Once living in a hellhole run by gangsters, residents of Andy Street can rightly brag that they’ve found the secret to building a better Long Beach

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

AND RINA PRAYED
Fifteen years ago, Rina Castaneda broke a cardinal rule of apartment-hunting when she rented a unit after seeing it just once on what turned out to be an exceptionally pleasant evening. Move-in day revealed that her apartment—one unit in a large fourplex on the 3400 block of Andy Street—was situated in a hellhole. Andy Street was littered and graffitied—neglected, it seemed, by all but the gangsters dealing drugs in plain view and preying on kids walking between their homes and the school bus. There are no single-family detached homes on Andy Street, just 24 identical apartment buildings—and these, Castaneda soon learned, were incubators of violence, illegal drug sales, and prostitution.

Castaneda complained to her landlord. She noted that fights broke out routinely in the walkways of her building, that wind-blown trash tumbled across the sun-blasted lawn, clouds of smoke billowed from windows, that men on the street drank beer from brown paper bags.

Her landlord was indifferent, she says—no: irritated, actually angry that she expected Andy Street to be a livable place.

Police were indifferent, she says. They showed up most often as the postscript to nighttime gang shootings. Residents recall hearing the almost comic-book-style pop-pop-pop of a drive-by—which they say was the signal to throw the kids to the floor of the apartment. Then followed the sound of squealing tires; and finally, 10 minutes later, the arrival of police.

The beginning of the end came one night in 2001. Castaneda heard violent noises outside her door: shouting, furious banging, and, after a moment, terrible sounds coming through the shared wall. A man recently released from prison had come to Andy Street in a rage, had entered the apartment next door, and was beating his pregnant girlfriend. As the assault continued, Castaneda looked outside her door and saw policemen with guns drawn and aimed at a spot just a few feet from her own front door. She knew the drill: she grabbed her children and pulled them into the farthest corner of the living room.

And then Rina Castaneda prayed.

SAFETY AND NUMBERS
Andy Street is one-and-a-half blocks long. Just north of South Street, Downey Avenue cuts it almost in half—one full block on the east side of Downey Avenue, the troubled half-block to the west, capped by a dead end with detours leading to alleys that border Andy Street north and south. Walkways outside each apartment permit foot traffic between the street and the alleys. Ringing this section of Andy Street and its two alleys is a collection of businesses—among them a liquor store, a nail salon, a pawnshop, a storage facility, and a barber shop. If you stand at the corner of Downey and look down the west end of Andy Street, you see a quiet cul-de-sac, tucked away and easily overlooked.

The 96 large units were built in 1963 to house employees of Boeing and Lockheed. But over the years Andy Street had become something like a nasty little alley, completely lacking a reassuring flow of traffic and dodgy enough to warrant walking four blocks out of your way to avoid it. People drove from all over Long Beach to dump their garbage on Andy Street—literally: discarded furniture mostly, some of it (rumor has it) driven in from as far away as Lakewood. By 2003 the street was so treacherous that the US Post Office refused to send carriers there. Mailboxes were installed at the end of the street, enabling carriers to drop off mail without ever leaving the relative security of Downey Avenue.

Things are different now. Police say calls from Andy Street have dropped over 30 percent in the past five years. Perhaps more impressive, the nature of those calls has changed, too: drug busts and reports of drive-by shootings have given way to complaints about loitering and loud parties. And while aimless foot traffic of a worrisome sort persists in the alleys, the groups of rowdy young men laughing and shouting obscenities and the solitary men drinking from brown paper bags rarely turn to enter the cul-de-sac. One long-time tenant says even the prostitutes are gone—and their clients with them. Instead, children cluster on the sidewalks and lawns, ride Big Wheels and play games. In one of the more hopeful signs, parents emerge every so often to issue a warning or call someone inside.

During my visits to Andy Street, three sounds dominated: birds, shouting children, and the thud of boys kicking soccer balls at the end of the street. At that end of the street, there’s a colorful mural, not the dark, ham-fisted things you see on Downtown LA underpasses, but really sweet propaganda pieces: kids holding up signs with work-together exhortations about creating a home sweet home. Sure, it’s crowned with loops of concertina wire, but it’s pristine, absolutely graffiti-free. And on most days, the street is clean, the lawns are green, and there are trees—healthy, leafy things like pictures of trees. You’ll look in vain for abandoned furniture.

Andy Street is far from perfect, but so much better that Castaneda, now the head of the Andy Street Tenants’ Executive Committee, can offer the street this most basic praise: “It feels safe.”

