A Bitter Battle on Home Turf: Garment Plant Is Not Welcome

To the mavens of economic growth, it seemed like serendipity.

Here was the State of California and the City of Los Angeles, trying to lure industry into a depressed neighborhood south of downtown. Move here, create jobs and we’ll give you good financing and tax breaks, the government said.

And here was the Kluger Company Inc., a 49-year-old family owned apparel business eager to expand from its garment district quarters. The Klugers bought into the neighborhood even before learning about the benefits.

Then they found out they weren’t welcome. The problem was that what officialdom sees as an economic boon, many neighborhood residents see as a menace: A garment factory? In our neighborhood?

Among Los Angeles’ recent development controversies, the Kluger Company’s bid to move 17 blocks south hardly matches the scale of the Howard Hughes Center in Westchester or the Westside Pavilion, where affluent residents have waged battles with powerhouse corporations. Still, the conflict shows how politics and planning are played out in Los Angeles these days, engaging heavyweight questions about the city’s future.

Arena for Conflict

In this case, in a nameless, mishmash neighborhood northeast of USC, working class Latino residents are doing battle with one of the city’s oldest industries. The business forces, heralding economic growth and the need for jobs, have gained the support of key officials such as Councilman Gilbert Lindsay.

But it is the increasingly aggressive community activists, promoting the preservation of neighborhoods and housing, who have gained the upper hand. After losing a 3-2 vote of the city Planning Commission, the Klugers are now on hold.

Ready to Fight

“We’re going to fight anybody who tries to come in,” said Cecilia Nunez, a life-long resident of the area. Nunez, 36, is a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Chapter of the South Central Organizing Committee, which has organized opposition to the garment factory. Nunez and others fear that the Klugers’ factory may merely be the forerunner of more industry to come.

Ben Kluger doesn’t get it. Just when he decides to return to the old neighborhood, the old neighborhood, it seems, doesn’t want him. Generations before the powers of government deemed the “Central City Enterprise Zone” into existence, this early 1900s neighborhood was Ben Kluger’s turf. One afternoon in 1927, when he was 13, Ben went uptown and got a job as delivery boy for an apparel company.

He had found his life’s work. At age 23, Kluger scraped together $582 and went into business for himself. Every day he hustled about the garment district, buying leftover thread, buttons, ribbon and linings from the “big jobbers,” and selling to the small companies. “To make people think I had inventory, I used to take empty boxes and keep them on my shelves. A lot of them.” That first year, his business made $4,000.

Today, at 73, Ben Kluger is a self-made millionaire, the result of 49 years of steady growth, he says. “It’s like a bucket of water. You can put in a drop at a time, but eventually you fill the bucket.” Kluger, who now lives in the Hollywood Hills, still works full-time at his son Lance’s side--after a morning five-mile jog.

Sells Synthetic Fiber

The Kluger Company of the 1980s is a purveyor of Pellon, a synthetic fiber used to reinforce collars, cuffs and linings. The small complex near 11th and Maple streets includes a warehouse, offices and a “fusing department” where adhesive-backed Pellon is heat-pressed on to precut fabric. About 80 women work here, almost all of whom are immigrants from Latin America. Workers’ pay ranges from $3.35 an hour to more than $6 an hour. They have no medical benefits but the room is clean and air-conditioned. It is the biggest operation of its kind in Los Angeles, the Klugers say, catering to some 180 client companies.

Limited by space, the company is running up to five days late in a business where, as Lance Kluger put it, “Everyone needs it today.” They envisioned expansion of the work force from about 115 to 200, most of whom would start at minimum wage.

The Klugers studied their options. One possibility was moving to Orange County. The rent would be cheaper, but the company would have to keep its trucks on the road more and doubtless would have to hire new employees. “Most of the people working here now,” Lance Kluger said, “won’t be able to follow us down.”

They also looked at other buildings in the garment district, but none was suited to their operation; building their own seemed for the best. Then in 1985 they found an eight-parcel property at Maple Avenue and 28th Street zoned for manufacturing and occupied by a construction yard and six old homes. The families who lived there were evicted and the site cleared to make way for a planned 60,000-square-foot factory.

“I told Lance, ‘It’s like coming home,’ ” Ben Kluger said.

Government smiled on the Klugers. Soon they learned they were in the “Central City Enterprise Zone.” The concept of the zone, created by state legislation and coordinated by the city’s Community Development Department, is to foster business in neighborhoods that have high unemployment despite an existing industrial base.

Jaspar Williams, enterprise zone coordinator, met with the Klugers and studied their plan. “I felt it was a good project, and I think they’re genuine people,” Williams said. The move would be “part of a natural evolution. The garment industry is seeking larger quarters, and they are moving from north of the (Santa Monica) freeway to south of the freeway.”

Project Approved

The Kluger project was approved for up to $3 million in low-interest Industrial Development Bond financing, a state-sponsored program administered by the city. Meanwhile, the enterprise zone program would also provide the Kluger company with a 15-year schedule of tax breaks and a partial payroll subsidy for workers recruited from approved job-training programs.

Councilman Lindsay, long a friend to the apparel industry, shared Williams’ view. And besides providing jobs, the Klugers seemed intent on being good neighbors. They would dress the building in ivy and hide parking on the roof. They talked about a child-care center for their employees.

