Houston Cleans Up Drug Area

Former City 'Hot Spot' Today's Death Valley

Not long ago, 5,000 people lived in the once-fashionable city district near the Astrodome. Dozens of fine apartment buildings were clustered along Link Valley Drive - buildings with colonial-style pillars, brick facades, wrought-iron balconies, hardwood floors and dining-room chandeliers.

Surrounding neighborhoods still offer middle-class homes that sell for $75,000 to $250,000 each.

''This used to be one of the hot spots in Houston,'' said police Officer Jim Woods, who grew up a few blocks away. ''These apartments were the nicest places to be 15 years ago.''

That was before a nice neighborhood was transformed into Houston's most notorious drug-distribution center, a piece of '60s suburbia gone sour.

Six people were killed in Death Valley last year. By then the whole neighborhood had disintegrated into a haven for stop 'n' shop drug dealing. Pushers stood on street corners like parking lot attendants, directing the drive-through drug traffic with flashlights.

Houston police made 200 drug-related arrests last year in Death Valley's vacant and vandalized apartment buildings.

But nothing changed - until nine days ago.

On Jan. 27 Houston police cordoned off the entire 27-acre neighborhood - an area the size of Eola Park in downtown Orlando - with roadblocks and checkpoints. A squad of 100 officers conducted a sweep of the apartment buildings to rid them of the vandals, vagrants, addicts and pushers.

The next day 400 residents from the nearby neighborhoods cut down the waist-high weeds and collected enough trash to fill eight large dumpsters. City health officials collected 150 discarded hypodermic needles used to inject drugs. Scores of empty cellophane packages that once held crack cocaine were found in the apartments.

When the barricades went up and the police moved in, the clock started ticking on a 30-day plan to rid Link Valley of its crime and squalor, even if it means razing the entire neighborhood.

In South Florida recently, residents in several subdivisions erected road barriers to slow down quick-working muggers and burglars. And last year Tampa used seized drug money to finance the bulldozing of more than 60 crack houses throughout the city.

Such efforts are dwarfed by what's happening in Link Valley, however. No one's ever tried this before.

The unusual crackdown was sparked by the killing in September of an elderly woman in a nearby neighorhood. Police investigating the killing found the woman's van backed up to one of Link Valley's vacant apartment buildings. Two men were busy unloading her possessions from the vehicle. They were arrested and charged with murder.

As a result of that case, nine civic clubs from surrounding neighborhoods formed the Stella Link Revitalization Coalition. (Stella Link is one of the area's main thoroughfares.) The coalition's goal: level Link Valley and replace it with an office complex, hotel or shopping mall.