L.A. Community Redevelopment: ‘Powerful, Unexamined Agency’
The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency is caught in the vortex of a politically charged debate over lifting the spending cap on downtown redevelopment. Mayor Tom Bradley has proposed that CRA spend more than $2 billion on low-income housing and homeless-related services as well as after-school child care. We think debate over this plan is healthy and encourage our critics and supporters alike to take a hard look at our record.
Unfortunately, the writers of an Aug. 16 Op-Ed Page column (“The CRA: Powerful, Unexamined Agency,” by Margaret Holub and Charles F. Elsesser Jr.) on this issue failed to take advantage of that opportunity. Their column is rife with half-truths, innuendoes and downright falsehoods. Even the column’s premise is fallacious.
By the time the downtown redevelopment spending cap is reached in 1990, both the city and county will be approaching their Gann spending limits and, therefore, will not benefit from a windfall in tax increment monies that can be spent helping the homeless and meeting other vital needs.
On the other hand, CRA today is at the vanguard in serving the homeless in Skid Row and has generated more housing for seniors and poor people throughout the city than any other local public agency.
CRA produces 1,000 new housing units a year and rehabilitates another 1,000, the vast majority for low- and moderate-income persons. Seventy-eight percent of the current housing projects are being assembled by nonprofits and minority developers. Few, if any, housing programs in the nation, can match our production or community involvement.
Moreover, as the public liaison with the private sector, CRA is able to leverage four and a half dollars for every taxpayer dollar invested.
Downtown developers account for much of that contribution. Instead of subsidizing high-rise office buildings as the authors allege, CRA gets developers to help pay for low-income housing, transportation improvements, historic preservation, parks, child care and social services. A prime example is the ongoing restoration and expansion of the Central Public Library.
There’s no question CRA helped the development community bring the moribund downtown of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s back to life. And we still offer financial assistance and incentives to businesses in depressed and blighted areas of the Central Business District that remain such as Skid Row and the Broadway and Spring Street historic districts.
While promoting agency goals of historic preservation and revitalizing Spring Street--once the “Wall Street of the West”--CRA recently approved a loan to rehabilitate the historic Stock Exchange building. CRA also floated a tax-exempt bond issue for building a private medical office complex to support California Medical Center, which stands to gain from the profits that it can use for trauma care or any service it deems appropriate.
None of these transactions were done in secret. The CRA Board of Commissioners meets in open public session weekly and the agency is fully accountable to the mayor and City Council. Indeed, CRA appeared before the council more than 100 times last year.
CRA is proud of its record. As the debate over the spending cap ensues, we hope that record will serve as a springboard for discussion as well as a measure of our success.
JIM WOOD
Chairman, CRA Board
of Commissioners
