A Neighborhood Sheds Its Shame : Delano Street: A new multi-agency partnership brings hope to a ravaged Van Nuys barrio and offers a model for other blighted areas.

Ron Mogen, a 6-foot-10 former college football and basketball player, finally broke down in tears.

“What do I have to do to get someone to listen, get shot?” the Van Nuys apartment building owner sobbed last February, pounding on the desk of City Council aide Rosalind Wayman.

For two years Mogen had tried, with scant success, to get city officials to pay attention while cocaine sellers and gang members moved in and spread violence and financial ruin on Delano Street. Five of his building’s nine apartments were vacant, their occupants driven away by fear. Repairs and loan payments were draining $3,000 each month from his son’s college fund.

Finally, a few weeks after shedding those tears, Mogen got action from city officials.

“I said, ‘We’re doing something. . . . Life’s a mess out there,’ ” recalled Wayman, a field deputy to Marvin Braude, who represents the area.

Wayman and another official in that meeting, John Mutz, commander of the Van Nuys police division, responded last March to Mogen’s pleas by helping to create a fast-track emergency response team that leaps bureaucratic hurdles to bring lasting change to one of the oldest Latino barrios in the San Fernando Valley.

The Delano Street Community Impact Team comprises the police, the Los Angeles city attorney’s office and 17 other agencies responsible for housing, health, education, recreation, streets and anti-gang efforts. The team has already achieved some early successes, pressuring the owners of four of the area’s busiest crack houses and gang strongholds to board them up.

The team has removed abandoned cars, cleaned up graffiti and trash, set up centers at local schools where parents can learn English or receive other assistance and corrected problems with buildings that lacked hot water, windows, electricity and other basics.

Although in many ways the team’s work is just beginning, it is already being touted as a model for how local government slimmed down by the recession can provide better service at less cost. At least eight other Los Angeles neighborhoods characterized by poverty, drugs, violence, substandard housing and ill health also are exploring the approach.

One such neighborhood is a gang-plagued stretch of Blythe Street in Panorama City, where a popular landlord, Donald Aragon, was killed Halloween night. Police said the teen-agers arrested in connection with the killing were gang members who wanted to steal his truck to go joy riding. In response to outrage over the killing, police and aides to City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who represents the street, promised to form an “impact team” similar to the one already in place on Delano Street.

“The impact team is a way to get all the agencies to look at the whole picture and see how their efforts fit,” said David Mays, Bernardi’s chief deputy.

It’s also a way to replace hopelessness with hope. If city agencies show they can make a difference by, for example, shutting down a crack house or getting the street cleaned regularly, then residents can begin to take pride in their surroundings. “It’s a way to help residents out there understand that they can change their future,” Mays said.

Hard by the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, the Delano neighborhood is a hodgepodge of small, cheaply built apartment buildings, shacks rotting on muddy lots and shady bungalows surrounded by orange trees, hibiscus and roses. The area has for decades been home to both the Barrio Van Nuys gang and hard-working, blue-collar families whose children grew up to be teachers, firefighters, probation officers and business owners.

In recent years, a growing traffic in cocaine and heroin has brought unpredictability to the neighborhood. But police and other agencies paid only sporadic attention while longtime residents and merchants such as Ron Franco, whose family has operated a neighborhood market there since 1949, became afraid to walk down the street at night.

“The greatest consistency with respect to the neighborhood has been its inconsistency,” said Franco, referring to the way the Police Department dealt with the area’s growing problems.

Now, he says, he believes the coalition of public and private agencies has a chance to do what has been only attempted before: restore stability to a once-peaceful neighborhood.

The Delano Street team members meet monthly to take on the problems of the six-square-block area situated five minutes from the Van Nuys civic center where most of the agencies have offices. To translate talk into action, tasks are assigned, deadlines are set and standards for measuring success are agreed upon. Realizing that eventually the community has to carry out its own salvation, residents and property owners are enlisted in the effort.

Police now walk a beat in the area and get the proper agency to respond quickly when, as happened earlier this month, fresh local gang signatures in 4-foot-high letters showed up on a vacant building. Street signs were installed telling drug-buying motorists that their license plate numbers were being reported. The team also takes credit for reducing the number of active gang members in the area from 125 to 75.

But Braude said that the new model for government efforts created by the team is as important as the early victories.

“What we’ve demonstrated is the ability of city forces to work together as a team and that’s never happened before,” Braude said. “Everyone associated with the project has that . . . feeling of purpose, and they feel more satisfaction in what they are doing.”

In a sense, the impact team approach is pure common sense: Agencies dealing with a variety of related problems work together instead of sticking to narrow protocols of how to solve problems. To get them going, team members are trained in the business philosophy known as “total quality management” to help eliminate “the typical bureaucratic approach to problems, which was, essentially, ‘it’s not my job,’ ” said Police Officer Stephan C. Margolis, the team’s facilitator.

The action-oriented philosophy, which first seeped into American corporations during the 1980s when executives fretted about losing market share to the Japanese, puts customers first, involves low-level employees in high-level decisions and constantly strives for improvement.

On Delano, for instance, building and safety inspectors moved in and looked at every building in the target area. After citing the owners for violations, the inspectors stayed on to make sure the corrections were made.

In one sense the effort is revolutionary, because it abandons the squeaky-wheel principle of city government.

