By Joe Holley

Tribune Staff Writer

Fiftieth Street in Southeast San Diego dead-ends in a cul-de-sac a block off Imperial.  On the block are a few small-framed houses, built in the ’30 maybe, and several two-story apartment complexes.  The complexes are new and cheaply built; many have windows knocked out or boarded up with plywood.  A few have been abandoned.  No trees or shrubbery soften the landscape; tall chain-link or wrought-iron fences surround almost every structure, including the single-family houses.

Those fences are there for good reason.  This block of 50^th is a war zone.   Gangs dividing up the drug business can’t seem t decide who controls what apartment complex, so it’s not unusual for bullets to fly.  Street sales are common.  During a 10-day period not long ago, the police made 94 arrests on this block of 50^th.

It wasn’t always so bad, Phil Bonham and Scott Silverman will tell you.  The two men, both native San Diegans, manage an apartment complex on 50^th, one of 16 properties they manage in the area.  They have become experts on what they call “problem properties.”  “The problem only began three or four years ago,” Silverman says.  “With crack cocaine, the gangs took over, and it caught a lot of owners off guard.”

Not long ago, Silverman and Bonham got together with other apartment owners and property management people to form Management Alert.  The organization offers owners and managers a means of pooling information and resources so they don’t have to walk away from their property.  It’s also become a way to help reclaim livable, affordable places for families who desperately need them.

Silverman and Bonham have their share of horror stories.  Bonham tells of one unit he managed where gangs “ripped out every single wall on the inside.  Just the studs were left, from one end of the building to another.”   On another occasion, he realized it had been a couple of weeks since he had seen the tenants who lived in a unit on a hill overlooking the rest of the complex.  Investigating, he discovered that gang members had broken in and pistol-whipped the father, terrorized the children, and commandeered the apartment.  They wanted a unit at the top of the hill so they could  watch police activity on Euclid and communicate to their comrades via cellular phones.

The key to managing property in the area, Silverman says, is “a hands-on approach.”  He and Bonham are on the scene every day.  They hire reliable resident managers, screen their tenants closely and keep the property well maintained.   They use private security forces on occasion – at the end of the month, for example.  That’s when, in Silverman’s words, “everybody’s dry, withdrawal sets in and there are a lot of burglaries.”  They rely on their resident manager to let them know when it might be wise to have the security people driving by.  “We’ll use the cops when we have to,” Silverman adds.  “But in the last 60 days, we’ve used them only once.”  They also get to know the gangs operating in the neighborhood.  “We don’t ‘dime’ on them,” Silverman says.  “It’s kind of an unspoken territorial respect.  We tell them up front what we expect.”

On 50^th Street, the complex that Silverman and Bonham manage is an island of calm.  It’s clean, well maintained and quiet.  Before summer, the 100 children who live in the complex will be enjoying a new playground.   “We’re going to a lot of expense to put a playground here, because this is a family complex,” Silverman says.  “What are they going to do, play in the street?”

Scott Silverman and Phil Bonham are, of course, businessmen; their motives are not totally altruistic.  But their willingness to confront society’s problems represents the only way a city can reclaim areas that have succumbed to violence and lawlessness, chaos and despair.  Their island of calm, and others, we can hope, will grow larger – block by block, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood – until a whole city is safe, sane and livable.

Reprinted from

The Tribune