City Is No Longer ‘Iowa by the Sea’ : Once Moribund Long Beach Is Booming

When shopping center magnate Ernest Hahn began scouting Long Beach in 1975, he was struck by the city’s natural beauty--and by its empty downtown shops.

Business was slow even at the tattoo parlors and girlie shows on Ocean Boulevard. The Navy had left town, the Pike amusement park was in decline, the Red Cars had stopped running and the oil was running out.

Across Queensway Bay, the Queen Mary, a costly municipal white elephant, sat rusting. The Spruce Goose lay forgotten under a tarp on Pier A.

The downtown was so close to dead that Long Beach would soon rank sixth on a national list of moribund cities. Property taxes plummeted. Crime spiraled. Vagrants slept in doorways.

A haven for Midwestern sun-seekers and retirees for 70 years, the city struggled to shake its dowdy image as “Iowa by the Sea” and to cast off the comfortable insularity it had long embraced.

“Long Beach was trying to get anybody to come to the downtown to do anything,” Hahn recalled.

“In 1975, we were essentially flat on our backs. . . . Nobody was knocking on our door,” said City Manager James C. Hankla, director of the early redevelopment effort.

In Hahn, Hankla had a customer.

And today, 12 years after Hahn weighed the risks of building his $100-million Long Beach Plaza and five years after it opened, development is knocking as never before on Long Beach’s door.

One year shy of its 100th birthday, the sprawling city--California’s fifth-largest with 400,000 residents--is experiencing its greatest boom in office, home and industrial construction in decades.

The surge of investment, boosters say, demonstrates that Long Beach is quietly moving out of Los Angeles’ long shadow to become a center of business and international trade in its own right--and that the big small town is coming of age as a racially diverse and dynamic city.

Since 1977, about $1.5 billion has been spent and $1 billion more pledged in the downtown area alone. In 1986, applications were received for about 540 new apartment buildings with 6,400 units--many in the expanding immigrant communities of the central city.

Major downtown rebuilding projects, many financed by Japanese banks or developed by Japanese companies, are lined up like supertankers at the busy Port of Long Beach. Each one, it seems, is larger than the last.

The $550-million Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center, with a 35-story central tower and 15,000 workers, was to dominate the downtown skyline when finished in stages between 1988 and 1996.

Then, this summer, prominent East Coast developer James Rouse and a Los Angeles partner, Wayne Ratkovich, revealed plans to spend $750 million to transform 14 oceanfront acres at the old Pike amusement park into a high-rise office, residential and shopping center.

“Long Beach absolutely is the popular kid on the block right now,” said Los Angeles developer Alexander Haagen, who wants to build an apartment-and-shopping complex next to Hahn’s mall.

“In 1975, if you said you were going to Long Beach, your banker would have frowned,” Haagen said. “But now it’s recognized by the total development community as an opportunity center.”

Mix of Old and New

Regardless of the recent interest, however, USC urban planning professor George Lefcoe considers Long Beach a “terrific secret.”

“I’ve never seen a place where there was so much activity and so little known about it,” he said.

In a striking mix of old and new, 13 office towers have risen among--or replaced--the ornate offices, theaters and hotels built along palm-lined Ocean Boulevard during the oil boom of the 1920s.

Three new luxury hotels are open or under construction, and ground-breaking is expected on three more by next summer. A dozen new restaurants have also begun to break the silence that envelops the downtown after dark.

Convention and tourist trade is at an all-time high. And the city plans to double the size of its 9-year-old Entertainment and Convention Center, whose elegant Terrace Theater is home to Long Beach’s symphony, civic light opera, opera and ballet.

“There has been great cultural growth that is parallel with the business resurgence. They feed off each other,” arts patron and land developer Jean Bixby Smith said.

The ballet and opera, both founded in the last decade, the 38-year-old civic light opera and the 53-year-old symphony draw regional audiences. Most of their once-large debts have been paid off.

The building boom is fueled, in part, by the port’s emergence as the West Coast leader in a shift of international trade from the East to the Pacific Rim and by strong interest in the last large tracts of oceanfront between Malibu and Laguna Beach on which high-rise offices can be built.

