Watts renewal plan not welcomed by all

LOS ANGELES - Juanita Sims has lived in the notorious Jordan Downs project in Watts for nearly four decades, raising eight children behind the barred windows of the cramped barracks-like apartments.

She moved in shortly after the Watts riots in the 1960s left nearly three dozen people dead and made the South Los Angeles community a national symbol of urban decay.

Now Sims fears she'll have to leave, just as Watts emerges from years of neglect with a proposed urban village of shops, homes, and businesses that would force the demolition of Jordan Downs.

"I'm not afraid to move, but what my fear really is is: Where?" said Sims, 73, who sat at a kitchen table against a wall covered in peeling white paint. "That's what I'm concerned about: Where are we going?"

The proposed demolition of the sprawling complex of two-story cinder-block buildings is part of an audacious but as of yet unfunded $1 billion effort by city housing officials to remake a large swath of the hard-luck neighborhood into a national symbol of rebirth.

The Los Angeles Housing Authority has pledged to relocate residents within the community, but some of Jordan Downs' 2,300 tenants are skeptical, noting local agencies' broken promises of providing job training and wireless Internet service.

Jordan Downs, which dominates a parcel of blight the size of 40 square blocks that includes a school and an abandoned factory, was originally built as temporary housing for factory workers during World War II.

The project and the surrounding neighborhoods became engulfed in poverty in the following decades. In August 1965, rising tensions between residents and law enforcement culminated with riots that raged across 50 square miles for six days. Thirty-four people were killed, more than 1,000 were injured, and 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Since then, Jordan Downs and the rest of Watts have remained a hot spot for crime and poverty. Just one-third of the project's residents between 18 and 60 years old are employed, and households average less than $16,000 annually. Jordan Downs' robbery rate this year is five times the city's rate based on population.

The statistics portray a situation of desperation for many residents at the project, where a tall black metal gate separates the apartments covered in splotchy salmon-colored paint from the surrounding neighborhood of faded stucco houses.

Clotheslines cut across the project's patchy lawns where, on a recent afternoon, a circle of bleary-eyed men sat on tattered furniture while a few children entertained themselves by dragging a discarded VCR down the sidewalk by its cord.

Jordan Downs is much safer, however, than it was in the last several years, when members of the notorious Grape Street Crips gang used empty homes as drug dens, bordellos, and dogfighting venues. Police boosted patrols in the area and in 2006 installed a network of video surveillance cameras. The result: a 41 percent drop in robbery the first half of this year compared with the same period of 2004.

Still, Jordan Downs remains a trouble spot for police, and residents said they remain careful to avoid the project's many blind corners.

The city's public housing officials hope their redevelopment project will help tenants feel safer by drawing middle-class residents into the area. They say that living among people outside the poverty cycle - along with a planned new corps of caseworkers to help impoverished residents find good-paying jobs - will raise living standards.

"I see this as a way to invest in the people in such a way as hasn't been done in Watts in forever," said John King, a Housing Authority director.

Plans for the new complex are being drawn up, but officials say it will likely include a mix of townhouses and apartment buildings, peppered with shops and interspersed with small parks and athletic fields.

Other cities have boosted family incomes and reduced crime by replacing traditional public housing with mixed-income development, but most had to displace some low-income residents.

King said his agency would not move any Jordan Downs residents from their neighborhood and has taken pains to get the tenants' support. The agency spent $160,000 to fly a committee of community members to visit successful housing projects in other cities.

Richard Alford, one of eight Jordan Downs residents on the 30-person committee, said that he tried to reassure his neighbors about the project, but that the Housing Authority needed to take tangible steps to improve residents' lives, such as offering job counseling.

"You've just got to start showing stuff to the residents, and then they'll say, 'They're serious,' " he said. "You have to give people something they can touch."