WHAT HAPPENED?
“Great,” you’re thinking as you read this, “let’s do that here. Let’s do that everywhere. How do we start?”

But after weeks of talking to residents, officials and activists, combing the City of Long Beach Website and watching videotapes of City Council meetings, I still can’t tell you. Or rather: I could tell you, but the answer is complicated.

Andy Street was transformed not by passive gentrification but by hard work, committed city employees, collective action, and an impressive constellation of local government entities. But reconstructing the details of that work is almost impossible. Though everyone agrees that what happened on Andy Street isn’t a miracle—not, that is, something beyond the capacity of everyday humans—almost everyone agrees that it’s just short of one. And almost everyone has a different explanation for how it happened. There has been no publication of best practices. There’s no official template to follow, no single or obvious starting point for the concerned resident. No one could tell me the precise mechanism by which Andy Street was selected for intervention and if or how other neighborhoods are slated for that sort of comprehensive neighborhood renewal.

So maybe the first question is this one: can Andy Street happen elsewhere?

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

THE EDUCATION OF LAVERNE DUNCAN
By all accounts, the dedication, good humor, and resourcefulness of LaVerne Duncan of the Department of Community Development has been critical to Andy Street’s improvement from start to finish. She learned about Andy Street in July 1997 when she joined the department as an ombudsman. The Police Department’s North Division had been tracking Andy Street for some time, and the neighborhood had been flagged as a candidate for immediate intervention.

A month after Duncan arrived, the city launched a sweep: in an effort coordinated by Police Services Specialist Marlene Arrona, representatives and inspectors from the police, health, fire, planning, and building departments descended on Andy Street, knocked on doors, checked the buildings one by one, and talked with residents.

A sweep is both a coordinated search for code violations of all stripes and a dramatic gesture of community outreach. Carried out badly—with aggressive cops and bullying City Hall types—it can backfire. That this one didn’t turn into a civil uprising may be a credit to those who executed the Andy Street sweep, as well as a measure of the desperation of the people who lived there, of their readiness to change.

Duncan—the department’s newest member and charged with oversight of the city’s Section 8 program—asked to ride along. The officials were not met with garlands of flowers.

She recalls that some residents opened their doors and quickly shut them in her face. But many were eager to vent, and so that August night Duncan learned about life on Andy Street. Tenants reported frequent shootings; parents said their children had never been allowed to play outside; kids described running between home and the bus to avoid being jumped.

“Until then I had never really seen what crime can do to families, to people,” said Duncan. “Not like that.”

Residents were clearly stunned by the city’s apparent interest. But at one building owned by longtime resident Floyd Warsham, the mood was almost festive: Warsham and many of his tenants pulled chairs outside so they could watch the inspectors work and occasionally cheer them on. Duncan was moved and committed herself to Andy Street on the spot.

OWNERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE
If there is a fulcrum in the process of neighborhood renewal, it’s the property owner.

Armed with findings from their sweep, Arrona and Duncan were able to demonstrate that the property owners had in some cases contributed to the street’s problems. It was their tenants who were the source of much of the neighborhood’s trouble.

Duncan held monthly meetings with the owners, and on most occasions Arrona was at her side with a stack of incident reports. Most of the owners were eager to see the place improve for reasons both civic and financial and hoped to learn how to speed that process. But in those cases where owners were resistant, citations provided extra leverage.

“The police department would say [to owners], ‘In the past month we’ve received 30 calls for service, and 10 of them were to your building alone,’” Duncan explained. “And the owner would say, ‘OK, I’ll get rid of that person.’”

From then on, everyone with a financial stake in the street was regularly briefed on the disposition of the street. Ostensibly these were Neighborhood Watch meetings, but in actuality the group was a fledgling, informal owners association.

There was some progress, but by 2000 Andy Street remained not only blighted but dangerous. Heavy drug trafficking and gang activity meant that helicopter flyovers were an almost daily necessity. City employees were still required to visit Andy Street with a police escort. S.W.A.T. teams were familiar with the block.

It was time, Ninth District Councilman Val Lerch said, either to fix Andy Street or end it.

Duncan and her colleagues at the Department of Community Development, along with Pat West, the agency’s director, brainstormed options—from traditional neighborhood improvement programs such as Neighborhood Watch to a strategy in which the city would buy and bulldoze every building. They settled on the former, but with a twist.