“In how many places can you find 15 acres immediately adjacent to the ocean . . . at the end of a freeway? I can count them on one finger,” said Rick Stephens, Los Angeles division president of the Koll Co., a partner in a planned $180-million hotel-and-office project next to the Pike.

Yasuo Sento, of Japanese construction giant Taisei, said his company is making its first American investment in a $130-million Sheraton hotel tower because of cheap land, good weather, great views and a location close to airports, the port, freeways and the terminus of the Los Angeles trolley line under construction.

“So far, I think nobody pays attention to Long Beach,” Sento said. “You’ve got the image of old Long Beach. (It) was sleeping for 10 or 20 years. But I think that Long Beach is just at a turning point of growth.”

The city’s construction boom can also be felt five miles north of the downtown along the San Diego Freeway, where more than a dozen office and industrial buildings, and a new hotel, have been erected at the expanding Long Beach Airport and McDonnell Douglas Corp.

Revitalized Neighborhoods

More subtly, it can be seen in many of Long Beach’s older neighborhoods, where increasing property values and about $25 million in government loans have prompted hundreds of owners to rebuild or replace dilapidated homes.

Streets that had fallen on hard times are coming back. A 40,000-person gay and lesbian community has revived dozens of shops along Broadway near the ocean. Immigrants from Cambodia and Vietnam have opened 127 stores north and east of the downtown in the inner city.

The city is spending $12 million to lure business and spruce up homes along Atlantic Avenue in the heart of the city’s black community and $23 million to improve a neighborhood of small businesses just north of the port.

The Long Beach port and the Port of Los Angeles, which together handle about two-thirds of West Coast cargo, plan to spend $4.4 billion to double their size by 2020. The ports, longtime rivals that now work and plan together, have led the nation in cargo value since 1984.

As port tonnage has doubled since 1977, many trade-related companies have moved to Long Beach.

Japan’s six largest shipping companies have moved their U.S. headquarters there since 1980, and 30 to 40 other major freight forwarding and exporting companies have moved from San Francisco or Los Angeles, said James McJunkin, port executive director.

“It’s an accelerating trend,” McJunkin said. “Look at the tenant lists of any office building on Ocean Boulevard. . . . Five years ago none of them were here.”

The Navy has also returned to the Pacific Fleet’s old home port with 30 ships, 15,000 sailors and plans for $100 million in new construction.

“Things are crazy around here. There’s never been so much interest,” said Roger Anderman, the soft-spoken city Community Development Department boss. Six downtown apartment or office projects are on hold because the department’s Redevelopment Agency is too busy to handle them, he said.

“One of the largest housing developers in the country is asking us, ‘If we were to come to Long Beach, where would you want us to build?’ We like that kind of question,” Anderman said.

From his office at City Hall, built in 1977 as a sign of Long Beach’s confidence in the downtown area, Anderman surveys the thriving waterfront: the Hyatt Regency, Ramada Renaissance and Sheraton hotels, an 1,800-slip marina, 40-store Shoreline Village and Shoreline Park and the picturesque Promenade.

Most prominent, from Anderman’s window and the rest of the downtown, is the Queen Mary. It has paid its own way since the Spruce Goose arrived in 1983 and is due for a 350-room hotel expansion this fall in the first stage of a $250-million improvement plan.

“The very difficult, pioneering things are done,” Anderman said. “Now we’re carefully filling in the gaps.”

The gaps remain large. And impatience is growing.

Some early investors want more to happen quickly, Anderman said.

Residents complain that downtown reconstruction has diverted City Hall’s attention and resources from other Long Beach neighborhoods, which fan out from from the coast to cover 50 square miles.

Blacks, Latinos and Southeast Asians--15% of the population in 1970 but at least 43% today--say they have been left out of redevelopment and sometimes pushed from their homes by a budding downtown gentrification.

Homeowners in quaint but aging neighborhoods, stunned by the construction of hundreds of boxy apartment houses on their quiet streets, are banding together in a slow-growth movement.

