Thread: Mostly Latino neighborhood in Escondido is full of poverty

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nort ... trugg.html

Struggle to reform


Mostly Latino neighborhood in Escondido is bursting at the seams with poverty
By Booyeon Lee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
July 16, 2006

ESCONDIDO – From their back porch near Washington Avenue, Benny and Anita Herrera used to watch their sons play baseball with neighborhood children in a 2-acre backyard.

Now a forest of apartments stands there.

The Herreras were once the only Latino family on their street.
“Now I see a white person and think, 'What's this person doing here?' ” Benny, 69, said.

The couple live in the heart of a mostly Latino neighborhood in central Escondido, laboring under the fastest-growing poverty rate in the state.

In recent years, the city has spent $9 million on the neighborhood for new sidewalks, affordable housing, after-school and day-care programs, and a 4.5-acre park. Last month, the city released a study that painted a sobering picture of the area, where 75 percent of the households are headed by single mothers and half the residents don't have a high school diploma.

The neighborhood, bounded by Lincoln Avenue, Ash Street, Valley Parkway and Centre City Parkway, includes the city's most important redevelopment project – the $17 million City Hall and the $84 million California Center for the Arts, Escondido, built in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It sits in the shadow of a downtown struggling to remake itself into a bustling urban core anchored by a full-service hotel and high-end condominiums.

When the city began pouring money into the neighborhood, city officials named it Mission Park. But most people who live in Mission Park are unaware of the community's name, which has done little to change what the area has become – a jungle of mostly neglected apartments and bungalows that serve as the first stop for many immigrants.


Slow changes
Benny and Anita Herrera remember when the neighborhood consisted mostly of five homes on huge lots. They considered theirs to be on the outskirts of town.

Then, in the late 1970s, hundreds of apartment buildings began sprouting. The City Council approved them despite warnings from city planners that in 30 years, the area was likely to become “instant slums,” said Jerry Harmon, who served on the council from 1974 to 1998. About 3,300 apartment units are in Mission Park now, according to the city.

Two apartment complexes were built in what used to be the Herreras' backyard. Anita's father had sold most of the family's 2.5-acre parcel to a real estate company in the 1960s.

As waves of Latino families moved in, white families moved out.Today, 80 percent of Mission Park's 16,000 residents are Latino.
“At first, I thought, 'This is great, my people are moving in,' ” Benny said. “Then came the graffiti and the trash on the streets and the gunshots.”

Benny hates the rhetoric of racism that some people use when talking about his neighborhood. It is a bitter reminder of his childhood in a segregated Texas of the 1940s. Going to the movies as a child, he would throw popcorn at people from the theater's second-floor balcony where Latinos were required to sit. Blacks were rejected at the door.

Talk of poverty in Escondido is inextricably linked to a swelling population of Latino immigrants. At a recent council meeting, Councilman Sam Abed said: “Sixty-five percent of the students in our school district are Hispanic. We must stop the influx of poverty into our city.”

Latinos make up 42 percent of the city's population of 142,000. In 1990, it was 16 percent, according the San Diego Association of Governments.

Five years ago, Benny and Anita Herrera formed a neighborhood group to persuade the city to improve their street. The couple couldn't stand living in what they said looked like a “little Tijuana,” with no sidewalks or street lights only a few blocks away from Escondido's stately City Hall. Every morning, the Herreras walk around the block, picking up trash and spotting graffiti. On Park Place and Park Avenue, streets lined with one-story bungalows and giant pepper trees, graffiti tags can be seen on walls and sidewalks. Most are tough to discern, bleached white by Benny.

Recently, the couple went nine days without seeing any new graffiti. That's a record, Benny said.

Four years ago, they came close to selling their home after a man stumbled into their driveway one evening, shot in the chest four times. Five months ago, talk of leaving came up again when the couple discovered blood on the street during their morning walk. Teens had beaten a boy with a baseball bat, crushing his skull, neighbors said.

Anita, 65, who grew up on the street, can't imagine living – or dying – anywhere else, she said. The memories come alive here. She remembers running barefoot through a neighbor's apple orchard, which stretched to Grant Middle School on Mission Avenue. Today, rows and rows of dilapidated apartments and homes stand between the Herrera backyard and the school.

Anita remembers coming home with a flutter in her heart after meeting a shy Marine at La Tapatia, a Mexican restaurant on Grand Avenue. She was 16. They would marry three years later. The couple raised four sons on Park Place.

Park Place and Park Avenue are probably the best manicured streets in Mission Park. The Herreras hardly ever go to Fig Street, Grape Street or Elder Place, they said, where the grass is brown, trees are rotting, and trash and shopping carts are strewn about.

