DATE: Wednesday, October 22, 1997           TAG: 9710220531

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   72 lines

NORFOLK LAUNCHES CRACKDOWN TO COMBAT BLIGHT IN OCEAN VIEW

Jarred by the recent shooting deaths of three people in East Ocean View, the city has launched a sweep to clean up the neighborhood, targeting blighted property as well as drugs and other illegal activity.

The crackdown, described as the most comprehensive in recent memory, for the first time has teamed police and firefighters with city building inspectors, code enforcement officials and health inspectors, city officials said.

At a briefing for City Council members Tuesday, Ernest Freeman, director of city planning and codes administration, said that about 195 building code violations and more than 100 health violations have been uncovered since the door-to-door sweep began Friday.

The offenses have ranged from overgrown lawns to junked cars and broken windows and doors.

As a result of the effort, Freeman said, two abandoned houses cited for violations in earlier inspections will be razed this week because the owners had not made necessary repairs.

City Councilman W. Randy Wright, whose Ward 5 encompasses the East Ocean View neighborhood, said the city is taking a ``hard-ball, hard-nosed approach'' to let property owners and ``slumlords'' know that ``we're fed up with this kind of stuff.''

The sweep, continuing through Thursday, is targeting a section of the neighborhood that lies between Ocean View Avenue and Pretty Lake, and 2nd and 21st Bay streets. It contains a mix of single-family homes and apartments but is heavy in rentals, officials said.

``We are looking for buildings that we can condemn and bulldoze,'' Wright said. ``We're going to hit them with everything we've got.''

Wright and Freeman said the sweep grew out of a triple homicide that occurred Sept. 16 in East Ocean View in the 9600 block of 15th Bay St. Police suspect the shootings, which erupted near a parking lot of an apartment complex, were drug-related. The victims ranged in age from late teens to early 20s.

Two days after the shootings, city officials held a press conference and promised to rid the neighborhood's streets of crime and the blight that contributed to it.

Officials say the crackdown is key to the success of the redevelopment occurring in East Ocean View, both to reassure residents and to draw potential investors and home buyers.

The city expects to spend as much as $60 million in tax dollars to redevelop a once-blighted 90-acre tract there into a model, Bayfront community. The first two homes being built on the property will be worth about a half-million dollars each, Wright has said.

``If we get at the major sore points,'' Freeman said, ``maybe we'll get some reaction that, number one, the city does care, and number two, that there are reasons to invest in redevelopment.''

Wright said Tuesday that the city's team approach in East Ocean View ``can be done in other neighborhoods, once we fine-tune it.''

City staffers also said this will mark an effort to get residents to take a more activist role in maintaining their neighborhoods, such as by picking up trash. The city can't do it all, they said.

``We want to make the place more liveable,'' Sterling Cheatham, an assistant city manager, said. ``We want to encourage citizens to bond together to take responsibility for their neighborhoods.''

Councilwoman Daun S. Hester, while applauding the sweep's message, said that solving the problems will take a citywide effort. Many times, all that's achieved, she said, as with crackdowns on prostitution and drug activity, is to shift the problems elsewhere in the city.

``Unless we're able to do this on a continuous basis throughout the city,'' she said, ``all we're doing is just a little bit of the battle. We're just moving them around. We need to do something to help pull them up.''

Wright, however, said that everybody in the community can contribute.

``Poor people can pick up the trash in their yards,'' he said. ``There's no excuse for it.'' KEYWORDS: EAST OCEAN VIEW

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