City to Hold Course on Commodore Area

The Huntington Beach City Council, faced with a plan to condemn 80 apartments on crime-ridden Commodore Circle and create a senior citizen complex, decided instead Monday night to continue a $1-million rehabilitation effort on the city’s worst street.

However, the City Council also voted to make the short cul-de-sac, where 120 mostly poor, Latino and Southeast Asian families live, a redevelopment area. If the drive to eliminate overcrowded housing conditions, drug activity and loitering day laborers in the neighborhood fails, the council said, the city then will have redevelopment powers to condemn and buy the properties.

And the council voted to pursue the possibility of setting up a municipal housing authority and said it would still be interested in a senior housing project for the area, a plan that would cost an estimated $8 million, including relocating the current Commodore Circle residents.

But Sandra McClymond, executive director of the Orange County Housing Authority, told the council that creating a city housing authority might cause “procedural problems” because the Board of Supervisors could still retain some authority over the area.

The City Council caught heat from all sides on the Commodore Circle issue Monday night in the packed council chambers.

Residents of newer surrounding complexes said their property values have plunged because of the street’s blight, and urged condemnation of the apartments. Latino residents of the street said they are victims of “slumlords” and pleaded for city intervention. And building owners said they had no warning of the condemnation plan and further accused the city of breaking promises to make public works improvements on the street.

“All we’re asking for is to be looked at as human beings,” said Arturo Vasquez, 18, a seven-year resident of Commodore Circle.

In voting 5 to 2 to continue the rehabilitation program, some council members said they were reluctant to “bulldoze” a neighborhood of low-cost housing.

Councilwoman Grace Winchell said: “If we do go to bulldozing . . . we remove an entire population from our city. That bothers me because people need to live somewhere.”

Councilman Jack Kelly, who voted against the motion to create a redevelopment area at Commodore Circle, said these are “superficial, hipshot suggestions. . . . The folks in there seem to represent a social dilemma. . . . If you think you can bury them under redevelopment, you’ve got another think coming.”

Monday night’s meeting marks the culmination of years of frustration over the short street for city officials and residents. The 20 four-plex apartment buildings have been an eyesore and a police problem for years--the scene of many drug deals and some brutal crimes, as well as overcrowded, unkempt housing conditions.

In late 1985, environmental officer Susan Tulley was hired as part of a city push to clean up the 80 apartments, where about 120 families--mostly poor Latinos or Southeast Asians--live.

Property owners were ordered to correct more than 700 housing code and safety violations, among them collapsing ceilings, stairways and floors, decaying walls and plumbing, and infestations of cockroaches and rats, even rodent nests in ovens.

The city offered low-interest loans and other financial incentives for owners of the two-story buildings, located just west of the city’s Five Points Shopping Center. Improvements were made to 17 of the 20 properties.