Downtown Vision Blurs : An ambitious and costly plan for a ‘vibrant’ community of housing bring in the affluent, but leaves advocates for the poor unsatisfied.
Michelle Barker, a hospital public relations director, works, shops and, most importantly, lives in downtown Los Angeles. Her home is on the sunny side of the financial district, a tasteful $190,000 condo midway up a 14-story building called the Skyline, complete with gym and racquetball court. She and her fellow urban pioneers call their neighborhood “South Park.”
Nine blocks south, Rosario and Maria Valdez and their six children, ages 11 to three months, also live in South Park. They are not familiar with the name, however, nor are they considered urban pioneers. Home is a cramped $350-a-month flat in the Young Apartments, a certified slum building. The other night, the plumbing burst. A pair of rats bolted from a wall seeking drier ground.
The Skyline and the Young Apartments are two extremes, the best and worst of South Park. But they are also two sides of the same coin. The Bradley administration, the City Council and the Community Redevelopment Agency have committed nearly half a billion of the public’s dollars to reinventing this forlorn hunk of downtown into a vibrant, “24-hour” community.
Goal of Balance
The goal, officials say, is a “balance” of housing options that would appeal to downtown workers. “The predominant land use (in South Park) . . . shall be housing, to be designed for various income groups and family sizes,” says the redevelopment plan approved by the City Council.
But today, five years after the keynote Skyline project opened, balance has been slow in coming to South Park. Instead, stark inequities remain. Thus far, one of the net effects has been to entice affluent people in and move poor people out.
Both supporters and opponents of the South Park strategy agree that its history has been marked by miscalculations, failed commitments and abrupt changes in policy. Regardless of their relative virtues, many of South Park’s projects are years behind schedule.
Symbol of a Policy
As Los Angeles struggles with a crisis in affordable housing, traffic and smog, South Park is occupying a special place in city policy debates. To some, this area--roughly bordered by 8th Street on the north, Broadway on the east, the Santa Monica Freeway on the south and the Harbor Freeway on the west--represents a microcosm of the city’s urban renewal strategy in that it embodies such a diversity of projects and agendas.
Mayor Tom Bradley, his planners and developers portray South Park as one day providing not only housing, but jobs, taxes and park space. By putting homes near jobs, CRA Administrator John Tuite contends, South Park “will help ease local traffic and improve air quality while freeing downtown workers from their cars.” South Park development money also goes to benefit commercial ventures and industries--the largest of which is the $400-million expansion, now under way, of the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Points of Contention
Activists, meanwhile, point to South Park as they accuse City Hall of being more concerned with creating a chic, upscale downtown than with meeting the basic needs of the city’s residents. “They are subsidizing what is essentially market-rate housing--and spending a fortune to do it,” said Charles F. Elsesser of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “Our problem with South Park is: Is that where the money ought to be going?”
An analysis of South Park’s evolution thus far shows that three times more money--about $24.1 million--has been used financing pricey homes for the well-to-do than on homes for low-income residents. Public loans totaling $56,000 per unit helped build the Skyline’s 200 condos, where the average price was about $200,000 and penthouses reached $350,000. Thus far, the Skyline represents the sum total of South Park’s completed new housing. An apartment building next door, the Metropolitan, is supposed to be ready in the middle of next year.
Only 15% of the Skyline and Metropolitan units were reserved for below market-rate prices, the lowest ratio allowable under the city’s redevelopment policy. But the chief effort for housing low-income residents in South Park has been the rehabilitation of occupied buildings, not construction.
$7.1 Million in Loans
So far, more than $7.1 million has been lent to rehabilitate more than 700 mostly low-income units in nine buildings.
“Our track record on rehabs has been very successful,” said Don Spivack, CRA’s senior project manager for the area. Officials acknowledge an exception in the Young Apartments, where the mismanaged expenditure of more than $500,000 still left the building a fire hazard and a slum.