Preservationists complain too that historic buildings are being razed and quality of life lost in the name of progress.

“We’ve kind of bogged down in redevelopment. We’ve been overly focused on that. . . . It’s another version of the trickle-down theory, and it hasn’t trickled down yet,” said Bill Barnes, a dean at Long Beach City College.

Nor has redevelopment been an unqualified success.

20% Vacancy Rate

Downtown offices have a 20% vacancy rate, and capacity will increase by nearly 50% by late next year. Developers acknowledge that they must bring in big-time corporate clients to fill the void.

Lenders worry about a possible hotel glut. Residential high-rises, which the city said new construction would inspire, have failed to materialize, although two now seem solid bets to soon go forward.

Hankla, chief administrator for Los Angeles County until he returned to Long Beach in March, predicts a succession of new downtown projects that will give government the tax base to pay for needed improvements citywide. (Property tax revenues are up from $22.7 million to $41.1 million in the 1980s.)

He also acknowledged the obvious: The downtown dies when the sun sets, and that will not change until it is filled with apartments, shops and night life.

Although at least 2,000 new low-rise apartments and condominiums ring the 421-acre downtown redevelopment zone, only 200 of 7,000 planned inside the zone have been built. No downtown movie theater remains open. And the slow-starting, 140-store Plaza has apparently brought little new business to nearby stores.

Immediately north of the emerging iron superstructure of the World Trade Center on Ocean Boulevard, property values have risen in 10 years from $4 a square foot to about $55. But slum housing marked by youth-gang graffiti persists in the area, which one Latino activist calls “dog town.”

Downtown reconstruction, for all its success, is only 10 blocks long and three blocks deep. If that. Even on Ocean Boulevard, several prime parcels have lain vacant for years.

Jim Bradley, who bought and restored the 80-year-old Dr. Rowan Building, a block north of Ocean Boulevard on Pine Avenue, said he can see the street “picking up every day” as people “begin to realize they can come downtown without getting hurt.”

New horse and canine police patrols and the razing of transient hotels and “two-bit bars” have improved the atmosphere, he said.

“They used to shoot up on the hotel (roof) right behind me. We had a couple of murders and, man, there were thieves. I put up a barbed-wire fence to keep them off my building. That’s where redevelopment has been good. They go ahead and acquire the real trouble spots and help you out,” Bradley said.

Several small businesses from affluent Naples and Belmont Shore have moved four miles up the coast into Bradley’s restored building, with its terra-cotta pastel exterior, on the city’s historic main street. A popular jazz club and an art gallery have also opened there.

Bradley said, however, “I think we’re still two or three years away down here.” He recently received an inquiry, for example, from a small businessman wanting to open a downtown shop. “I told him there was (an available spot) on 3rd Street. But he said he didn’t want to go that far up.”

Along the shady streets of the east-central city, far from the towers of downtown redevelopment, Carmen Perez is moving out of the 64-year-old California bungalow she bought 24 years ago.

“You kind of think you’re going to accomplish the American dream. You buy your own home. It’s on a beautiful, tree-lined street--just everything you want for your kids,” said Perez, 47.

Six or seven years ago, however, Perez noticed that “it was getting dirty and ugly at Alamitos and 10th Street (11 blocks away), then at Walnut (six blocks away), and now it is everywhere around here.”

Several families pack some houses, and drugs are sold on the street, she said. Within the last year, eight apartment houses have been built nearby.

“It’s not a neighborhood anymore. It’s just a place to go and live,” said Perez, senior deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

Perez’s new home is about two miles farther east, not far from Alamitos Heights, where attorney James Edson has lived for 15 years.

“I’m sort of a steady, longtime guy,” said Edson, 55, who moved to Long Beach in 1939. “My kids were third-generation students at Wilson High School. There are a lot of people in Long Beach like that.”

The recent thefts of two of his children’s cars from in front of the family home--and an unnerving pursuit of one of the stolen autos--have prompted thoughts of a move to Orange County, he said.

When retrieving his son’s restored ’67 Mustang, which he had spotted on the street and followed into a central city alley, he was confronted by a crowd of young Latinos, he said.

