Home at Last : Casa Loma--a Housing Complex Built by Latinas for Latinas--Will Open Its Doors This Week

There won’t be much for Margarita Zavala to pack. Her tiny studio apartment near Koreatown only holds so much.

The two rooms serve double duty there. The divorced mother of two shares a bed with son, Manuel, 5, while Paul, 1, sleeps in a crib at the foot of the bed. A small adjoining area passes for a kitchen where Zavala, 27, cooks on a range on top of a small refrigerator.

After meals, she washes dishes in the bathroom sink.

The place is not much, Zavala acknowledges. But it is better than the place she used to share with eight people, and it’s all she could afford.

Until Casa Loma.

Nearly a decade after a group of Latina feminists decided to focus attention on the needs of single parents and their families, Casa Loma has become a reality. The 110-unit complex, scheduled to open in June, is considered the nation’s first low-income housing project built by Latinas primarily for Latina single parents.

Its builders hope it will become a nexus for self-improvement for some of the city’s least powerful--women who work hard, yet stay poor; who yearn for a better life, but find it hard to keep their heads above water.

For Zavala, Casa Loma means more than a larger apartment, lower rent and escape from a roach- and mouse-infested building.

Just two weeks ago, a man was beaten within a few feet of Zavala’s front door; she is scared for her sons, living in a neighborhood plagued by crime.

It will be different at Casa Loma, a four-story haven nestled between downtown Los Angeles and Pico-Union--a largely Central American immigrant community from which the project will draw most of its residents.

Zavala will pay $330 a month for her new three-bedroom apartment in a guarded complex with one entrance and 24-hour security. And she will no longer have to pay $2 an hour to a baby-sitter who does not even feed the children. Instead, she’ll be able to leave her boys at Centro de Ninos, the complex’s on-site child-care center.

The El Salvador native, now living on welfare as she looks for a job, will also be able to inch closer to her goals. Already studying English at Los Angeles City College, Zavala will be able to take courses at Casa Loma ranging from basic math to time management.

Within a few years, project organizers hope, Zavala and other residents should be able to move from the complex and into their own homes, thus making way for the next group in need of what Casa Loma has to offer.

“We’ll know we’re not going to live forever in that building,” Zavala says. Casa Loma will help, “but I have to work for my dream.”

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The Latinas who built Casa Loma share bonds stronger than career or color.

Many were raised by poor families, in substandard housing. And they remember the struggles, and dignity, of their mothers.

“We’re really honoring our past,” says Beatriz Olvera Stotzer, president of New Economics for Women, the Latina economic development corporation that built the $18-million Casa Loma.

“This is about honoring our mothers, our families, our community.”

One of six children, Stotzer never had her own bed until she went to college. Sandra Villalobos, a single mother and Casa Loma’s director, spent her first 14 years learning new addresses. Her mom moved frequently--every time the rent increased. Maggie Cervantes, NEW’s executive director, watched her mother work two jobs and still not have the money to send her two girls to the dentist.

“It’s very emotional,” Cervantes says of Casa Loma, “because when you hear the women talk about how it’s going to affect their lives, I relate it to my experience growing up. How my mother would have loved to have lived there.”

Leda Zepeda’s mom will.

Maria Zepeda, 37, is happy that Leda, 17, and her two other daughters won’t grow up in the crowded apartments the family has called home since emigrating from El Salvador 10 years ago.

A health outreach worker to the Central American community, Zepeda learned of Casa Loma when a representative asked her to pass out a stack of applications at a church presentation.

She completed an application and survived a lottery held to pare down the more than 2,300 applicants. After interviews, during which the project’s builders made sure applicants were aware of and interested in the services Casa Loma had to offer, Zepeda was notified she would get a three-bedroom apartment. Applicants also must meet income and, in some cases, marital status and family size tests.

Zepeda now plans to quit a second job and devote more time to learning English and computers. Her daughters, not allowed outside after dark in their current Westlake neighborhood, can participate in activities at the on-site Boys and Girls club.

Even better, she says, Casa Loma offers the chance to wield control over her own life, and to believe that she or her daughters could one day build a similar complex.

“I know Latinos don’t have very much power in this place,” Zepeda says of the United States. But Casa Loma “is an example that if you get together you can do things like this.

“These women have demonstrated that not only men can do things. Sometimes without men we can do much more.”

Casa Loma was the vision of Comision Feminil Mexicana Nacional, a Latina feminist organization that formed NEW in 1985 to address the housing needs of single parents and their families.

First they had to challenge stereotypes and prove that a corporation run by women could handle such a task. Later, after receiving seed money from United Way and forging partnerships with various agencies, the group secured the public and private financing needed to build Casa Loma.

But getting to the May 24, 1991, groundbreaking from there was no easy feat. Last April, an arson fire caused roughly $500,000 in damage. A week later, the worst urban rioting in a century broke out, destroying many buildings in the surrounding community. This year, heavy rains further delayed construction.

Now the complex’s success is up to its new residents.

“We want these families to know they have a nice environment to live in, an option to succeed,” Stotzer says. “The rest is up to them.”

Three dozen apartments have been promised to older residents, who, organizers hope, will provide the complex with the feel of extended family.

Isabele Calderon, 58, just recently saw the inside of Casa Loma for the first time. But she knew every carpenter on the project by name and knew what color carpets would cover the apartment floors.

For the past year or so, she had walked daily to the site, hoping that one day she might live there.

“I never pray,” she recalls. “But I prayed for that building.”

Two weeks ago, she found out her prayers had been answered. “I cry,” Calderon says. “And I say thank you God.”

Just blocks from Casa Loma, young men loiter outside the building where she and husband Luis, 64, have lived for more than a decade.

The carpet leading up the steps to their studio apartment is worn and stained. But the Calderons, surviving on $645 a month in aid and food stamps, have lived with dignity.

Tape runs along the baseboards to keep out bugs. They papered the worn walls themselves, and covered the bedroom floor with wooden tiles. “If we were living here,” Isabele Calderon explains in Spanish, “we wanted to live like decent people.”

But there were simple things they couldn’t do, such as sit outside on a warm evening. After sundown, the street became drug dealers’ domain.

“We feel very alone here,” she says.

They are eager to become part of Casa Loma’s family.

“Maybe I can teach some of the children how to play chess, or carpentry, or painting,” says her husband. The couple will pay $277 a month for a one-bedroom unit.

And after more than 20 years in this country, the couple plan to learn English, something they never had the time or money to do before.

NEW president Stotzer rejoices at such plans, of people getting the opportunity to enrich their lives. The group hopes to build a 60-unit complex for teen mothers as well as another 115-unit apartment project a block from Casa Loma.

Meanwhile, beneath Stotzer’s smile, she admits, her heart flutters:

“I’m scared to death. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is about lives now.”