One evening in August 2001, police arrived unannounced on Andy Street and scoured it for parole violators. It was swift and some might say dramatic. Residents say Duncan’s presence—she insisted on accompanying police—was essential. “I thought the residents needed to see my face—not just for the good things, but for the accountability,” she says.

The property-owner meetings were about to achieve a new urgency, as well. Though some of the owners went along with city initiatives, Duncan still ran into indifference. She called Neighborhood Nuisance Abatement Officer Rita Hooker. “Rita,” she said, “I need your help. I need the hammer.”

This is how Hooker describes her role: “I attended one of the meetings, addressed the owners, and just informed them of what my program did.”

This hardly conveys the impression she made on the owners. Hooker is a civilian commander whose program operates with police department oversight and concerns itself primarily with criminal complaints. She made it clear that she had the power to hold property owners responsible for any illegal activity occurring on their property if they knowingly permitted, maintained, or allowed it. City officials, she said, would tolerate only so many complaints about a nuisance tenant before they’d hold property owners liable for failure to evict.

“The city’s focus is on correction and compliance,” not punishment, Hooker says. That’s why any warning is always delivered with offers of partnership and resources. But if that isn’t enough to spur action, Hooker has the power to seek a formal declaration that the property is a nuisance. That’s a designation with teeth: it initiates an official record, brings the city attorney into the game, and opens the door to hearings and fines. When a formal nuisance declaration was made against one Andy Street property, the owner quickly made the necessary changes and brought the building into compliance.

Hooker is friendly and cheerful when we speak, but she’s clearly a woman with a limited appetite for nonsense. Hooker likes to tell the story of a City Hall hearing in which, she says, a councilman told property owners that Hooker is “someone you do not want to meet.” (Hooker: “I take that as a compliment.”) In part, her presence is about the friends she has in high places: if a property owner falls out of compliance—and, more importantly, seems unwilling to correct a problem—with the city attorney by her side, Hooker will, she says, “once again give them the spiel of what could happen, and how the city is prepared to use the hammer, if you will, [to get] these owners to work with us.”

“You never know what is going to work with a property,” Hooker says. “So you do the carrot and you do the stick. Whatever works.”

When asked about Hooker, property owner Ian Gee chuckled. “She has a certain way with words,” he said, and then added, “She has been a great help.”

By the end of 2001, Hooker said, crime began to plummet. Some owners had become quite passionate about Andy Street and the opportunities for their meaningful involvement in its renaissance; others grumbled and did only what was required to avoid a visit from Hooker. Duncan worked to keep owners more or less aligned and continued to lead the monthly meetings. (“Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up—she never let anything fall through the cracks,” says Hooker.) The increased awareness, communication, and compliance among owners accounted for a great deal of progress over the next two years. The process of identifying and evicting disruptive and dangerous tenants was gradual—but without question, effective.

From 1997 to 2003, Duncan worked primarily with Andy Street property owners. In 2003, hoping the city had earned enough credibility with residents, Duncan began to organize tenants. She mailed letters inviting them to the first Andy Street tenants’ meeting, and days later she posted flyers outside their apartments. The first meeting was inauspicious, attended by just seven or eight people at the Church of Life & Light. Duncan didn’t worry. She told attendees she wanted to hear all concerns, big and small.

“She just asked us what made us scared,” Castaneda said. “That’s how we started.”

These meetings were held monthly, sometimes after hours in the local Century 21 offices, sometimes at the library or the Church of Life & Light, even around a table at Baskin-Robbins. As attendance increased, the gatherings became formal Neighborhood Watch meetings. Representatives from the police department explained the basics of deterring crime—or failing that, how best to document it. Many skeptical residents stayed away, but participating neighbors became fierce monitors of Andy Street—and they became friends in the bargain.

There’s no overestimating the significance of that by-product, so let’s pause for just a moment to note that what most makes a neighborhood is neighborliness. No police force, no government aid, no social worker can make up for anonymity; nothing so catalyzes social change as friendships that occur accidentally.

Quarterly cleanups came next. Removing problem tenants helps a community to decide what it isn’t (noisy, blighted, unfriendly); cleanups are a powerful opportunity to declare what a community is (collaborative, safe, united). In Duncan and West’s terms, cleanups “grow the neighborhood.” Duncan lobbied businesses for donations (the local Target, Albertsons, and Cowboy Country, to name only a few) and organized the Andy Street Cleanup and Resource Fair. She invited representatives of various city agencies and services, and on May 17, 2003, Andy Street was blocked off for food, contests, and, of course, raking—lots of raking. Neighborhood Services workers pulled up in a truck and handed residents and officials gloves, trash bags, and rakes. Residents, owners, and city employees worked side by side, and everyone present had a chance to speak directly with Councilman Lerch, who worked much longer than would have been required for a photo op.