Police finally ended the confrontation. As police officers and Edson were taking the recovered auto to Edson’s home, the officers spotted yet another stolen car and gave chase. Soon, they pulled over a car full of Southeast Asian teen-agers suspected of auto theft, Edson said.

As police frisked the suspects, dozens of Cambodian children watched from windows and sidewalks, he said.

“I felt like I’d gone from little Tijuana to Cambodia,” Edson said.

“Individually I’m not prejudiced. But I have the feeling these people are coming in such great numbers we’re going to lose our city and won’t be welcome eventually,” he said.

In a twist that reflects the peculiar double edge of change in Long Beach, disenchanted old-timers like Edson and Perez are being replaced by newcomers who have eagerly bid up the city’s traditionally moderate home prices, said Perez’s agent, Richard Gaylord.

$1-Million Houses

Perez sold her house in three days for more money than she had asked, said Gaylord, president of the Long Beach Board of Realtors.

Gaylord mentioned a small condo near the beach that he thought he had listed a bit high at $169,500; it sold for $177,500. An inner-city business parcel that received not a nibble in 1986 got two solid offers its first week on the market this summer, he said. Homes in Naples, an island community in Alamitos Bay, are selling for $1 million and more as soon as they hit the market.

“Our only problem in Long Beach is that there isn’t enough property on the market,” Gaylord said. “Long Beach is the last of the beach communities to really come into its own.”

Locals tend to see Long Beach not only as neighborhoods with distinctive personalities--trendy Belmont Shore, snooty Bixby Hill, comfortable California Heights and gay Broadway--but also as a city with two halves.

Generally, the Westside is older, poorer, more crowded, more dangerous, more ethnically mixed and more subject to change than the Eastside, which is rich with parks, golf courses and marinas.

Such geographical distinctions did not exist for Long Beach’s first 75 years as it evolved from resort town to oil town to Navy town and, in middle age, Los Angeles County’s drowsy second city.

“For a long time there was a sense that we were self-contained and a healthy community. You get complacent when things go well. And we kind of liked being a quiet, conservative little community,” recalled Jean Bixby Smith, 49, whose great-grandfather, rancher Lewellyn Bixby, once owned vast stretches of the Eastside.

In 1960, Long Beach was 93% white and predominantly middle class.

But during the 1970s, Long Beach’s black, Latino and Asian populations increased from 15% to 32%. By 1985, the racial and ethnic minorities made up 43% of the city’s total, with Latinos accounting for 18.4%, blacks 12.6%, and Asians 10.2%, according to a city-commissioned study.

Long Beach’s population reached 406,000 by January, 1987, up 17,900 during the last two years and 45,000 since 1980, the state reported. The 1985-86 spurt alone was greater than the city’s growth in the 20 years before 1980.

Social Services Taxed

Most of the newcomers are large families of low-income Latinos and Southeast Asians. Immigrant children have packed local schools to capacity as enrollment has increased by 9,000, to 65,000, since 1980. The percentage of white students has dropped from 53% to 38% this decade.

That influx has taxed city social services already stretched thin by Proposition 13, federal revenue cutbacks and stagnant sales-tax revenue, officials say.

As the average Long Beach resident has gotten poorer--median household income is about $3,000 less than the county average--crime has sharply increased. Reported crimes rose to an all-time high last year as youth-gang membership reached an estimated 2,725 and street drug sales increased, police say. Overall, the crime rate is about the same as in surrounding cities, although there are more violent offenses.

“I don’t think we’re at a point where any major area of city government is buckling or breaking at the strain . . . but we certainly can feel the pinch throughout the entire system,” Hankla said.

Some officials worry that Long Beach may not be able to continue to run efficiently if resident income goes too low and demand for services too high.

“It gets pretty tenuous,” said Planning Director Robert Paternoster, who notes that retail sales taxes, an important revenue source, have been flat for three years.

City policy reflects that concern. It aims to replace old housing in the downtown area with moderate- and high-priced dwellings for the white-collar professionals that the new development is supposed to attract.

