Blog Note: This article references
a grand jury report.
STOCKTON — Fred Sheil, a
longtime south Stockton housing activist, was in a particularly pessimistic
mood last week.
For the past 25 years, Sheil
has watched the perennial problems of blight, crime and disrepair linger or
worsen, leaving him to wonder when or if he will ever see ongoing change for
the better in Stockton’s most challenged sections.
“In the current situation,
the only people who are going to invest in these neighborhoods are the same
people who are ruining them,” Sheil said Friday.
Sheil, who heads STAND
Affordable Housing, says he believes there is “a lot of goodwill” at City Hall
to finally make the needed investment in Stockton’s older sections.
But even as the Stockton
Police Department prepares to embark this month on a 90-day “Neighborhood Blitz
Team” code-enforcement and anti-crime push in a 35-block portion of the south
side, Sheil harbors doubts about whether the new effort really will be enough
to finally roust the slumlords and irresponsible business owners dragging down
the community.
Sheil’s concern is that while
the code-enforcement crew is willing, the legal muscle behind it may not be
sufficient.
“It takes a lot of attorneys
and staff time, and the staff is just not there,” Sheil said.
In Sheil’s mind,
code-enforcement Utopia is to be found 400 miles to the south in Riverside, a
city of more than 300,000 residents that established a robust effort to clean up
its neighborhoods in 2003.
Sheil would like to see a
similar approach in 300,000-resident Stockton but is realistic about the
financial constraints facing the city, which exited bankruptcy less than six
months ago.
Still, Sheil believes the
Riverside model is well worth Stockton’s consideration. He said that’s
especially the case in south Stockton, which was the focus of a civil grand
jury report earlier this year that called on the city to do better by that
100,000-resident section of the community.
Riverside’s “Neighborhood
Livability Program” utilizes a squadron of deputy city attorneys to carry out
the findings of its code enforcers.
According to a 2013 report by
Riverside on its livability program, the effort is self-sustaining through the
penalties paid by the miscreants it punishes. The program is “a proven solution
for combating blight, crime and nuisance activities,” according to the National
League of Cities.
“The elimination of
substandard housing … has proven to be invaluable to the safety of the
residents of the city,” the Riverside report says.
Stockton’s code-enforcement
unit was decimated by layoffs in 2008 as the city plummeted toward bankruptcy.
On the legal end, City Attorney John Luebberke said Stockton has the equivalent
of one full-time deputy city attorney assigned to code enforcement.
City Councilman Michael Tubbs
said Stockton is building collaboration between community organizations and
government bodies to deal with improving the quality of life in the city’s
troubled neighborhoods. In time, he said, full implementation of the Riverside
model is “where we want to go.” But Tubbs said the city must move carefully.
“Just in February, we were
declared out of bankruptcy,” Tubbs said. “We have all these needs, but we need
to make sure we do things that are important but do it in a way that doesn’t
put us back where we were six months ago.”
Peter Lemos, who manages code
enforcement for Stockton police, said his unit is at “75 percent of where we
want to be” in recovering from the ravages of bankruptcy.
Lemos said that during the
worst of times, the code-enforcement team was “in triage mode,” expending all
its energy fixing problems that presented immediate threats to public safety.
Recently, though, manpower
has increased and the breadth of services has followed suit. Lemos said his
code enforcers handle as many as 10 abatements a day, from replacing faulty
water heaters to clearing overgrown vegetation and putting boards over broken
windows.
Lemos also said that in
addition to the City Attorney’s Office, his department has been working with
the San Joaquin County district attorney on several criminal cases against
slumlords.
“This is very new,” Lemos
said. “For them to come forward and work hand in hand with the City Attorney’s
Office is a new thing.”
Additionally, Lemos said, he
now has the funding to bring back a variety of programs lost during bankruptcy,
including “proactive sweeps” in which officers will traverse neighborhoods by
foot and address the problems they see. The first of these is scheduled for
later this month in north Stockton.
Lemos said he understands
Sheil’s concern that the same bad landlords and business owners will continue
to prosper and the same sores will continue to fester. But he said he has a
higher level of optimism, even if a full-fledged Riverside-style livability
program is years away in Stockton.
“I think (Sheil has) seen so
many of the same people doing the same type of violations over and over and he
wants the city to lower the hammer on them,” Lemos said. “I’m not saying we
don’t need to do it. I believe we have the tools to do it.
“He’s right. We need to use
all the tools we have, and do more prosecutions and things like that. But it
does take time to deal with it.”
Sheil said he knows what
success would look like in south Stockton, even if he is weary from waiting to
see it.
“Crime
should go down over time,” he said. “Property values will go up. And with that
you’re going to see other responsible homeowners fix their properties up.
Vacant lots will get built on. We’ll see a lot more infill. We’ll see our older
neighborhoods be taken care instead of now being the dumping grounds they’ve
been allowed to become.”
August 8, 2015
Stockton
Record
By
Roger Phillips
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