City lives down reputation as a disaster area
Once characterized by high crime rates and dilapidated properties, Paramount, Calif., has worked steadily for the last 20 years to transform itself into a more appealing city. Its efforts have garnered national awards and have succeeded in attracting residents and businesses to the largely Latino community southeast of Los Angeles.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Paramount began a downward spiral when dairy farmers began moving out to rural areas and taking a large portion of the workforce with them. Meanwhile, nearby cities were building housing tracts and shopping malls, luring local consumers away and forcing many small merchants in the city out of business.
As the years passed, building owners and developers eschewed landscaping and architectural flourishes, viewing them as magnets for vandals. Windows often were eliminated from buildings to keep from being broken. By the 1980s, Paramount had deteriorated into row upon row of decrepit buildings, rundown housing, widespread crime and poverty. The final straw came in 1982 when a study conducted by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Rand for the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) declared Paramount a “disaster area.”
Faced with the challenge of overcoming that dismal reputation, city officials began creating programs to encourage revitalization. Using its local redevelopment agency, the city began overseeing commercial improvements and administering architectural design guidelines that provided a clean, identifiable and unified look throughout town.
In 1985, the redevelopment agency created a Commercial Rebate Program to provide business owners with upgrades such as fresh stucco, new roofs, renovated sign-age, decorative walls and colorful landscaping. As part of the program, the agency provided design assistance and often picked up 75 percent of the tab for property improvements. Since the program began, Paramount has given almost $5.5 million to refurbish more than 240 commercial and industrial properties.
In 1996, the city began creating “pocket parks,” which are private vacant lots that are landscaped and used as public parks. The city contacts absentee owners of visible and problem vacant lots and asks them if the city can maintain the property as a park until the owners are ready to develop it. The city borrows the land for free, handles all the liability, develops and maintains the park, and gives it back to the owner when he or she gives a 30-day notice. Currently, the city has nine pocket parks, which occupy 91,470 square feet and cost $100,000 to develop.
In 1997, the redevelopment agency began offering homeowners white polyurethane picket fences to replace chain-link fences. The agency pays 75 percent of the cost of the picket fences, and the homeowners pay 25 percent. Since the program began, the agency has replaced fences at 225 homes in the city.
The property improvements helped lure The Home Depot to open a 25,000-square-foot store on Paramount’s westside corridor in February 2002. Today, the store — one of the chain’s first “inner-city” locations — sits on a 13-acre site immediately adjacent to the Long Beach Freeway. In addition to employing several hundred local residents, the store has become a major source of municipal revenue and has served as a catalyst for more than $1 million in commercial, housing and public improvements in the corridor.
The revitalization of Paramount has not been an overnight project. Rather, it has taken more than 20 years of intensive social, economic and civic reform. Over the last 20 years, the population of the five-square-mile city has doubled to 60,000, and crime has been cut in half. Since 1995, retail sales have risen at a rate that has outpaced most other cities in the southeast L.A. County region.
Additionally, many of the programs that helped create the turnaround have been honored nationally. Paramount has received three City Livability Awards from the Washington, D.C.-based United States Conference of Mayors, an All-America City Award from the Denver-based National Civic League, and a Best Practices Award for Innovation from HUD.