“There are relatively few places in Long Beach where middle- and high-end housing can be built. And it’s important to make sure Long Beach is a place where people of all income levels can live,” redevelopment chief Anderman said.

To Armando Vazquez-Ramos, director of Long Beach’s oldest Latino community organization, the downtown plan essentially calls for elimination of the largest barrio in the city.

“Right next the World Trade Center is what we call ‘dog town,’ ” he said. “You can be assured thousands of people will be dislocated, because they’re not going to be able to buy into the yuppie condos and the white-collar work force.”

Mayor Ernie Kell said there is no city policy to move poor people out of Long Beach, only to fix up the downtown.

“Regardless of a person’s income, the main thing is, are they productive? Most of the low-income people are immigrants . . . who are just getting their financial footholds established. Some are working two or three jobs. They’ll be the new wealthy of this city,” he said.

About 35,000 Indochinese, driven from Vietnam and Cambodia by war and genocide, represent the problems and promise of the new Long Beach.

Their success is written in bright red letters on the offices of doctors and dentists and on the restaurants and grocery stores that line Anaheim and 10th streets in the central city.

Twenty of 32 stores opened in a new Anaheim Street shopping center carry Indochinese names or lettering. Near Auto Trak and Radio Shack are the Mekong Pharmacy and Pho 79 Restaurant.

“We came here bare-handed. . . . But we have face-lifted the central area of Long Beach from a slum to a very acceptable strip,” said grocer Nil S. Hul, a former Cambodian army officer. The number of Indochinese businesses has increased fourfold to 127 since 1983, he said.

Hul is an example of progress within the 25,000-person Cambodian community, the largest in the United States. His unsuccessful race for City Council last year was apparently the country’s first by a Cambodian for elective office. He is a member of a police advisory commission and was on the board of the Chamber of Commerce.

In an effort spearheaded by their Buddhist temples, Cambodians are also attempting to buy a building for $1.1 million as a community center, said Than Pok, executive director of United Cambodian Community Inc.

Topsy-Turvy New World

Although Hul, Pok and many other Cambodians and Vietnamese have successfully used their professional and business training--and hard work and thrift--a later wave of immigrant farmers and forest dwellers has not fared as well.

At least half of the adult Cambodians in Long Beach are illiterate even in their own language and remain on welfare, Pok said.

For them, school officials and counselors say, Long Beach is a topsy-turvy new world where parents lack the power and self-esteem to run households, find jobs or help children with schoolwork. The toll on the children has been heavy. Some show little respect for authority, struggle in school and exhibit a wide range of emotional problems.

Police say they worry about an emerging Southeast Asian gang problem that has led to sharp increases in auto burglary and auto theft throughout the city.

Even Indochinese business success has carried an onus. Blacks, who have had to compete with immigrants for housing and jobs, complain openly about Asians’ not hiring blacks.

“What we’re talking about is taking and not giving anything back. And that creates a resentment from both the black and Latino perspective,” said John Rambo, a black community leader who runs a youth services program.

Pok said the Indochinese recognize the problem. Most Asian businesses, however, are mom-and-pop operations with no outside help, he said, and Asians are reluctant to hire blacks because “we have been mostly prey” to black teen-age robbers. Hul said his grocery has been robbed three times by blacks.

“Maybe the time will come when (Asian shops) will get bigger . . . hire blacks and have more black customers. But they have to be able to afford that first,” Pok said.

As Long Beach’s population has changed, as it has struggled to rebuild and redefine itself, a shift in political power has also taken place.

To a great degree, the city was run until the mid-1970s by a small group of white businessmen who lunched at the International City Club and golfed at the Virginia Country Club.

City Council candidates had to get the endorsement of the local newspaper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, or spend lots of money to become known. The paper’s endorsement almost always carried the day.

Since 1976, however, the nine council members have been chosen only by the voters of their individual districts, not citywide. And that has changed everything.

One candidate, Warren Harwood, had no traditional support and little money, spent four years of nights and weekends walking his district and was a runaway winner over a well-connected incumbent in 1982.