This too may be a key: Lerch has participated in almost every Andy Street cleanup—most notably, perhaps, when there are no cameras around. When I asked one property owner if he had met Councilman Lerch, he seemed surprised by the question. “Of course,” he said.

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

ANDY STREET BREAKDOWN
As coordinated by Duncan, the city’s work on Andy Street can be divided into three phases: first, motivate property owners to evict troublemakers; second, organize tenants to participate in the rebuilding of the neighborhood; and third, encourage cooperation between owners and tenants, helping them to see one another as people rather than enemies on different sides of a financial barricade.

Empowering Andy Street’s tenants has probably had the most visible effect on the neighborhood, culminating in the 2004 formation of the Andy Street Tenants Executive Committee. Duncan approached four tenants who had been heavily involved in the meetings, all of whom had lived on Andy Street at least 10 years, and asked them to coordinate projects involving residents. She gave them binders filled with information on relevant city services and rental laws and told them to bring the binders to each monthly meeting. She insisted that they refer to themselves as an executive committee. “These were women who had never been executives of anything,” she says, “and I wanted that for them.”

Eventually, two of the members—Castaneda and Thelma Turner—enrolled themselves in the Long Beach Neighborhood Leadership Program. For six months, Castaneda and Turner, along with a handful of attendees from other neighborhoods, met every two weeks for three hours at a time and received training in public speaking, project planning, fund-raising, and grant writing. They went on retreats and designed projects together.

“Every time we had to go, I just complained and complained: ‘Now, why on Earth did I sign up for this?’” Turner says. “But then we would get together, and it would be fun. We laughed and laughed and made so many friends—and I couldn’t believe how much we learned.”

The members of the executive committee have become Andy Street’s block mothers, taking over much of the work that Duncan did over the years. They schedule the quarterly cleanups and make certain they feel more like block parties, with food and sack races for the kids. Because they’ve taken over fund-raising for the parties and prize giveaways, they’ve formed crucial ties between Andy Street and local businesses. Duncan beams when their names are mentioned. “I am so proud of those women,” she says. And they are ever vigilant. One recent afternoon, an indignant Castaneda—who is proof of the axiom “If you want something done, ask a busy person”—describes how she chased away a woman who had tried to dump a carload of junk in the alley: “I told her to move that stuff someplace else.”

“And what did she say?” Turner asked, her eyebrows raised.

“She said I couldn’t tell her what to do. So I said, ‘Oh, yes, I can.’”

Turner, who knows Castaneda well and anticipated the direction of the story, started to laugh.

“I said, ‘You move that stuff or I’m going to make a phone call and give your license plate to the police, and you’ll get a $500 ticket in the mail.’ So she left.”

“I’ll bet she did,” said Turner, smiling as she watched a cluster of kids, Big Wheels and scooters at the far end of the street.

SMALL CHANGE
Tenants and owners are quick to acknowledge that not all has run smoothly. After an impressive initial drop, the crime rate seems to have plateaued. There are those who refuse to get involved, and resentments periodically surface among residents. But remarkably, Andy Street is slowly becoming a community defined by its families and its children. The change most frequently cited by everyone involved is that it is now safe for children to play outside.

“Creating opportunities for the kids”—there are about 200 kids—has developed into a major concern, said property owner Ian Gee. “All of them are worth working for. There are a few we have to work a little harder for, but there is a lot of potential.”

In 2003, the Housing Authority and Parks and Recreation brought together 45 children from the neighborhood, hired a professional muralist, and asked that they work together to paint the west wall of the cul-de-sac. The finished mural was formally dedicated with Lerch in attendance; to this day it remains untouched by graffiti. Many property owners maintain a fund for the children on Andy Street, setting aside money to pay the children’s membership fees for the Boys and Girls Club. The Tenants Executive Committee has organized arts-and-crafts days for families, after which they donate the art to the Red Cross for its yearly art fair. In return, the Red Cross has come to Andy Street to provide Safe Kids Training. And Girl Scouts of America is scheduled to launch a Discover Girl Scouts program on Andy Street in the near future.

“A lot of that has to do with LaVerne,” Arrona said. Gee says simply, “She’s a great lady.”