Meanwhile, the Convention Center expansion--a major change in the original South Park plan--has caused more money to be spent buying up and bulldozing a slum neighborhood and moving poor families out of the area than on constructing new housing and rehabilitating the old. The CRA has moved more than 1,500 mostly Latino residents out of South Park to locations around the city. Under pressure from the Legal Aid Foundation, the agency worked out a program thought to be the most benevolent in the city’s history.
For the most part, people who lived in crowded slum conditions, often families doubled up in a single unit, were relocated to better quality homes--one family per household. The agreement went beyond the CRA’s legal obligation for relocations, and included the further commitment to build 600 new housing units for low- to moderate-income families as replacements for the 400 that were torn down at the Convention Center site. The new units are outside South Park.
The relocation “was good for our clients,” said Elsesser of Legal Aid, “but not good as far as overall housing policy is concerned.” Housing activists portray the relocation as a purge of the poor from South Park to benefit development interests. The city would be better served, Elsesser said, by both preserving and upgrading low-income housing as well as producing more new, low-income developments.
Dramatic Shift
The Convention Center project is responsible for both the demolition of the low-income housing and a delay of new, higher-scale housing developments in South Park. Approved in 1985, the convention center project represented a dramatic shift in South Park priorities.
CRA officials say they support the Convention Center expansion, but are also quick to point out that it was not their idea. The City Council and Bradley quickly approved the massive expansion--almost tripling the size of the center--after a 21-member blue ribbon panel said it was necessary to make Los Angeles competitive for national conventions.
City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said the project would promote “a good, clean industry” that would attract more tourists and their dollars to Los Angeles. The city is paying for the construction through a bond issue, partly backed by an increase in the city’s hotel tax.
The Convention Center project has also spawned a hotel venture that could divert millions more from housing. The CRA is considering a $22-million program to build and attract hotels to serve conventioneers and create as many as 4,000 low-skilled jobs.
‘Full Spectrum’ Plan
Ultimately, plans call for 6,000 new housing units in South Park--about three times the number on Bunker Hill, the more established, more upscale neighborhood on the northwest edge of downtown, where rents are about 30% higher than South Park. Spivack of the CRA said the vision for South Park is a “full spectrum” of housing options, from residential hotel rooms for the poor to penthouses for the rich but with the larger share aimed at a middle class in the $28,000 to $40,000 yearly income range.
Today, however, South Park’s only residents of new housing are the condo dwellers of the Skyline. Next door, the Metropolitan apartment building will provide 270 units when it opens in the middle of next year, at rents of $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Another nearby 200-unit apartment project called Del Prado is expected to hit the market in 1990.
CRA officials say that as the community grows and becomes established, they will increase the proportion of below-market units per project from 15% to 30%.
Officials say that high land values necessitate public subsidies to build downtown residences, even if it means subsidizing a wealthy condo owner. The thinking is that an investment of public funds will “prime the pump” for privately financed housing in the future.
Counter to History
Subsidies are also needed, planners say, to change the public’s attitude about living downtown. The idea of an economically diverse neighborhood downtown runs counter to the history and psychology of suburbanized Los Angeles. What’s more, planners and developers would have to overcome the perception that south downtown is a dangerous, gritty, desolate place.
Planning started in 1970. The first, grandest conception looked like something imported from Manhattan--a kind of miniature Central Park, 12 blocks in size including a man-made lake, to be rimmed with residential towers. But soaring land costs and changes in federal urban renewal programs soon made the plan unrealistic.
For some, the proposed park--now scaled back to 2 1/2 acres--is a reminder of the faltering pace of South Park. Original plans called for “Grand Hope Park”--named in part for the streets that straddle it--to be ready for the opening of the Skyline in 1983.
It wasn’t until March, 1987, that Bradley and other officials participated in a ceremonial ground breaking for the park. Serious work still has not begun, however, and now the opening is scheduled for 1991, to be timed with the completion of the neighboring campus of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, a project being built with the help of $3 million in CRA funds. The cost to the CRA to buy, design and prepare the land for the park is $24 million.
