief said in an interview earlier this year.

In recent interview, however, Moncrief said: “That’s all changed. We’re looking at it completely differently. . . . It’s not really their burden.”

Housing officials are putting together a task force of city and private agencies that will work on solving the street’s problems, including those with the gang. LACA will be a part of that coalition, Moncrief said.

Although Project Renaissance has been scaled back, the housing department is working on other efforts to revitalize Blythe Street, said Annick Derrick, the department’s housing production manager.

In March, the City Council voted to make a low-interest $1.3-million loan to the Nelson Network to help finance a new family housing project on Blythe Street.

The money will help finance a new 50-unit apartment building at 14600 Blythe St. Owner Roger Nelson said he will coordinate his efforts with those of LACA.

Nelson said he has “mixed feelings” about the city’s decision to scrap much of the LACA plan.

“My first reaction is . . . I think it would be a good idea for the city to do it on a larger scale,” he said. “I’m concerned that putting a Band-Aid on an open heart wound isn’t going to be enough to stop the bleeding.”

But he said that the city’s decision may increase the participation of other Blythe Street property owners in an organization trying to turn the street around independently.

“It seems that a lot of these people have been holding back, waiting for LACA to come in and take over their property,” Nelson said. “Now perhaps they’ll be more willing to become more involved in what’s going on with the transformation of Blythe.”

Already the street is seeing changes for the better as a result of two buildings owned and operated by Genny Alberts, whose for-profit housing firm, Casa Urbana Consultants Inc., was to have managed the buildings purchased by LACA. Alberts, who is organizing tenants and running a tutoring program for youths, has received housing department loans to renovate the two buildings.

Her success with just two buildings further convinced Moncrief that a scaled-down approach would work, he said.

“I think we’ll learn quite a lot from those buildings and we can apply that to the next stage,” Moncrief said.

Although the project as he envisioned it is virtually dead, Vadehra says he will still serve as a consultant. He said that his original approach can help revitalize blighted parts of the city, if he is able to win the support of the council members who represent the areas.

“There are so many Blythe Streets in town,” he said. “Maybe I’ll do it somewhere else.”