Dearth of Sites Snags New-School Plans : Finding Open Land in Crowded Neighborhoods a ‘Nightmare’

When the Los Angeles Unified School District needed a new high school in Granada Hills in the late 1960s, finding space was no problem. John F. Kennedy High School was built on 28 acres of vacant land in the middle of a new housing development. Few people, if any, objected to having a high school in the neighborhood.

Those were the good old days. In Los Angeles and other big cities, finding space for new schools in increasingly crowded neighborhoods has become a huge challenge.

“It’s a nightmare” trying to find suitable sites for new schools, said Los Angeles Board of Education member Roberta Weintraub, who chairs the board’s building committee. “You look around and realize that no matter what you do, it’s either too expensive or there are too many people living there or it’s not in the right place.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, the district “pretty well had (its) pick of property,” said Robert J. Niccum, the district’s real estate director. “We were buying orange groves and strawberry fields (for schools). . . . Now, the closest thing we can find to a strawberry field is a hotel.”

Niccum was referring to the district’s recent announcement that it wants to buy the old Ambassador Hotel, demolish it and build a new 2,000-student high school to serve the mid-Wilshire area. The plan has preservationists, local business interests and politicians up in arms.

The Ambassador episode is the latest in what has become an increasingly controversial issue. The district stopped building schools for most of the 1970s and 1980s. Now, in a feverish attempt to catch up, it plans to build 19 elementary, three junior high and six high schools. Thirty-nine campuses are in need of expansion.

Thus, nearly every week the school board hears from angry residents who oppose having their neighborhoods razed to make way for schools. And, in other cases, the issue is not homes but toxic hazards, as illustrated in the district’s recent decision to study the contaminated site of a former ceramics plant in Atwater as the location for a high school.

To many, the problem of finding space for schools is a metaphor for the changing nature of Southern California. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when population growth was occurring mostly in outlying suburban areas, now the boom is in the inner city. Along the Wilshire and Olympic corridors, in South-Central and downtown Los Angeles, and in the southeast Los Angeles County communities of South Gate and Bell, where the Los Angeles district operates schools, factors such as immigration, a climbing birthrate and redevelopment pressures have placed heavy and sometimes conflicting demands on the use of precious urban land.

For the school district, the dilemma is that it needs new schools most in those areas of the city where open land is least available.

Model May Not Be Practical

As a result, some say the archetypal Southern California school, with spacious playgrounds and low-rise classroom buildings sprawled over acres of land, no longer is a practical model.

“In Southern California, we are simply accustomed to doing everything in suburban form, but life is changing,” said Wayne Ratkovich, head of Wilshire Stakeholders, a property owners group that would like the Ambassador site to be developed mainly for housing and commercial uses. A school in that area “ought to look more like a New York school than an Orange County school.”

But, says school board President Jackie Goldberg, who represents the area that includes the hotel, building schools New York-style makes little sense in California.

“What we’re talking about is just the California life style,” she said. “In New York, kids are not hanging around outdoors a lot because of the weather. In California, being outdoors, particularly in our mild winters, is an advantage. There’s a lot of Vitamin D (from the sun) and exercise and involvement in athletic activities which does keep some kids in school.”

New York City schools long have made do with less land than California school districts are accustomed to having. Most New York classroom buildings are at least four stories. Only half of the city’s 116 high schools have any kind of athletic field--a situation that would be considered anathema in sunny Southern California.

In the Los Angeles district, enrollment swelled in elementary schools by 52,448 students and in junior and senior high schools by 14,417 students over the past decade. Including continuation and other special schools, the district has nearly 595,000 pupils. Projections show that figure may grow by 7,000 to 10,000 students in the coming school year.

Year-Round Schools

To cope with the surging numbers, the district has created more than 100 year-round schools, which handle up to 50% more students by using classrooms through the summer. The district calculates that without year-round schools, nearly 34,000 students would not have a classroom.

The district also buses thousands of students from overcrowded campuses to ones with more space. During the last school year, 20,750 were bused, 5,000 more than the previous year.

Statistics such as these have forced the district not only to consider unusual sites but to approach school design more creatively.

A new elementary school in South-Central Los Angeles, for example, will be built on city land at Gilbert Lindsay Park and use the park as a playground, Niccum said. Similar arrangements have been made with the cities of Cudahy and Bell, where the district operates schools.

In the last year, three new elementary schools were opened, Montara Avenue and Teresa Hughes in South Gate and Pio Pico near Koreatown. Construction of a magnet high school in East Los Angeles is slated to be completed by this fall.

They are the first schools to be built since Kennedy High opened in 1971. No schools were constructed during the 1970s and the early 1980s largely because of Proposition 13, which limited the ability of school districts to raise construction money.

Neighborhood Opposition

In the years since, schools, particularly high schools, have not been welcomed in many neighborhoods. Haberdasher George Harb, whose store is directly across the street from the Ambassador, said that although he supports education, a high school on the hotel site would bring “crime, drugs, graffiti and extra traffic--you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to see that.”

Some critics of the district’s building program say it takes the homes of people who can least afford to move elsewhere. The district has bought about 2,000 homes and apartments in the last five years, Niccum said. Residents in another 1,300 dwelling units have been notified that their homes may be taken.

“There is a real affordable-housing crisis in this city,” said the Rev. Philip J. Lance, a spokesman for United Neighbors of Temple Beaudry. The group is fighting to preserve about 100 homes in a low-income neighborhood just north of downtown where the district wants to put a new junior high school.

School district officials consider the Ambassador Hotel, which closed its doors last January, an almost ideal site because it poses no major environmental risks, does not involve the loss of homes and is located in the middle of an area packed with teen-agers. Officials say they are prepared to use the process of eminent domain--the legal right of school districts and other public agencies to require the sale of private property for public use--to acquire the property.

But because it occupies 23 acres of prime mid-Wilshire real estate, the hotel property also is coveted by local community interests as the centerpiece of redevelopment plans for the rebounding Wilshire Corridor. They want the school district to scale back its plans--use only five or six acres, perhaps near a public park--or find an alternative site.

The Ambassador sits at the heart of the mid-Wilshire strip, which had been in decline for the last decade. Wilshire Stakeholders envisions a residential-commercial development on the property that would serve as a magnet to new businesses.

Developer Ratkovich, who has been responsible for renovating historic buildings such as the Wiltern Theater on Wilshire Boulevard, said the school district has been grossly insensitive to “the importance of . . . (the Ambassador site) to the surrounding community.”

“There just aren’t sites like this in the middle of cities any more, much less on a city’s main boulevard,” he said.

SCHOOL DISTRICT BUILDING PLAN Over the next five years, the Los Angeles Unified School District plans to build 29 new schools and expand 39 existing campuses. This table shows the location of the construction projects by high school attendance areas. Only 10 sites have actually been purchased for the projects.

New Campuses Classroom Sites Planned Additions Purchased ELEM. JR. SR. ELEM. JR. SR. 1 Banning 1 2 Bell 4 1 1 3 Belmont 4 1 1 5 1 3 4 Eagle Rock 1 5 Franklin 2 2 1 6 Garfield 1 1 7 Hollywood 4 1 8 Huntington Park 3 1 1 2 9 Jefferson 4 1 2 3 10 Lincoln 1 11 Locke 1 12 Los Angeles 1 1 2 2 13 Manual Arts 3 14 Marshall 2 15 No. Hollywood 1 16 Roosevelt 1 17 San Fernando 2 18 South Gate 4 1 1 1 2