On my first visit to Andy Street, I walked up and down the sunny street for almost an hour, counting the newly-planted trees—at least eight—and trying to find a resident who would speak with me. This proved difficult. Looking up the street I saw numerous families shepherding children either to or from cars, but the sidewalks had a way of clearing as I approached. A man holding an infant was a good sport and gave me a few minutes of his time, but the two middle-aged women with him looked me up and down, scowled, then turned on their heels and walked away while I was in mid-sentence. I tried to flag down a few kids, but again, only one would speak with me—from four feet away and poised on her scooter, her leg ready to push off in an instant.

Touring Andy Street with Duncan is an entirely different experience. Everyone waves. Duncan walks up to one girl of about 16 and tells her that she has found her a scholarship for a summer camp. Another girl, closer to 12, who has clearly been crying is pulled aside for a quiet talk and pat on the back. Duncan clucks her tongue at a boy who has kicked a ball into a parked car. A photographer has come to take her picture, and when protests don’t work, Duncan does everything she can to distract him from the task at hand, even attempting an impromptu meeting with Turner and Castaneda on the sidewalk. But Turner shoos her toward the photographer.

Turner bounces Castaneda’s nine-month-old daughter on her hip and is thrilled to find that, for the first time, the baby is happy to be held by someone other than her mother—so happy that she begins to pull and chew on Turner’s earrings. While Castaneda tries to extricate her, Turner amuses herself with the sight of Duncan at the mercy of the photographer. She occasionally shouts at Duncan, “Work it, work it!” until Duncan is doubled over with laughter. All the while, Castaneda, hawk-like, takes an inventory of every scrap of paper in the street and regards an abandoned shopping cart with particular hostility. A little girl on a tricycle asks me to tie her shoe. It’s a lovely afternoon, and when the photos are done I turn to Duncan and ask, “Could we have done this five years ago?”—meaning: could people have simply enjoyed one another is this warm and easygoing way on Andy Street? Duncan gasps. She shakes her head. “Never,” she says.

“Never. We wouldn’t have set foot outside back then.”

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS DEPARTMENTS
If this were an awards ceremony, this would be the part of the program in which we saluted the contributions of many others. In addition to the Department of Community Development’s Housing Services Bureau, Police Services, Housing Authority, Neighborhood Services, Neighborhood Nuisance Abatement, and the Police Department’s Community Relations Neighborhood Watch program provided critical aid.

When you talk with people from these agencies about the trajectory of the effort, you learn that, like neighborhoods, city governments work best when people know one another. Over and over again, people told me that their involvement began with a phone call from a friend: “I knew so-and-so from 10 years ago when we worked in another office, so that’s who I called,” they would tell me. In other words, the partnerships formed for Andy Street are far-flung, ad hoc, organic, and based on longstanding personal relationships between city officials. As Hooker put it, “When LaVerne [Duncan] called me, I thought, ‘You know what? She needs me, I’m there.’”

This doesn’t mean that individual community-development efforts won’t work, just that some successes may be difficult to replicate.

So, there’s no established flowchart for neighborhood renewal. This means that programs are infinitely tailorable; but some sort of professional coordination is a must. When you consider that Duncan’s involvement with Andy Street was inaugurated by a decision to go on a ride-along, you have to wonder about the role of luck in producing a dedicated steward for Andy Street at the moment Andy Street needed it most.

Under these circumstances, Long Beach residents should be made aware that they can—and have to—initiate change themselves; and that a single phone call can bring a host of free resources and passionate, experienced advisors. Unfortunately, I could not find a single private citizen who had known of any of these services before meeting Duncan; and as of yet, there is no single phone number that can be plastered on the side of a bus along with the message: “Is your neighborhood falling apart?” As Castaneda put it, “Nobody knew. I knew that we had to do something on our street, but I didn’t know how to start and who to call. I didn’t know anything about it.”

The Neighborhood Services Bureau is the closest thing to a starting point for a beleaguered community, but the department’s services are poorly publicized. And attempts to trace the improvised, thoroughly networked interventions on Andy Street were greatly complicated by the reflexive, almost pathological modesty of everyone involved. For now, long-term experience and institutional memory are the city’s best guides for neighborhood renewal. Such resources are superior, but they have a way of disappearing before your very eyes.

Duncan likes to say, “Andy Street is Long Beach.” It’s up to us to figure out whether the reverse is true

Tags: andy street, community development, laverne duncan, Long Beach, Rachel Powers