Clearing the Streets : A Ban on Parking May Be the Way to Reduce Crime in Ponderosa Area, Anaheim Police Say

ANAHEIM — From the Wakefield Avenue apartment where she has lived 25 years, Lila Jaggeares has witnessed many attempts to rehabilitate her troubled neighborhood.

Drug stings and intensified police patrols have brought temporary relief, but the brazen dealers and gang members inevitably reclaim the five-street area known as the Ponderosa Park neighborhood.

“I see them stashing drugs in the cars parked on the street, and I see them hide behind the cars when the police go by,” said Jaggeares, who manages three apartment buildings in the area. “I’m in favor of anything that would make this place better.”

Anaheim police are planning a new tactic. Later this month, the department will ask the city to take an unprecedented step in Anaheim: Ban all street parking in the neighborhood.

“Merely taking cars off streets gives us a clear vision and denies gang members and drug dealers an obstacle to hide behind,” said Officer Ed Cook, who along with partner Harold Martin has been assigned to the area full time since last July.

Although residents here are weary of crime, many are upset with the proposed parking ban. They wonder where they will park, since the ban would eliminate about 380 spaces.

“It’s going to be a problem,” said Mireya Rivera, 23, who has lived in the neighborhood 14 years. “There are a lot of families here and three or four cars to each apartment, and they only give you one garage. I don’t know what we are going to do if they pass that law. I think everyone will move.”

On Friday, Paula Maya, 37, flagged down Martin and Cook in an alley to express her concerns.

“What about the people who come to visit us?” she asked. “Where are they going to park? Disneyland? I’m sick of the drug dealers, but why should we have to pay forit too?”

In 1994, police were called to this neighborhood 1,790 times, and just last week, 17 people were arrested during a three-hour drug sweep.

The neighborhood has about 5,000 residents, and its 99 apartment buildings are mostly occupied by low-income Latino families. There is severe overcrowding in the area, with two or three families often sharing a two-bedroom apartment.

“I know one apartment that has 16 people in it,” Jaggeares said. “Another family is planning to move because they have four cars.”

To inform residents about the parking proposal, police have held two poorly attended community meetings at nearby Ponderosa Park. Officers later distributed flyers door-to-door in the neighborhood.

Police and city officials say they are mindful of the potential problems such a ban would bring, and they say they are working on solutions.

One plan is to pour concrete over some of the grassy areas next to the alleyways near many buildings to create driveways that would fit up to four cars.

Another goal is to get people to park in their garages. City and police officials estimate that more than 30% of the garages in the neighborhood are not being used to park cars.

Instead, garages store broken-down vehicles or other belongings and, in at least a dozen cases, are being used to run illegal auto repair businesses, said John Poole, the city’s code enforcement officer.

Poole said the city is trying to arrange free towing services for residents to remove inoperative vehicles and will provide trash dumpsters for cleanup of carports and garages.

“We feel that if everyone works on it, there will be enough parking off of the public streets,” he said. “There could be problems with it, but there are problems out there now.”

Police say that 280 of the lost spaces would be restored if residents used their assigned parking area.

The proposal to ban parking is scheduled to go before the City Council on April 18. If approved, the ban would begin in May. At first, the ban would affect only one side of each street in order to give residents time to adjust, police said.

Police officials concede that a parking ban may seem severe, but they say that the problems in the area are severe, and that dramatic measures must be taken to stop what they say is rampant sale of crack cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana.

Officers Cook and Martin estimate that 100 drug dealers work the neighborhood, ranging from a fifth-grade boy to a 70-year-old grandfather.

“The area is notorious for being a marketplace for drugs,” Martin said as he patrolled the area Friday. “These drug dealers work day or night, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are very service-oriented.”

Sgt. Joe Vargas, who heads the department’s community policing division, said police have considered everything in the neighborhood “short of having an occupying army in the area with officers at every corner.”

“We have considered permit parking, one-way streets, building walls around the area and installing a guard shack,” Vargas said. “But these things are not feasible. The parking ban seems like a simple answer to a problem we’ve been trying to address for years.”

Vargas said he was personally approached by a drug dealer this week while surveying the area in a city-marked code enforcement car.

“He flagged us down and asked us if we wanted to buy dope,” the officer said.

Although street-parking bans are rare, they are not unprecedented in Orange County.

Most notably, this type of a ban is credited with helping turning around Garden Grove’s Buena-Clinton neighborhood, once known as the worst neighborhood in Orange County.

Before the parking ban was imposed in the mid-1980s, the Buena-Clinton neighborhood was consistently the city’s No. 1 crime district. Last year, among the city’s 90 crime districts, the neighborhood ranked 24th, police said.

“The ban of street parking was the kind of thing we needed to get control of the neighborhood,” said Garden Grove Lt. Scott Hamilton. “It was a catalyst for positive change, even though it was hard for the residents to swallow. If you asked them now, they wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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Mean Streets

In an effort to rid the Ponderosa Park neighborhood of drugs and gang crime, Anaheim police want a parking ban enforced on a seven- street, quarter- square- mile area. Density: 5,000 residents, 99 apartment buildings. Calls to police: 1,790 in 1994, including attempted murder. Ban: 24 hours a day during a one- year trial. Source: Anaheim Police Department