There was a zoning hitch, but the project had such momentum it seemed a just a technicality. Although the Klugers’ land was zoned for manufacturing, the area’s community plan called for residential use. Resolving such inconsistences is a daily chore for the City Council and planning department; in the meantime, according to a court ruling, the community plan takes precedence.

To Lindsay, the solution seemed obvious: Change the community plan.

Cecilia Nunez never left the neighborhood. Like Ben Kluger, she grew up there, a couple of generations later. Nunez and a sister were reared by their grandparents in a shabby tenement on 33rd Street that rented for $55 a month. There is no irony in her voice when she says her grandfather, a dishwasher in a hospital, made $50 a week “at the height of his career.”

Nunez, a legal secretary, is a self-made woman. Nine years ago, as a single mother with two daughters and her grandmother to care for, she questioned the wisdom of paying rent.

For 3 1/2 years she worked two jobs, supporting the family with one paycheck and saving the other. When she had $6,000 in the bank, she started looking at houses in Maywood and Bell--but the $80,000 prices were too high, especially for something so tiny. Then in 1982 she found a home on 32nd Street--badly run down, but with three bedrooms, a $52,000 asking price and an anxious seller. Nunez’s counter offer of $50,000 was accepted.

It looked like the sale might collapse after the bank asked for 20% down--or $10,000. Then the seller agreed to lend the other $5,000, and Nunez had her home.

“I’m proud of what I did,” she says. “We’re fixing the house up. It will be my first and last house because I can’t afford to live anywhere else.” Today, she figures her home is worth “a good $80,000.”

Nunez’s new pursuit, as an activist, began in March, 1986, after she found a leaflet in her fence. It told of alarming news, of how the school district was planning to use its eminent domain powers to condemn 50 homes on four blocks not far from her home to expand John Adams Junior High School. Rallied by the South Central Organizing Committee (SCOC), more than 1,200 people showed up to meeting at the school, the vast majority in opposition. Lindsay joined in the uproar that defeated the plan.

“He said, ‘I will stand by you.’ I thought, what a great councilman,” Nunez recalled.

She later learned that, a few days earlier, Lindsay introduced a motion in City Council, asking that the area’s community plan be changed to affirm commercial and manufacturing along the Maple Avenue corridor from 23rd Street to 36th Street. The zone change was needed, Lindsay said, “in order to provide for the economic survival of the garment manufacturing business within the City of Los Angeles.”

Galvanized by the school district battle, the neighborhood had another fight on its hands. Resentment grew over Lindsay’s role, said Sister Diane Donoghue of the St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church’s SCOC chapter. “We felt like we had absolutely been sold down the river,” said .

Lindsay Plan Rejected

Faced with the outcry of residents and uncomfortable with the 13-block scale, the Planning Commission rejected Lindsay’s first proposal by a 4-0 vote, with one member absent.

Several months later, Lindsay proffered a more modest rezoning: a three-block stretch of Maple, between 25th and 28th. Sal Altimirano, a Lindsay deputy, said the plan would accommodate not only the Klugers, but some other property owners who wanted their land preserved as commercial.

When the Planning Commission considered the plan on May 21, the community activists again showed up in force. The Klugers countered by busing in scores of employees, several of whom carried placards in support of the new factory.

Residents argued that the factory would mark the beginning of the end of their fragile neighborhood. Soon other manufacturers would come in, “sweatshops” paying minimum wages. Is this really economic growth?

“They’d be trading homes for minimum-wage jobs,” Nunez argued.

In the end, planning commission split, 3-2, opposing the zone change, with commissioners Dan Garcia and William Luddy in the minority.

The Klugers were exasperated. “We don’t emit a lot of sound, we don’t generate smell or dirt. The only thing we want to generate is jobs,” said Lance Kluger.

Emotionalism Prevails

Williams, the enterprise zone coordinator, believes that emotionalism prevailed over wisdom.

“I’ve really been disappointed by the way things have gone,” he said. “I think the (neighborhood) group, they’re responding within a context of fear, rather than having done a thorough analysis of their situation.”

The activists are simply wrong, Williams and Altimirano both say, in believing their homes would be endangered. The enterprise zone program assumes a labor pool within the neighborhood, Williams stresses. Altimirano points to Lindsay’s ardent opposition to the Adams Junior High expansion is an example.

The officials are adamant: Destroying homes is not on the agenda.

To which the activists respond: Six homes are already gone, razed to make way for the Klugers.

To Lance Kluger, the industrial parks of Orange County are looking more and more appealing.

Ben Kluger is more stubborn, and wonders whether to appeal to the City Council. “With me, at my age it’s a little ego trip that I want to be here,” he says. Besides, to leave Los Angeles would be to forfeit the low-interest financing. SCOC activists assured him there were other, acceptable sites nearby. He challenged a leader of the community activists, real estate broker Ben Lardizabal, to find one.

Nunez, Donoghue and other activists say there is no argument, no compromise, that could sway their position. They resent the idea that outsiders should dictate what is good for their neighborhood. They also resent suggestions their views are merely parochial.

What would be good for Los Angeles, they say, would be more and better low-priced homes. They recommend, for example, a housing project for senior citizens . . . at Maple and 28th.