Low Income Housing Los Angeles

They've been hammering away for four days, those 100 volunteers working at a lot next to the Century Freeway south of Los Angeles. Most of them are rank amateurs who knew nothing about concrete forms or vinyl siding or plumber's tape a week ago. And most had certainly never set foot before in Willowbrook, where today they will finish constructing a new home for the Villegas family.

Sheila Bernard moves from one neighbor's apartment to the next, like a doctor visiting patients in a trauma ward. She knows her neighbors' histories, their fears, their dismal prospects for finding new homes. As president of the Lincoln Place Tenants' Assn. in Venice, she lobbied to keep them from losing their apartments. She attended meetings with housing representatives, enlisted the help of legal aid attorneys, staged a protest.

For the first time, the Los Angeles Housing Authority will accept applications for a lottery to decide who gets 2,000 slots for federally supported low-income housing. The last time the housing agency sought applications for rent-subsidized housing was in 1990, when 81,859 people applied during a three-month period. A lottery system was not used then and it took eight years for the waiting list to be whittled down.

when steve clare drives around venice, his mind's eye plays tricks on him. Along the canals where new mansions loom ostentatiously over the water, he sees ghosts of wooden working-class bungalows connected by dirt paths. On North Beach he sees shades of departed Holocaust survivors spending the last years of unimaginably darkened lives in the sun by the sea.

There was a joke going around the table at the first meeting of a city task force on illegal garage apartments: Now that the election is over, participants chuckled, maybe we can put off dealing with this for another four years. Indeed, Los Angeles has visited the problem--estimated to involve as many as 100,000 households citywide--every few years since the late 1980s, each time concluding that it is best to do nothing.

Tucked away in the shadow of the County Jail, the William Mead Homes housing project has long been neglected and hurt by a reputation as a haven for violence, residents say. The project's 50-year history is rife with tales of shootings and stabbings caused by racial tensions among the ethnically diverse residents. But in the past few years, residents say things have changed for the better, with neighbors now helping each other and local children involved in positive activities.

The Korean Youth and Community Center will soon expand its involvement with the community by inviting it to move into the center's new home. Well, not the entire community, but as many as will fill the 19 low-income family apartments that are part of the center's nearly completed $4.6-million facility at Wilton Place and 7th Street. This is the first low-income family housing project built by a nonprofit Korean American group in Los Angeles, said project manager Helen Kim.

Claiming a gross violation of free speech and privacy, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a group of Pico-Union residents who say their landlord is retaliating against them for trying to organize tenants in the federally subsidized apartments. According to the lawsuit, landlord Frank De Santis Jr.

Calling for an end to "the inequitable distribution of public housing" in Los Angeles, Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. is asking the City Council to consider a motion that would require other council districts to develop more low-income housing.

Some of the thousands of people who live in Nickerson Gardens will start going to class this week for lessons in how to take over their housing project, the largest in Los Angeles and one of the most troubled. About 50 Nickerson Gardens residents are expected to show up for the beginning of a yearlong series of training sessions intended to help them form a management corporation that would gradually replace the Los Angeles Housing Authority in running the Watts housing project.

Lake View Terrace neighbors Thursday lost an appeal challenging a low-income housing project that Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla had intervened earlier with city regulators to support. After Padilla stepped in, city engineers relaxed requirements for such items as sidewalks alongside the controversial building, which was proposed, in part, by a close political advisor to Padilla. The project is Lakeview Manor, which is being developed with a $2.

Nine housing projects received part of a $9.4-million grant from the state's affordable housing program, a state housing officials said Tuesday. Three grants went to the multifamily apartment projects of Sonya Gardens, Laurel House and Heritage Park. The Courtyard Apartments, Cosmos Transitional Housing, New Harbor Vista and Harbor Community also received Families Moving to Work Grants. The Civic Center Barrio Housing Corp., another multifamily project, received funds as well.

La Estrella. The star, in Spanish. Certainly, the name is appropriate for an apartment building that was reborn out of combustible forces--negligent landlords, lurking gang members, encroaching vermin--and now stands like a beacon, calling back displaced residents. Once an infamous example of the city's worst slum housing, the apartment building at 1979 Estrella Ave.

The Housing Authority announced Friday that 29 families facing eviction from Aliso Village, a public housing project in East Los Angeles, will be relocated to temporary housing and given help finding new homes if they can't find a place to live by the end of April. The announcement was welcomed by the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which has been negotiating relocation for the families.

Members of the Temple Beaudry neighborhood gathered Thursday for the grand opening of the Angelina Apartments, a $14-million housing complex of 82 units for low-income and very low-income families. Financed by Bank of America, the Los Angeles Housing Department and other institutions, the project was designed to ameliorate the shortage of family rental units in central Los Angeles.

The federal agency charged with putting low-income people into decent, affordable housing is itself trying to evict dozens of poor and elderly Los Angeles residents from homes they have rented for years but which are now in foreclosure.

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.

The first in a series of experimental low-income housing projects to be built in the San Fernando Valley will open today, accompanied by ceremonies led by City Councilman Joel Wachs. Built specifically for low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities, the new Parthenia Court complex contains 25 units, including seven studios, six two-bedroom apartments and 12 three-bedroom apartments.

Hoping to revitalize a community plagued by blight and crime, a coalition of Latino organizations has announced the formation of a community economic development corporation for the Pico-Union/Westlake area. The corporation, created by groups that include El Rescate, a nonprofit legal aid firm, and Casa de La Cultura of El Salvador, a nonprofit cultural center, will work to create low-income housing projects, education and health programs, and efforts to bolster the business climate in the area.

Two decades and $117 million in public money later, efforts by the city of Los Angeles to rescue suburban North Hollywood from creeping blight have largely struck out, a Times computer analysis has found. North Hollywood had seemed a promising candidate in 1979 for one of the city's most ambitious redevelopment projects ever. It sits adjacent to enclaves of entertainment industry jobs in the San Fernando Valley and is freeway-close to downtown.