Poverty Areas, Slow-Growth Advocates Not Natural Allies

Last year, when Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley abandoned plans to build a trash-to-energy incineration plant in South-Central Los Angeles, victory parties extended well beyond the poor and predominantly black neighborhoods near the proposed site.

Environmental activists, lawyers and homeowners from the Westside, San Fernando Valley and several suburban communities joined the celebration. Their opposition to the plant was credited with persuading Bradley to scrap the project.

Leaders of the city’s slow-growth revolt--some of whom joined the incinerator fight--offer that unlikely alliance as proof that their movement has appeal beyond the city’s middle- and upper-income neighborhoods. So-called quality-of-life issues that have fueled the revolt in those neighborhoods--traffic, parking, congestion and pollution--cross ethnic, racial, economic and social boundaries, they say.

No Unanimity

But some residents in the city’s poorest neighborhoods disagree. Quality-of-life concerns in those areas focus less on traffic and parking than on crime, housing and jobs. While they may not want a trash incinerator in their back yard, residents of several distressed communities, particularly in South Los Angeles, are trying to attract--not scare away--new development.

“To a child who has lived on ice cream his whole life, it is an annoyance to tell him there are going to be another 31 flavors on the corner,” said Ozie Gonzaque, a 44-year resident of Watts and member of Los Angeles’ Housing Authority Commission, explaining the difference between her community and areas with strong slow-growth support. “But to a kid who can’t have ice cream every day, it is a luxury. It is a treat.”

In Watts, residents waited nearly 20 years following the 1965 riots for the area’s first shopping center to open--an event that attracted several hundred celebrants. Today, they still need industries that will provide jobs for local residents. And they want more housing--even high-density condominiums, if they are affordable--and movie theaters and sit-down restaurants.

“We would love to have a Sizzler,” said Alice Harris, a 28-year resident of Watts and head of Parents of Watts, which runs educational and relief programs. “We all have to go to Compton for a nice meal on Saturday or Sunday. We want one here. I guess we will have to keep praying until we get it.”

Last year, a Los Angeles Times Poll found sharp divisions on growth issues between relatively affluent white neighborhoods and less well-off minority neighborhoods in both the city and county of Los Angeles. Whites said by a 2-1 margin that they wanted less development even if it means fewer jobs. Blacks and Latinos, on the other hand, rejected slow growth 2-1.

Welcomes Development

The poll also found that whites worry as much about traffic congestion and the environment as they do about crime. Blacks and Latinos, by contrast, picked crime as their biggest problem and seldom mentioned traffic or the environment.

Mike Stewart, an aide to Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores and a resident of South-Central Los Angeles, said most area residents would welcome some of the development pressures plaguing other parts of the city.

“If the guys on the Westside don’t want to go, we’ll go,” Stewart said. “We want hotels. We want restaurants. We want some high-rise investment. We need growth. We feel we are like Japan and Korea in the 1950s: We are on the Pacific Rim but we don’t have any investment.”

While the city does not compile statistics comparing development in poor and rich neighborhoods, the Planning Department recently estimated the number of dwelling units built between 1980 and 1986 in the city’s 35 planning areas. The estimates underscore that development--housing construction, in this case--has in large part bypassed the city’s neediest communities.

The annual increase in housing units during the six-year period was 11 times greater in the Westwood area, for example, than in the relatively poor Crenshaw and West Adams area, where it increased just 0.25% per year. In addition, increases in the fast-growing suburban stretches of the north San Fernando Valley outstripped growth in depressed Southeast and South-Central Los Angeles by up to 15 times, according to the estimates.

Fewer Control Ordinances

In another indicator of lopsided development patterns, few of the 39 existing or proposed interim control ordinances in the city affect poor neighborhoods. The ordinances, which temporarily restrict certain kinds of building, have become the near-exclusive tool of middle- and upper-income residents in their battle against new construction.

“If the city was actually doing its job, we wouldn’t be in the position to be asking for these ordinances,” said Diana Plotkin, vice president of the Beverly-Wilshire Homes Assn. and one of several homeowner leaders who has fought for the ordinances on the well-off Westside. “They are the only way to protect the community. . . . You cannot simply let things go along as business as usual. By the time a long-term solution comes along, things are so bad there is no solution.”

Community leaders in low-income neighborhoods say they understand such concerns, but some say they fear the slow-growth movement could create a citywide anti-development climate that ultimately could hamper the revival of their neighborhoods.

“I think whatever happens on the Westside affects the Eastside, whether it is positive or negative,” said E. Grace Payne, a longtime Watts resident who runs the Westminster Neighborhood Assn. “Slow growth is going to affect the whole city. People who speak loud enough make the people who make decisions think they speak for the whole city.”

Claudia Moore, a tenant leader at the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts, said slow-growth advocates should resist the temptation to speak for all of Los Angeles.

“I would hope that as they campaign against things coming into their areas that they do it in such a way as to send out a message that is loud and clear that they are not trying to stop it from going into the communities that want it,” Moore said.

Indirect Benefit

But many slow-growth advocates emphasize the citywide importance of their movement, arguing that it indirectly benefits the city’s least affluent residents. Gerald Silver, a homeowner leader in Encino, a largely well-to-do San Fernando Valley community, said poor residents would have the toughest time coping in a city paralyzed by gridlock or poisoned by pollution.

“If the water got so bad that you can’t use it to bathe in, I would tell the Sparkletts guy to deliver 24 bottles a month,” Silver said. “But what about the guy who can’t afford to buy them at six bucks a crack? It is the same thing with jobs. If (that guy) can’t drive across the city because traffic is so bottled up, (he) can’t afford to put a computer in his house and . . . do his work there.”

Some South Los Angeles community leaders are quick to point out that they would not favor unchecked growth, and in that respect, they say, they have much in common with homeowners in other parts of the city. Robin Cannon, chairwoman of Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles, said residents fear that too much construction would threaten existing housing and price many South-Central residents out of the housing market.

“We have a fear that anytime any new development is brought into the community, housing will be taken away,” Cannon said. “We may need growth, but we do not want massive growth. We are not going to stand for any more growth in our community where we don’t have a say in how it is planned.”

Councilman Robert Farrell, who represents much of South Los Angeles, predicted that the city’s poorest neighborhoods will ultimately benefit from the slow-growth movement. Farrell said city officials, learning from their mistakes in other parts of the city, will be better able to prepare for new development in his district and elsewhere.

“I don’t think we would accept density in South Los Angeles simply because somebody wants to build there,” Farrell said. “We would like to have the development, but only if it is appropriate to the incomes of the people who are there, so the people living there can enjoy it.”

Cannon said South Los Angeles residents have already learned an important lesson from slow-growth advocates.

“The squeaky wheel gets attention,” Cannon said. “We are asking for things, and we intend to get them.”