[Hugh R]

From this LA Times article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-southla-pueblos14-2009jul14,0,2422714.story

apartment. He leaned ever so gently against the door. "It's open," he said, and his breath quickened. He locked eyes with another officer who was standing across the stoop, gun held tight against his thigh. "I'm going in," Vargas said.

The gunshots had erupted in a courtyard at Pueblo del Rio, one of the oldest and largest public housing developments in Los Angeles, a place beset with crippling poverty and gang violence for much of its 67 years. It was late on a Friday, and it had been a quiet night. Now it looked as though someone had kicked over an anthill.


Looky-loos streamed in. So did police. There were obstacles everywhere: shell casings you weren't supposed to step on; old-timey wire clotheslines, neck-high, that you didn't want to run into. A police helicopter banked overhead; everyone winced at its burst of white light, then pushed on through the dark.

Witnesses shouted out stories that could not all be true. The shooter had fled east, toward the old flour mill. No, west, toward the tracks. It was a handgun. No, a rifle. They agreed on one thing: The victim had been shot in the back and stumbled into one of these apartments. Vargas, a 16-year LAPD veteran, had found the right place. He had no idea what he'd find on the other side of the door.

Gang violence has fallen in this corner of South L.A., and civic leaders are laboring to secure some semblance of lasting peace and community -- through new police tactics and city-funded gang-prevention, job-training and other programs.


Defusing Pueblo del Rio is a less daunting proposition than it would have been in years past. But it still comes with complexities: the three gangs that call "the Pueblos" home, the insular families who've been here from the start. The community reflects what lies ahead for South L.A.: an unlikely sense of quiet and optimism most days, tempered by startling episodes that threaten to plunge the neighborhood back into the more familiar narrative of violence.

A third slammed into Nicole Horne's shoulder.

Horne, 25, was born and raised here -- the third generation of her family to live in this apartment. She'd been in the courtyard when a fight erupted; the bullets were not meant for her. She'd stumbled inside, then collapsed onto the bare tile floor of the living room.

"It burns!" she screamed. "Where is the ambulance?"

Horne's wounds were not fatal. Vargas helped soothe her until paramedics arrived. He needed to get back to the streets, and there was nothing more he could do here anyway. But as he steered his cruiser away, he suspected this wasn't the last he'd hear of this. The area where Horne had been shot was controlled by the Pueblo Bishops, the community's dominant gang.

"They'll kill each other for this," Vargas said.


So what "good" does these 2 and 3 generation families living on the "dole" actually provide Los Angeles? Taxes revenues, any contribution to society? I say cut off public housing subsidies entirely. LA is an expensive place to live. If you don't have the IQ, education, skill set to make a living here without a government handout, you should move somewhere else.