Disappointing Sales
The city’s failure to complete the park in 1983 hurt sales at the Skyline, said Steven P. Albert, president of Forest City Development, builder of the Skyline and Metropolitan projects. But bigger market forces were at work as well. When the Skyline opened, interest rates were up to 18%, and sales were off throughout the city. It took three years and an array of creative financing options to sell out the Skyline.
The Skyline’s poor showing gave pause to politicians and planners. As council members talked of leaving the real estate to private commercial developers, the CRA in 1985 brought in the Urban Land Institute, an advisory group of leading real estate development professionals, to review South Park strategy. Based on the CRA’s ultimate goal of building 6,000 units, public assistance in South Park could total “as much as $600 million over the next 10 to 12 years” because of soaring land costs, the institute warned.
The Urban Land Institute recommended a new strategy calling for apartments instead of condos, and setting an initial goal of building “a critical mass” of 1,500 to 2,000 units clustered near Grand Hope Park. This could be accomplished, the consultants said, by the end of 1990 at a total public cost of about $60 million.
The CRA is largely pursuing the institute’s strategy but the agency has fallen considerably behind schedule. Spivack estimates that South Park will have more than 1,400 units complete by spring of 1992. But the 2,000th unit will not be built until the year 2000, he said. To date, the reasons for delays have been a rezoning battle with landowners wanting to preserve the area for commercial purposes, the diversion of $100 million because of the Convention Center expansion and the collapse of negotiations with some developers.
Who Will Live There?
When finally built, who will live in the new South Park housing?
Although the redevelopment plan stipulates housing designed for “various family sizes,” developer Albert and others say the likely tenants of South Park are downtown office workers who are single or couples with no children. There is also “a good market,” Albert believes, in six-figure executives who would beat traffic by using the apartments as weekday residences.
Albert argues that the construction of market-rate housing downtown and the construction of low-income housing should be addressed as distinctly separate issues--the former an economic stimulus, the latter a social program. Projects such as the Skyline and the Metropolitan, he suggests, are a public benefit on par with, say, the widening of a freeway. If only 10,000 units were built downtown, it could house 10% of the white-collar work force downtown, according to studies. With the downtown work force growing, the alternative is freeway gridlock, Albert argues.
But the notion of subsidies helping to build a part-time residence for executives is galling to housing activists. That money, they argue, could provide housing for a family of five elsewhere.
“We’re not getting a mix. It’s clearly not a mix, because we’re losing housing for poor people down there,” said Sister Alice Callahan, director of Las Familias, a Skid Row agency that serves low-income families. “They put the whole burden of redevelopment on the poorest in the city. . . . If the poor families mattered to anybody, they all wouldn’t be losing their homes.”
The tale of the Young Apartments, Callahan said, illustrates how the CRA can fail the poor. Agency officials, meanwhile, blame the landlords for botching the job.
The Young had long been a problem building. When a known slumlord sold the 67-unit building to investors Bradley Thrasher and Robert May in the early 1980s, the agency agreed to lend them more than $800,000 to make repairs.
Health Violations
CRA officials, initially satisfied with first several months of work on Young, cut checks totaling more than $500,000 in the restoration of the building. But when inspectors from the city’s slum task force visited the property, they issued citations for serious health and safety violations and ordered immediate corrections.
Several weeks later, a fire broke out, trapping more than than 30 tenants on the landing of a fire escape with a broken ladder. Firefighters rescued the people; there were no injuries.
Prosecutors put Thrasher in jail. The CRA halted its loan and has been trying to take possession, but the building has been tied up in bankruptcy.
Why hadn’t the CRA insisted in its contract that health and safety violations be addressed early in the rehabilitation process?
The scheduling of such work is left to building owners, officials said.
“That’s pretty much the way our contracts work,” explained Sergio Vasquez, the CRA’s construction supervisor for South Park.