Community, political and labor organizations are increasingly involved in local elections. A coalition of such groups took on a supposedly invincible incumbent in 1986 and helped defeat her.

And, troubled that four of five local school board members live in the affluent southeast, the coalition helped push through district elections for school trustees beginning next year.

In the last three years, the City Council has become “substantially more responsive to the needs of the people, instead of the moneyed interests,” said Sid Solomon, president of the fast-growing, 680-member Long Beach Area Citizens Involved.

For example, Solomon said, the council rejected a 1985 recommendation of an advisory commission to set up a task force to study youth gang activity.

A new council member, Ray Grabinski, pressed the issue last fall, however, and the task force reported this month that “until recently, the ‘unofficial’ policy of our city government and school district was to deny that a gang problem existed. Unsurprisingly, we are now paying for this past denial.”

The recent 8-1 passage of an ordinance protecting the gay community from job discrimination also indicates a change in the council, said Rob Kramme, spokesman for a gay political group.

Latinos, blacks and Asians remain almost totally absent from local elective boards, however. No Latino has ever been elected to the City Council, school board or community college board. One councilman is black, and a Japanese-American is a school board trustee.

Voter registration is low for all three groups, and leadership in the 75,000-person Latino community has been splintered for years.

Nor, despite progress, do minorities hold many top jobs at City Hall. About 80% of 159 administrators are white, and no Latino, black or Indochinese heads a city department.

“We have not been a force, so we have not been recognized as a population that has needs and the potential to make contributions,” Latino activist Vazquez-Ramos said.

“At the time we can vote,” Pok said, “I think they will react to our community.” And educator Barnes, a black, said the inner city has suffered from “a soft version of neglect” that has resulted in few youth activities and jobs programs.

City officials say new tourist industry construction has created many new jobs for low-income residents. City affirmative action is gradually working, they say, and municipal leadership will increasingly reflect the broader community.

Beginning next spring, the community will have a leader to whom it can take its concerns--Long Beach’s first full-time mayor.

Debate about the new job last fall exposed an argument that has been repeated in Long Beach for at least a decade.

“I don’t want a big-time city mayor. We’re still a small city at heart,” argued retired oil refiner Ralph Hand, 69, who moved to Long Beach in 1926.

The voters disagreed 2 to 1. They sided with arguments that Long Beach, like every other major California city, needs a single designated leader to represent it.

Essentially, they agreed with mall-builder Hahn, who dealt with merchants’ perceptions of “the home of the Iowa picnic” but believes in the city’s future.

“I don’t think,” Hahn said, “that Long Beach has come anywhere near its ultimate potential.”

LONG BEACH BY THE NUMBERS POPULATION

Year 1970 1980 1986 358,633 361,384 406,200

POPULATION BY RACE

Year 1970 1980 1985 White 85.0% 68.4% 56.7% Black 5.0 11.3 12.6 Latino 7.0 14.0 18.4 Asian/Other 3.0 6.3 12.3

PUBLIC SCHOOL ENROLLMENT

Year 1970 1980 1986 69,927 56,124 65,067

PUBLIC SCHOOLS BY RACE

Year 1970 1980 1986 White 82.1% 52.8% 37.7% Black 9.1 18.7 18.5 Latino 6.1 18.3 24.9 Asian/Other 2.7 10.2 18.9 Limited English -- 13.6 21.6

1981 figures

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

1980 1986 est. Long Beach $15,468 $21,726 L.A. County $17,935 $24,719 California $18,522 $25,803

WELFARE RECIPIENTS (1987)

Long Beach 14.5% L.A. County 11.0

VOTER REGISTRATION (1987)

Democratic 50.8% Republican 38.6

MAJOR EMPLOYERS (MAY, 1987)

McDonnell Douglas Corp. 3,200 Long Beach Naval Shipyard 5,956 Long Beach Unified School District 4,867 City of Long Beach 4,816 Cal State University, Long Beach 4,465 Memorial Medical Center 3,890 Hughes Aircraft Co 3,607 Veterans Administration Med Center 3,200 U.S. Postal Service 2,111 St. Mary Medical Center 1,838