On these streets the median household income is $17,000, less than half the city's median, and far less than the $30,500 in the rest of Mission Park, according to the study, which was commissioned by the city and conducted by the National Latino Research Center at California State University San Marcos.
A new gated community of tract houses on Fig Street looks out of place among rundown rental apartments and townhomes. Last month on Fig Street, a woman was shot to death while her two daughters stood nearby in the parking lot of their apartment complex.

A few blocks away on Grape Street and Elder Place on a recent evening, cars sat parked bumper to bumper. The population is soaring in Mission Park. About half of those surveyed in the study said they share living space with other families and about one-third said they live in an overcrowded unit. Rent exceeds 75 percent of most household incomes, according to the study.

Overcrowding is an issue the City Council has debated for years. Councilmen Abed and Ed Gallo lament that a dozen people living in a unit designed for a single family drains the city's resources. Fees and property tax levied on households pay for services such as water, sewer and fire protection.

“Five families living in an apartment are not paying their fair share to the city,” Abed said. “We are compromising our service to our citizens.”

City Attorney Jeffrey Epp regularly reminds the council that it is difficult for the city to legislate how many people can live in an apartment. There's the issue of privacy, Epp said, and “then there are also practical issues of how you differentiate between large families and families with guests.”


Avoid windows
Maria Najarro, 12, said she lived most of her life in a studio apartment on Grape Street with her younger sister, her mother, her stepfather and an uncle.

“We had a curtain up, one side for the girls and the other side for the boys,” Maria said.

Maria's family recently moved to a three-bedroom apartment at Cobblestone Village, an affordable-housing complex on Washington Avenue. She shares a room with her 17-year-old sister. Most of her family is from El Salvador. When she grows up, Maria said, she is going to get her own room.

On a recent evening, Maria and her friend, Venessa Reyes, 12, met in the courtyard of the apartment complex to swap music. They became friends at a federally funded tutoring program at the complex.

Maria smiles more than she talks, and Venessa is quick to let a visitor in on the latest gossip. They have the same dream: to become a teacher and own a house with a pool.

“I want to get away from here, as far as I possibly can, as soon as I can go to college,” Venessa said.

The girls say they feel safe in their neighborhood, even though they see gang members in the courtyard from time to time, and hear gunshots maybe once a month.

“It's not that scary,” Venessa said. “You just stay away from the window.”

The Mission Park study found that 67percent of those surveyed were “very concerned” about crime. Sixty percent said their children don't have a safe place to play in the neighborhood.

In an average month, between June 2003 and June 2005, 65 burglaries, thefts, homicides, rapes or robberies were reported in Mission Park, according to the study. Citywide, an average month of 43 crimes are reported every month, Escondido police Lt. David Mankin said.

“Anytime you have a concentration of apartments, especially when you have known gang members in the area, you're going to have more problems with crime,” said Mankin, adding that Mission Park is discussed during staff meetings as a trouble area for car thefts and strong-arm robberies.


With or without papers
Mission Park is divided among those who “have the papers” and those who don't. The city's study did not collect information about citizenship status, but found that 85 percent of participants were born in Mexico or Central America.

The neighborhood is a popular starting point for immigrants, primarily from Mexico, many of whom have families of mixed legal status, with children who are U.S.-born and therefore citizens, and parents who are not, said Arcela Nunez-Alvarez of the National Latino Research Center.

Councilwoman Marie Waldron, a vocal opponent of illegal immigration, recently proposed drafting a code enforcement law that would fine landlords $1,000 for every undocumented immigrant to whom they rent or lease. Waldron hopes to include a measure to arrest landlords who fail to pay the fines.

“I'm not sure how legal this would be yet,” Waldron said last week. “But I'd like to see Escondido become a place where illegal immigrants would not want to live because they know they can't rent a home here.”

Last year, Waldron persuaded the council to endorse an initiative that would have created a state police agency to track down undocumented immigrants. It never made it to the June statewide ballot.

Benny and Anita Herrera of Park Place say they wonder how long their undocumented neighbors will last.

One Park Place mother and daughter have lived in the neighborhood for 17 years without papers. The daughter attended Lincoln Elementary School, Grant Middle School, Escondido High School and Palomar College, and now works for a physician's office.

“They've been here for so long. They volunteer at the schools and they're good people,” Benny said. He paused, then added: “The fact remains, though, that they're breaking the law.”

Maria and Venessa, both of whom were born in the United States, say they are afraid that one day someone might knock on their doors and take some of their family members away.

If Waldron had her way, she said, she would not separate the family.

“Everyone would be deported together,” she said.

They bring it from their countries right into ours... and our government allows it!

At first, I thought, 'This is great, my people are moving in,' ” Benny said. “Then came the graffiti and the trash on the streets and the gunshots.”

"Your" people, Benny?

Benny hates the rhetoric of racism that some people use when talking about his neighborhood.

But, of course, everyone else is racist.