Bradley’s Plan for CRA Funds Sparks Debate During Forum

It was just an ordinary-looking union hall in the garment district, but Saturday the building at 2501 S. Hill St. became Los Angeles’ temporary political capital.

Several of the powers of local politics were drawn to the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers hall by the opportunities--and dangers--awaiting them there at a public meeting on one of city government’s more complex, interesting and controversial proposals.

On the table before an audience of about 120 was Mayor Tom Bradley’s plan to use increased revenues from the downtown redevelopment project to build low-rent housing and provide more social services. Announced earlier in the year by the mayor, it has become one of his Administration’s top-priority programs and is expected to be one of his boasting points when he runs for a fifth term in 1989.

What seemed clear as the forum drew to a close was that the Bradley plan is increasingly becoming a subject of an intense citywide public debate unusual for the often murky subject of redevelopment. The debate is expected to continue Wednesday, when the City Council discusses the Community Redevelopment Agency’s budget.

The reason that downtown redevelopment is becoming such a big citywide issue is because of a shortage of inexpensive housing, the resultant increase in homeless on the streets, the lack of funds to provide them social services and the Reagan Administration’s dismantling of federal low-rent housing programs.

T-shirts attacking the city’s redevelopment agency were on sale. Banners with the same message were on the wall. As speeches became repetitive, members of the audience wandered over to the sideline, chatting or arguing. This was local politics--informal, undisciplined, a little down at the heels, a universe away from the discipline and high production values of the national political conventions.

Opponents, who ranged from young urban leftists to a Democratic populist city councilman from the San Fernando Valley, Ernani Bernardi, got a chance to attack the Bradley plan publicly--and in front of the press. Defenders such as Deputy Mayor Mike Gage and the top leadership of the Community Redevelopment Agency had a chance to size up the opposition at one of the first community public discussions on the plan. Bradley himself was not there.

Charging that the mayor is not allocating enough money for low-cost housing--even with Bradley’s proposal to up the ante from CRA funds--Bernardi warned that “more than 350,000 people in Los Angeles are paying more than 50% of their income for rent.” Martha Brown-Hicks, a prominent Bradley Administration supporter who heads the Skid Row Development Corp., which provides social services for the poor, replied that the Community Redevelopment Agency already has substantially increased jobs and housing in the last five years.

Despairing of receiving more federal funds or state funds for housing or the homeless, the Bradley Administration proposed early this year a change in the distribution formula for downtown redevelopment revenue.

At present, the Community Redevelopment Agency is allowed to spend only $750 million in property tax revenues from the redevelopment project for rehabilitation of downtown Los Angeles. The rest goes to other city uses, the county and the school district. Bradley proposed raising that limit to $5 billion.

Half would go to downtown rehabilitation and half for low-income housing and an after-school care program for children. The increased housing, plus the availability of after-school care, would reduce the number of homeless, administration officials said, by increasing the availability of low-rent housing and permitting single parents to work.

An indication of the citywide nature of the debate came from Alisa Katz, top fiscal deputy to City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, the council Finance Committee chairman, who intends to run against Bradley for mayor. She watched the discussion and then said in an interview, “We have a lot of concerns about the” Bradley program.

Yaroslavsky Worried

She said Yaroslavsky fears that the CRA will not allow enough public debate when and if it reallocates its funds as Bradley wants. “The CRA board does not operate under the same kind of public spotlight as the City Council or the Board of Supervisors,” she said.

Gage disputed that and said that Yaroslavsky’s committee had had plenty of time to examine the proposal while studying the CRA budget. “The budget has been there (in Yaroslavsky’s committee) since December. Seven or eight months sounds like plenty of time to me.”