San Pedro 2000 : Blueprint for Future Leaves Low-Income Residents Fearful

From her tiny front stoop on Third Street, Bess Barbadillo has a clear view of the giant steel and glass headquarters of the Los Angeles Harbor Department, one of the most striking examples of this community’s changing downtown and waterfront profile.

“This is valuable property we have here,” Barbadillo said one day last week, sucking on a cigarette outside her stucco apartment. “I am sure some rich people would want to buy this and build some condominiums, or a market or whatever.”

Barbadillo lives in Rancho San Pedro, a 45-year-old housing project for the poor that spreads across 21 acres just north of downtown and west of the harbor’s burgeoning West Channel. More than 1,500 people live in the city-owned project, which serves as a gateway of sorts to the impoverished northeast section of town.

Rancho San Pedro and the surrounding Barton Hill neighborhoods have the highest violent crime rate in San Pedro. They are popular hangouts for drug dealers and home to at least two rival gangs that often claim innocent victims in their quest for local supremacy, police say. According to the most recent figures available, four murders were committed there in the first nine months of 1986. Many residents of other parts of San Pedro say they are afraid to go near the area.

But as the Harbor Department, the city of Los Angeles and private investors pump hundreds of millions of dollars into new commercial and recreational developments on San Pedro’s waterfront, local business leaders are beginning to look beyond Rancho San Pedro’s notorious reputation to see it as a choice piece of real estate with vast development potential.

While denying they are “rich people” interested in developing the area at any cost, members of the San Pedro Peninsula Chamber of Commerce have drafted a proposal calling for the demolition of Rancho San Pedro, the construction of new low-income housing several blocks west on Pacific Avenue, an increase in residential density in the Barton Hill neighborhood and the development of a harbor front commercial area where the housing project now stands.

Dubbed “San Pedro 2000,” the proposal is meant to serve as a blueprint for future residential and commercial development in the northeast section of town. Chamber officials say that it would provide improved housing for residents of Rancho San Pedro, reduce crime in the area, upgrade the Barton Hill housing stock and, perhaps most important, open up several blocks of Harbor Boulevard near the expanding World Cruise Center to commercial development.

“The chamber would see this as a showpiece boulevard in San Pedro,” said D. Leron Gubler, executive director of the chamber. “It is valuable, prime land with ocean views.”

Word of the proposal has only trickled into pockets of the Rancho San Pedro and Barton Hill neighborhoods. But many of those from the area who have heard about it characterize the plan as an underhanded effort by the chamber to rid the community of some of its poorest residents while “making the rich people richer,” as one of them said.

Renters in Barton Hill fear improvements to homes there may price them out of the market, while some Rancho San Pedro residents say they do not accept the chamber pledge that all 479 units at the project would be rebuilt--upgraded and offered at affordable rents.

“They want to make the waterfront look more presentable so that more rich people will want to come into this area,” said Margaret Blake, who lives in Rancho San Pedro with her husband, George, on monthly income of $800. “We are poor people here. And we have to have a place to live, too.”

Harbor Boulevard, with direct access from the Harbor Freeway, is the main artery to the San Pedro waterfront, which is going through a $300-million renaissance. The largest cruise center on the West Coast is under construction, as are a marina with slips for thousands of private boats and a youth aquatics camp. The Harbor Department also has plans for a $40-million fish market, restaurants and two hotels.

‘Logical for Growth’

“We are trying to define where the future business growth in San Pedro should take place,” said John Barbieri, president of the chamber, who owns an energy consulting business in San Pedro. “That area just happens to be opposite the West Bank of Los Angeles Harbor, which the Harbor Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. It is a logical place for business growth.”

Since December, the chamber has been taking its proposal to service organizations and other San Pedro community groups in an effort to gather support. Gubler, who has spoken to more than a dozen organizations, said the chamber will use comments from the meetings to revise the proposal before it is presented next month to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the San Pedro community. The chamber hopes Flores will then forward the proposal to the Housing Authority and the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Aside from negative reaction in northeast San Pedro, Gubler said, San Pedro 2000 generally has been playing to rave reviews from merchants and residents who consider the area an eyesore and a hotbed for crime. Opponents of the plan from the neighborhood, however, charge that the chamber is not really interested in hearing from them.

