Cleanup gives NLV neighborhood hope for renewal

By Mike Trask

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Elizabeth Driver has lived in the same small home for 40 years. Her life has remained mostly unchanged. Not so her neighborhood.

For a while it got ugly, what with the guns and the drugs.

But there are signs of improvement.

“Oh Lordy,” Driver says, sitting on her scooter this Saturday afternoon in the driveway of her North Las Vegas home. “You can rest better.”

And that’s good news for all of College Heights, a small section of ranch homes in one of the roughest areas of North Las Vegas.

Saturday wasn’t the day the neighborhood turned around. But it certainly seemed to be circling in that direction.

It was the first time anyone remembers that a lot of people on the streets had only good intentions. The city — along with a newly formed neighborhood group — flooded the area with city workers, police officers, volunteers and few ankle-bracelet-wearing folks doing community service.

The busted appliances that had sat on lawns and hundreds of garbage bags stuffed with detritus went into donated trash bins. The thinking: If the community near Lake Mead and Martin Luther King boulevards looks good, then it will become good.

After the cleanup, the neighbors were treated to hot dogs off the grill.

No, this isn’t going to suddenly gentrify the area dubbed “40 Block” — pejoratively named after the smashed 40-ounce malt liquor bottles that used to line the sidewalks — and then adopted by City Hall.

Full transformation is going to take a lot more time, and, frankly, a lot more cash and sweat.

The first thing the neighborhood group did was change the name of the city redevelopment project from 40 Block to the North Valley Community.

It was a start.

Before the cleanup began, the city spent weeks replacing all the streetlights, painting all the fire hydrants and fixing some of the crumbling cinder block walls around the community.

The more telling action might have been the shuttering last summer of the Buena Vista Springs apartments bordering College Heights. Their residents had caused most of the problems, at least in the eyes of the city and the well-meaning neighbors hauling junk out of their own modest homes.

After the federal government cut off funding to the apartments last year — those near College Heights and the larger complex less than a mile away at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Carey Avenue — life got better for people like Driver.

Suddenly, the loud neighbors were gone. The streets got quieter and more peaceful. Police had time for routine patrols.

North Las Vegas has spent more than $2.5 million in federal and local money to start the redevelopment project, about $5,000 of which went to the Saturday cleanup. The big bucks are being used to help provide financing for home buyers in the area.

Still, real progress may come from what the neighbors saw accomplished on this day, Kenny Young, senior assistant to the city manager, said Saturday.

“I think a lot of it is just the neighbors seeing the city out here, seeing that it cares,” he said, having turned in his business suit and put on a pair of work gloves. The city, he said, is getting a better understanding of the problems confronting the neighborhood.

Other cleanups are planned for this summer. There’s always hope of more grants to help renters buy their own homes. A neighborhood community office will soon open to offer more assistance to residents.

Young said the city is looking for ways to spur redevelopment of the boarded-up Buena Vista Springs properties, which remain in private hands.

In the meantime, six homes are being sold to buyers who may take pride in the neighborhood. Those deals are in the works after an open house last month that drew more than 30 interested families.

The progress is real, said Beverly Mathis, principal of Booker Elementary School, across the street from the neighborhood.

Mathis has been at the school for 12 years and has been widely praised for raising test scores and leading the beleaguered community. More than once she’s walked across the street to rouse a truant or to tell a parent about a child’s misbehavior.

This is, after all, a poor area where not everyone has a working telephone.

It’s important, she said, to be seen in the parts of the neighborhood that still don’t seem safe.

“The kids will see people working and caring,” Mathis said. “This shows there is community. That’s needed.”