It is true that Rialto has gone the extra mile when it has tried to fight blight. With the apartment complexes that were full of gang activity, they just went in and purchased the apartments as imminent domain and then rebuilt the apartments. Then they either rebuilt the apartments fixed them up or donated them to a non profit organization that builds and manages them for lower income families. They also don't take to the braking of the rules and they evict with braking of the lease rules, so the calls for service are usually low for law enforcement after the non profit management group takes over.
The city spends a great deal of money buy purchasing the apartment complexes to do this. And they just cannot keep doing this to the Tax payers of the City of Rialto. So they are looking for better remedies, they are trying them on the E. Jackson Apartment Complex, and we will see what will happen there.
BS Ranch
Rialto keeps its options open
"I go where I can pay," said the 48-year-old Rialto man.
If he could afford to go somewhere else, he probably would. In 2004 and 2005, each unit in the neighborhood averaged about five calls for police service a year.
Since the January shooting death of 19-year-old Tyrone Brooks, who was shot by San Bernardino police after a chase, Rialto has stepped up efforts to rehabilitate East Jackson. In March, police swarmed the street, arresting 29 people. The city then began sending code- enforcement officers to the neighborhood to crack down on landlords, and now housing officials are trying to form an ownership association to continue to clean up the area.
The city's action on East Jackson is a modified version of the strategy officials have attempted in a number of troubled neighborhoods throughout Rialto.
But how did these neighborhoods deteriorate?
Rialto's population continues to rise. Now it is close to 100,000. Housing Director John Dutrey said that before the growth in the '80s and '90s, the city
had a population of about 30,000. Not long after, the local economy deteriorated, much of which was tied to the 1994 closure of Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. Dutrey said there were foreclosures on houses all over the city. Landlords began to rent their buildings out to anyone they could.The result was densely populated, crime-ridden, low-income housing in neighborhoods like East Jackson. Absentee landlords only exacerbated the situation by failing to maintain their properties, evict problem tenants and properly screen prospective tenants.
One of the early attempts to rehabilitate a neighborhood was the transformation of "the
Glenwoods" into Renaissance Village in the early '90s. The complex had almost 150 units, owned by different people, which meant there was no coherent management structure in place.
The city decided to acquire all the units and hand them over to SoCal Housing Development Corp., a nonprofit developer. Now police cite the project as a model of how to reduce crime in a blighted neighborhood.
"It's clean, well maintained," said Luis Bravo, a 43-year-old father of five who lives in the Village with his children and his wife, as he dropped off his daughter at the school bus stop Thursday.
He did complain that his cable and Internet connection were recently switched from Adelphia to DirectTV, which increased his costs from $30 to $40 a month. In addition, some of the pedestrian gates in the complex were left unlocked, and the laundry rooms have been vandalized, a problem SoCal Housing officials said should be fixed when the laundry rooms are renovated in the coming months
"I'm safe enough to take my kids and my trash out at night," said Lisette Castaneda, the property's manager and a 10-year resident. She and Dutrey said, however, that the complex next door has caused crime problems in the area.
The city is trying a similar strategy to reduce crime in the neighborhood at the intersection of Willow Avenue and Winchester Drive. It spent more than $13 million to acquire all the units and hand them over to SoCal Housing to manage and maintain. A groundbreaking for the project was held last month.
But because the city cannot continue spending such large sums to revitalize troubled neighborhoods and because there are fewer units on East Jackson, Dutrey said the city is trying a different strategy. Instead of purchasing all the units at a high cost, the city will spend up to $2 million making aesthetic improvements and forming an ownership association that will hire a professional management company to maintain the property.
"It really is dependent on you, the owners, to be proactive out there," Dutrey told the 14 out of 20 East Jackson owners who attended a meeting last week. He wants all 20 owners to sign a document that would force them to agree to maintain the property, in large part by hiring a professional management company and evicting problem tenants from the complex.
The residents on East Jackson, including Barber, were happy to hear about the ownership association.
The street is full of scattered trash, and the low walls surrounding the alleys are splashed with graffiti.
But residents agreed that East Jackson is less dangerous than it was before the officer-involved shooting in January and the city began to pay attention.
Contact writer Jason Pesick at (909) 386-3861 or via e-mail at jason.pesick@sbsun.com.
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