Existing on Rumors

More than two months into making the speaking rounds, the chamber has yet to hold a formal meeting with residents of Rancho San Pedro or Barton Hill, an omission that has brought harsh criticism from Barbadillo, Blake and others who live or work in the area. Community leaders say most people in the area know little about the program aside from rumors. Although Gubler denies it, some charge that the chamber is intentionally keeping residents in the dark.

“It has been very hush-hush,” said Dee Petty, who runs the Barton Hill Neighborhood Organization, a community outreach program of the United Methodist Church that provides social services to 600 Barton Hill families. “The community doesn’t even know about it. The chamber has a responsibility not only to the business community but to the residents that will be affected.”

Barbadillo, who is the Rancho San Pedro tenant representative to the city’s Housing Authority, said residents have been inquiring about rumors that they will be evicted. Last week, she called Gubler and got permission to photocopy a 10-page chamber report on San Pedro 2000 that she wants to distribute to all 479 units in the project.

“I don’t think it is right to make these people suffer by having them wondering about where they are going to live,” said Barbadillo, a 22-year project tenant. “People are getting depressed. When I heard about it, I thought, ‘Oh, my, I might have to be a street people like they have in L.A.’ ”

Gubler Denies Charge

In an interview, Gubler denied that the chamber has been avoiding Rancho San Pedro and Barton Hill residents, saying he has spoken with the manager of Rancho San Pedro and the board of trustees of the Toberman Settlement House, a nonprofit community outreach organization in Barton Hill. He said he is willing to meet with residents and said he will arrange to do so later this month.

“We have developed this as a concept, and we have taken great pains to go out to groups and get their input,” Gubler said. “If we wanted to push this through at any cost, we wouldn’t be going out and telling everybody about it. We welcome suggestions.”

But during a speech to the local Lions Club several weeks ago, Gubler acknowledged that the chamber has an image problem among Rancho San Pedro and Barton Hill residents. He said any chamber proposal to redevelop the area would run into stiff opposition there.

“I do suspect that the residents will be opposed to this because it requires change,” he said. “The basic problem is that they don’t trust us.”

Chamber President Barbieri agreed. “Many economically disadvantaged people just distrust business,” he said in an interview. “It is not unique to this area.”

Fuels Opposition

Indeed, Allen O’Rourke, manager of Rancho San Pedro, said in an interview last week that the question of trust--or lack of it--has fueled opposition to San Pedro 2000 within the project. He confirmed that Gubler had called him to talk about the proposal, but only after he first heard about it from a reporter.

“He told me that he didn’t want it to be misunderstood here,” O’Rourke said of his conversation with Gubler. “I don’t know how it could be misunderstood when it isn’t even being distributed in the community here.”

David McKenna, president of the Toberman board of trustees, also acknowledged that the chamber had discussed San Pedro 2000 with his board. Although the group applauded efforts to upgrade housing in northeast San Pedro, McKenna said board members were concerned that the chamber was excluding area residents from the decision-making process.

“It seems the chamber is busy going around to service groups in San Pedro, and feel they have done their deed for Barton Hill by making the presentation to Toberman,” McKenna said. “But there are a lot of individuals who may use Toberman but are not aware of what is going on. These people are still in the dark.”

Asks Public Hearings

McKenna said the board suggested that the chamber hold public hearings on the proposal in the affected neighborhoods. He said Gubler rejected the idea, saying the chamber preferred receiving written comments.

Gubler defended the chamber’s strategy, saying in an interview that the group believes it is too early to hold public hearings. He said the chamber, which is not a government agency, is only seeking comments so that it can fine-tune the proposal before it drafts a final version. Public hearings, he said, wouldn’t be held until the city--through Councilwoman Flores--expresses an interest in San Pedro 2000.

“The chamber is trying to play the role of catalyst by getting the community to recognize that we have a problem here and that we should be doing something about it,” Gubler said. “This is not a government proposal. What we will be adopting is a chamber position. I can’t guarantee that the (chamber’s) board will go along with any suggestion we receive.”

