Downtown Neighborhood Awakening to Big Plans

A century ago, the city’s first oil strike transformed the low hills just west of downtown Los Angeles into a makeshift boom town. The landscape bristled with 500 oil derricks. Shanties sprang up near mansions. Now, the downtown’s westward expansion into that historic neighborhood is once again stirring the expectations of rich and poor.

Dubbed Central City West, a strand of 355 acres running from the Hollywood Freeway south to Olympic Boulevard, west of the Harbor Freeway, is becoming a magnet for downtown real estate developers looking for cheaper land and a freer hand to build what they want. At the same time, the Los Angeles city councilwoman who represents most of the area, Gloria Molina, wants to make it a haven for poor and elderly people who so often lose their homes when old neighborhoods become the targets of new development.

Hoping to avoid a collision of interests, Molina and the developers have formed an uneasy partnership. The developers are tentatively agreeing to foot most of the bill for the low-income housing Molina wants. In return, they hope to get out from under some of the control that government has exercised over the size and shapes of their buildings in the past.

The new partnership is an interesting match-up. It unites Molina, who grew up in an Eastside barrio, with a cohort of the city’s most politically astute capitalists. If Molina gets all the low-income housing she wants, the deal could trigger the highest development fees in the country. If Molina offers the developers the breaks they want, she could find herself in a fight with powerful downtown interests who see themselves in competition with Central City West.

Even if Molina can fashion a broadly acceptable deal, there is no guarantee that the new housing will be cheap enough to accommodate all of the renters who live in the area now.

A patchwork landscape, Central City West stretches from the bustle of Wilshire and Olympic boulevards to the barrios and vacant lots of Temple-Beaudry and Crown Hill. Good Samaritan Hospital, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Pacific Stock Exchange are all part of this neighborhood where, on side streets, you can hear roosters in the morning and smell the crude oil that is still being pumped from back-yard wells.

Most of the 16,000 to 17,000 people who live there are Latino families renting from absentee landlords and earning less than half of the county’s median annual family income of $28,000. Many of the inhabitants are new arrivals from Central America. Others settled in the area after being displaced by urban renewal projects elsewhere in the city.

An Elusive Goal

Redevelopment of the area could also achieve one of the city’s more elusive goals, blending past and present styles to create a flourishing residential neighborhood close to downtown. Rich and poor, immigrants and natives would live near each other. People could walk to work. Architectural landmarks would be preserved. Spruced-up Victorian cottages would command views of new skyscrapers designed by such internationally acclaimed architects as Kenzo Tange and Helmut Jahn.

Central City West may be a long way from reality, but it is more than an expensive fantasy. Land has been bought and cleared, architects and lobbyists hired, community meetings held in schools and living rooms, and political muscles flexed as developers and public officials jockey for control.

“The only things that can do this project in is fear and greed,” joked George Mihlsten, a lawyer and leading City Hall lobbyist who represents a consortium of Japanese and American developers who want to put up a hotel-office complex on several acres of land bordering the Harbor Freeway.

The project has attracted a host of major developers, among them Ray Watt, Unocal Corp., Tutor Saliba Properties and Shimizu America Corp. Working alongside them is a cadre of well-connected lobbyists, including Mihlsten, former City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, former City Atty. Burt Pines, and former city Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garcia.

Surge in Population

If the dreams for Central City West come true, the population could rise as high as 40,000. Eight thousand to 10,000 housing units would be built. Ten million to 20 million square feet of office buildings would go up, expanding the downtown area’s high-rise office market by at least 25%. Along Glendale Boulevard and elsewhere, rows of new retail services would take root.

To make it all come together, the Central City West partnership will also have to build new roads. Now, there are no through streets running north and south. Land also would have to be set aside for new parks and schools. With public funds scarce, Molina will have to look to the private sector to finance a large part of those improvements.

In their public statements, members of the Central City West partnership are bubbling with optimism.

At one meeting recently, lobbyist Mihlsten put his arm around Susan Cloke, a former Santa Monica city planning official who now works for Molina.

“Look at me, a rock-ribbed Republican working side by side with a former chief planner for the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” Mihlsten said.

Just beneath the surface, however, Central City West is alive with tension. Developers, who have interest payments to meet and investors to satisfy, want to start building now before a housing plan for the area has been adopted. Meanwhile, many of the area’s remaining residents want assurances that they won’t lose their homes.

Molina said she does not want to approve a single commercial development until all of the developers have agreed on a housing plan that specifies the number of low-income apartments to be built, their location and method of financing. Molina’s goal is to replace the 2,000 low-income units that have been torn down.

“I want the housing. I want a stable community there. My goal is to see to it that the area doesn’t become another Bunker Hill or Chavez Ravine,” Molina said recently, referring to the displacement of thousands of poor families by the redevelopment of Bunker Hill and the construction of Dodger Stadium.

No one is saying no to Molina, although she worries that some people who are saying yes mean something else.

Snyder, the former councilman who is representing Ray Watt, said he has offered Molina “a blank check” for housing, a promise to pay whatever the other developers ultimately agree to, if the city will hurry up and approve Watt’s planned 1.6-million-square-foot office project.

At the same time, Snyder said, he is confident that Molina’s colleagues on the City Council will not ask developers to pay for the 2,000 low-income units Molina wants. The council, he said, does not want to risk alienating the only source of capital for housing in Central City West.

“We feel it is possible to nurture the goose and have it lay nice gold eggs over time. We have a certain faith that the city is not going to kill the goose,” Snyder said.

While developers and city officials debate the cost of replacement housing, many people who still live in the area worry about losing what they have. For five years, they have witnessed the ravages of real estate speculation as bulldozers plowed homes and yards into a rubble-strewn desert surrounded by chain-link fences. The notion that new apartment buildings are destined to be built there is slim consolation to longtime neighbors such as Gloria Esquivel and Misael Alvarez.

“I would have to go into a chicken coop. There would be no room for my dogs, no place for my garden,” said Esquivel, who said she pays $200 a month for a rambling four-bedroom house in the Temple-Beaudry neighborhood.

A recent community meeting on Temple-Beaudry Hill underscored the confusion and apprehension surrounding the future of the area.

A Study in Contrasts

Held in a school auditorium, the meeting was a study in contrasts. A knot of developers, dressed in aviator jackets, fleece-lined denim vests and cowboy boots, congregated in the back of a room while the residents, many of them elderly men in coats and ties, struggled in broken English to learn the fate of their neighborhood.

Molina presided, assuring people that there would be no wholesale evictions, that the city would not use its powers of eminent domain to acquire property.

While she spoke, developer Leonard Glickman quietly promoted a totally different plan in the back of the room. Glickman proposes to clear 50 acres, relying on local government to take property where necessary, and build a junior high school and several square blocks of new apartments in place of the homes that are there now.

“People would have replacement housing built and waiting for them before they had to move,” Glickman said, adding: “Under a plan like ours, eminent domain isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

For the time being, Glickman’s proposal is on hold. But even if it never comes to pass, Molina may not be able to ensure that the neighborhood can be preserved or that all of the tenants will be able to afford the replacement housing.

Nearly 80% of the houses that are left are owned by absentee landlords, free to sell whenever they are offered an attractive price. More than half of the renters earn $10,000 or less a year. Even the cheapest replacement housing may be out of the range of some tenants.

Needs of Tenants

“I think we can do a hell of a job with housing, but we won’t be able to take care of everybody’s needs. I don’t think we can promise everyone over there dollar-for-dollar replacement for what they’ve been paying,” said Dan Garcia, a lawyer representing Hillman Properties, one of the largest developers in Central City West.