Project of Hope

As the federal government began spending $35 million to refurbish the huge Jordan Downs housing project in Watts, a nagging question began to trouble longtime residents, people like Martha Clark:

Why, she asked, was Los Angeles’ city housing authority paying so much money to outside contractors to modernize the 700 units when there were so many able-bodied people inside the project looking for work?

“There are people right here begging for jobs,” said Clark, who has raised three daughters in Jordan Downs and had managed to lift herself off welfare by working numerous odd jobs, including one brief stint as a housing security guard.

Clark and other tenants answered their own question with a new entrepreneurial spirit.

Last year, they launched the Jordan Downs Security Co., a resident-owned firm that in little more than a year has obtained more than $1 million in housing-authority contracts and parceled the work to scores of tenants.

Then, with the profits from the security firm, they set up a tenant-run moving company, and followed that with a pest-control business. Eventually they hope to open a 99-cents store.

The bubbling up of businesses in the impoverished confines of Jordan Downs comes as many residents are bracing for welfare cuts that will require many recipients to begin working--some for the first time in their lives.

“Ultimately, we want to be a diversified community like anywhere else,” said Dorothy Toliver, a Jordan Downs resident who heads the corporation that oversees the housing project’s tenant-owned and operated companies. “These companies will help us to build a stronger economic base, a stronger environment.”

Thus far, about 70 residents are working full time and part time at Jordan Downs, the first of the city’s 21 federally funded housing projects to establish its own companies.

The goal of forming resident companies, said housing authority director Don Smith, “is to begin building communities from the inside out, so that people have the choice to move on.”

Residents in other city housing projects are being urged to pursue similar companies as a way to reverse the negative image of public housing as a dumping ground for generations of poor families.

The housing authority itself has set up the Kumbaya Construction Co. to hire and train residents to remodel units and gain needed experience to land good-paying, unionized jobs.

Such programs are just a drop in the bucket in communities where 58% of the housing project residents are on some form of public assistance. But Smith contends the jobs have a ripple effect, creating a positive attitude and thirst for work where few opportunities exist.

Los Angeles is not the first housing authority in the nation to help tenants get a share of refurbishing funds. In Chicago’s public housing developments, custodial companies owned by tenants and joint-venture partners from the private sector have sprung up.

“They say inner-city people can’t do anything, they are uneducated,” said Jordan Downs resident Toliver. “It’s not true. We can improve our lifestyles and give opportunities for people to work.”

The Jordan Downs Resident Management Corp. hired a business consultant to help it design companies that would enable tenants to take advantage of funds earmarked for modernization. But in a community where drug abuse and alcoholism is high and industrial jobs have dwindled, a solid work ethic needs to be nurtured.

Arthur Sanford, 35, and Garon L. Graham, 36, friends since childhood, grew up in the project. They attended school together, cut classes together and joined the same gang. They became fathers and learned how to cut corners supplementing their incomes selling drugs. Eventually, both landed in prison.

Today, they have become each other’s keepers in the Kumbaya construction venture, where they are apprentice carpenters making $14 an hour.

“I lost a lot of time learning that there are no short cuts,” Graham said.

Jordan Downs tenant leaders are convinced that with more jobs the projects can be made a better place to live. But that is not how Bessie Grimes, 41, sees it.

After 15 years in the project, Grimes dreams of moving out, buying a house with a low-interest loan through the GI bill, the benefit of a tour in the Army two decades ago. Between her part-time job as a security guard and another as a maintenance worker, she is almost ready.

“I fully intend to be able to leave here one day,” she said. “I think 15 years is long enough. When I leave, I want my children to have something.”

The Jordan Downs Moving Co. got one of its bigger jobs earlier this month when the housing authority hired it to relocate more than 30 families from housing projects in the San Fernando Valley, displaced when their units were damaged in the recent windstorms.

“This is a winning situation for us,” said Sandra Raye, the housing authority’s relocation manager. “We used to hire an outside firm, and they would come in with an entire work force. Now we hire Jordan Downs and they do an excellent job. . . . These are folks who weren’t working and are willing to do whatever it takes to have a job.”

Martha Clark, who once worked as a part-time guard and supervisor for a housing security firm, was named the first chief executive officer of Jordan Downs Security Co. She says that she too would someday like to move on and open up her own security business.

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She has learned how to schedule work hours and do taxes and expense reports.

“It’s exciting, it’s stressful,” she said. “I like being a CEO.”

Melba Williams patrols the project grounds for the security firm, making sure that vacant units being remodeled are not ransacked and vandalized.

With her experience at Jordan Downs, she said, she hopes to get a job at an outside security firm. There would be longer hours at work, but more money for her three children.

At $6 a hour, the Jordan Downs job is “a good start,” she said. “It’s a steppingstone, a foot in the door.”

And just possibly, she adds, a foot out the door.