The chamber proposal, approved by the board of directors in October, was a reaction to both community complaints about Rancho San Pedro and an awareness by chamber members that they must develop a strategy to compete with Long Beach for port-related businesses and commercial developments, chamber officials said.

‘Looking at Potential’

“We are looking at the potential which exists with the explosive Pacific Rim growth in trade,” the chamber’s San Pedro 2000 report states. “Unless we take action now, we will see the benefits from this trade completely going to neighboring Long Beach.”

In his presentation to community groups, Gubler usually begins by reading newspaper accounts of shootings, stabbings, robberies, murders, rapes, burglaries and other crimes in Rancho San Pedro.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people, including the chamber, have not taken the problems at Rancho San Pedro seriously,” Gubler told the Lions Club. “People are coming to the chamber and are asking what is being done down there.”

Barbieri, the chamber’s president, said merchants near the project complain about crime, while businesses from outside the community lose interest in moving to downtown San Pedro when they see the project and surrounding neighborhood.

“This is not a referendum on Rancho San Pedro,” Barbieri said. “A blind man can see that there is a terrible problem there. The place is in deplorable condition. The people who live there ought to have better housing--more secure housing--where they don’t have to worry about a mugging every night or a murder every weekend.”

All Would Be Relocated

Under the chamber proposal, all 1,500 residents of Rancho San Pedro would be relocated in San Pedro, although it does not specify where. In his speeches to local civic groups, Gubler has suggested that low-income housing be built along north Pacific Avenue, a run-down commercial strip within Barton Hill that police have identified as a particularly high-crime area.

The new housing would be built with revenue from commercial developments on Harbor Boulevard, and would be dispersed among other residential developments to “discourage the criminal element” from gaining a foothold, according to the chamber proposal. The entire Rancho San Pedro and north Pacific Avenue area would be declared a redevelopment zone, which the chamber believes would attract developers.

A change in zoning in a 30-block area of Barton Hill surrounding Pacific Avenue would allow property owners to build three rather than two units on their lots, which the chamber believes would encourage owners to improve their property and provide better housing.

Chamber officials said they have not discussed their proposal with the city Housing Authority, which owns and operates Rancho San Pedro, but the chamber’s report refers to an article in The Times that quotes Al Greene, chairman of the Housing Commission, as supporting efforts to upgrade city housing projects through mixed-use housing and commercial developments.

Unfamiliar With Plan

In an interview last week, Greene said he is not familiar with San Pedro 2000, but said the commission welcomes redevelopment proposals.

“We are always looking at creative proposals designed to improve or increase the amount of housing available for low-income people,” Greene said. None of the city’s 21 low-income housing developments has been redeveloped along the lines of the San Pedro 2000 plan, although there has been at least one similar proposal in the works elsewhere in the city, he said. He did not elaborate.

Bernie Evans, chief deputy to Councilwoman Flores, said chamber members have outlined the proposal for Flores, who said she will reserve judgment until she receives it in its final form next month.

“It is a chamber initiative,” Evans said. “The chamber realizes that there would need to be widespread community support for it.”

In the meantime, officials at Toberman Settlement House and the Barton Hill Neighborhood Organization said they intend to hold community meetings to give local residents a chance to hear about the proposal and comment on it. McKenna, of the Toberman board, said the hearings are essential before the proposal reaches Flores’ office.

‘Put Order in Process’

“We will try to put some order in the process so that everyone’s rights are protected,” said McKenna, who works in the city attorney’s office at the Harbor Department. “I think it is a good idea what the chamber is trying to do. It is just a matter of how are you going to go about doing it. . . . The chamber said this is only the preliminary plan, but unfortunately it becomes the assumption that this is the consensus of the community. . . . We stress the fact that we think community hearings are necessary.”

At Rancho San Pedro, Barbadillo, passing an afternoon with Margaret Blake one day last week, promised not to give up without a fight.

“They aren’t going to take our Rancho from us,” said Barbadillo, who accused the chamber of exaggerating the crime problem to justify its plan. “Every section of the city has crime activity, I don’t care where you live. People living up in Palos Verdes have murders and robberies. You don’t see them trying to take their homes, though, do you?”