Typically, local government serves best those who complain most and affluent neighborhoods have made a science out of getting good service. For neighborhoods such as Delano and Blythe, where many residents speak only Spanish and are elderly, poor or in this country illegally, police and other agencies usually pay attention only after problems are already out of control. Then, after a stopgap measure such as a gang sweep or an emergency health department inspection, the focus of city efforts once again moves elsewhere.

“The system doesn’t work unless you know how to work the system,” said Mary Clare Molidor, an assistant city attorney in charge of the anti-narcotics FALCON unit.

She said the impact team, of which her unit is a key member, will be successful if it teaches unstable neighborhoods how to make the government more responsive. Then, she said, the team can move on to other trouble spots confident its accomplishments will last.

Molidor said the approach requires more time and effort up front. But the investment pays dividends if residents are inspired to sustain the improvements.

For example, police statistics showed that prior to the team’s formation, Delano and Erwin streets had a combined total of 25 buildings where officers responded five times or more annually for drug or gang incidents during 1990 and 1991. During 1992, no buildings in the area achieved that dubious distinction.

A 10-unit building at 14801 Delano built in 1985 during a period of wild real estate speculation exemplifies how a festering sore can infect an entire street.

Last spring the building was in foreclosure but was, in effect, owned and operated by the gang members who sprayed their street monikers on living room walls, the junkies who left their needles and bloody tissues in the kitchens and the prostitutes who tossed used condoms into bedroom corners. No one paid rent, although families still lived in a few of the apartments.

Forty-five doors had been broken off their hinges, the handles tossed in a pile. Screens and windows were gone. A car’s radiator leaned against one wall, holes had been punched in others. Piles of trash and rotting garbage were everywhere.

Things had started going downhill when the building’s owner was unable to keep up the mortgage payments. Then a couple of drug dealers moved in and chased rent-paying, law-abiding tenants away, said Molidor of the city attorney’s office.

Earlier this year, Molidor told the lender, Coast Federal Savings, that the bank could be taken to court and forced to forfeit the building if the drug and gang activity were not halted. To help her get the message across, she drew on crime statistics and arrest reports from the Police Department. Building inspectors were brought in to tell the owner what work needed to be done.

In the past, Molidor said, each agency might have independently ordered the bank to make changes. But making sure the improvements were carried out would have likely been neglected.

The bank responded by boarding up the building and spending about $65,000 on renovations and stout iron security bars. Now an orange “For Rent” sign is draped across its front and Manager Juan Godoy is scrutinizing tenant applications. So far tortilleria worker Jose Hernandez has moved into one of the upstairs units with his wife, one of three that is occupied.

“This was done without going to court, without the owners having to spend a lot of money on lawyers,” Molidor said.

The process also saved the city money--Molidor estimated that the team approach to 14801 Delano and the other three busy crack houses saved roughly $66,000 in expenses for police efforts and city attorneys’ participation in civil trials--and time. In the past, it could have taken years, instead of months, to shut the buildings down. In recognition of the savings, the city awarded the team one of its annual productivity awards, to be given out in February.

Such a victory bears fruit in many ways. Police calls are down. Other property owners, seeing the changes, are more likely to spend money to improve their own buildings. Stable tenants tell their friends the street is again safe. And so on.

Guadalupe Campos, whose living room walls are graced with 78 photographs of the eight children she raised there and their children, lives on Erwin Street in a shady bungalow across from another apartment house that was a drug supermarket before being closed down by the team.

“They never let you sleep because there was always something going on” before the building was shuttered, said Campos as she stood in her driveway, which is pocked by holes made by bullets as they fell to earth. “Now it’s quiet. But when they open it up again, who are they going to rent to?”

Police say between five and eight other buildings need similar treatment and most property owners are still wary of cooperating.

Hortencia Bautista, 79, lives across from one such Delano Street building that police call Ft. Apache, where cocaine and marijuana are still sold around the clock by dealers who each work regimented eight-hour shifts. Police have made some arrests, but the building’s problems persist.

“It’s sickening, sickening, I’ll tell you,” said Bautista, referring to the shooting and fighting that make her afraid to go into the front rooms of her house at night.

Bautista has lived there since 1942. “Sometimes I feel like leaving but this is the home my husband and I worked hard to get and to have,” she said.

To her, the impact team has had no impact.

Her grandson, Gilbert Bautista, a 34-year-old probation officer who grew up on Delano, is of two minds about the team, whose meetings he has been attending.

“If a group of people comes together with great intentions, you may get some short-term successes” and if they bring recreation, education, job training and other opportunities, the successes might last for a while, he said.

But permanent changes will come only if the causes of poverty--and not just the predictable effects--are eradicated, he said. And that may be beyond the team’s scope, on Delano as well as on Blythe. “The bottom line is that people need jobs,” he said.

Ron Mogen, whose frustrations with the city bureaucracy originally kicked off the impact team, said changes are still occurring too slowly, and he fears that property owners are being scapegoated for many of Delano’s problems.

Still, he is reserving final judgment. “It’s about the only way,” he said. “But it’s going to take years and it’s going to take leadership.”

Wayman, the City Council aide who spearheaded the team’s formation, said the challenge for the team is to maintain momentum. And to do that will require sustaining the interest of city bureaucrats and gaining the trust of residents.

“Don’t ever tell the community you are going to do something and not do it,” she said.