In a Word, He’s Sorry : Editor Blames ‘Ignorance’ for Stinging Commentary on San Pedro Project Tenants

Rex Brewer, a 30-year-old former restaurateur, is editor of the San Pedro Weekly, a fledgling community newspaper that largely showcases the finer points of life in San Pedro--its elegant dining spots, its trendy art galleries, its booming real estate market.

Nadine Janisse, who works as a volunteer and sells her handmade knitwear to support her two children, is a resident of Rancho San Pedro, a city-owned housing project that is home to 1,500 elderly, disabled and poor people in the northeast corner of town.

Last week, Janisse and several dozen other Rancho tenants--people Brewer recently labeled “under-employed and under-educated” in his newspaper--taught the editor a lesson, not only in journalism but in human relations.

‘Things I Didn’t Know’

“There were many, many things I didn’t know,” said Brewer, subdued and clearly distressed after a Thursday night gathering where, for the first time, he met people who live in Rancho San Pedro.

“I was blind. Now, slowly, my eyes are beginning to open up.”

What brought together these two segments of San Pedro life was an editorial Brewer wrote after he was questioned by housing authority police when he stopped his car to inspect a tail light while passing through the Rancho San Pedro project.

In it, he complained about crime and drugs in the project and said Rancho San Pedro would ruin efforts to upgrade the nearby downtown San Pedro business district. He called for the city to “evict and transplant all project residents to outside the area, mow down Rancho San Pedro with a fleet of very big bulldozers, and erect new multi-unit dwellings, luxury condominiums, office buildings, high-rises, retail shops and restaurants.”

A Lengthy Apology

The opinion piece--which Brewer retracted with a lengthy apology in Friday’s issue--was peppered with harsh language that some say had racial overtones.

“The government subsidies which allow this underclass of basically under-employed and under-educated ethnicities to coexist with the predominantly blue- and white-collar neighborhoods of San Pedro serve not to ease the squalor of the afflicted, but to perpetuate it,” Brewer wrote.

He concluded by remarking that if Rancho San Pedro were to be razed, “innocent people will surely be affected. And that’s OK. Because it’s better to carve out the cancer-ridden organ, even taking healthy flesh with it, than to let it remain and poison the whole body.”

For residents of Rancho, the editorial touched a particularly raw nerve.

Two years ago, they successfully fought a proposal by the San Pedro Peninsula Chamber of Commerce that made a similar, if far less strident, call to redevelop the 21-acre Rancho community, which has frontage on Harbor Boulevard, across the street from the waterfront. But with land prices in San Pedro continuing to rise, project tenants remain worried that the proposal could resurface.

Chamber officials quickly distanced themselves from Brewer’s editorial, although they say they still stand by their “San Pedro 2000” plan.

“We don’t have any position on his article,” said chamber Executive Director Leron Gubler. “I’m just hoping that people won’t confuse what Rex wrote, which were his own beliefs, and what our 2000 report stated. . . . (The editorial) was fairly inflammatory commentary.”

In Barton Hill, the neighborhood that encompasses Rancho San Pedro, the editorial has sparked a new effort to persuade city officials to adopt the Barton Hill Neighborhood Plan, a 114-page document drafted last year as an alternative to the San Pedro 2000 plan. The Barton Hill plan recommends that the area retain low-density zoning and that the layout of Rancho San Pedro be slightly changed to discourage drug and gang activity and to create more recreational space.

But as Brewer quickly discovered, the furor over his words was not confined to Barton Hill.

Letters Flooded In

As soon as the editorial appeared in the July 28-Aug. 10 issue (the Weekly is actually a biweekly) letters flooded in denouncing Brewer.

His own friends called him and said, in his words, “Why in the hell did you do this?”

Between 15% and 20% of his advertisers pulled out of this week’s issue--including his former wife, who now owns the restaurant that bears his name, Rex’s Cafe on Pacific Avenue.

No one, Brewer said, stepped forward to support him.

Nowhere was this more evident than at Toberman Settlement House on Thursday night, when the Barton Hill Neighborhood Organization called an emergency meeting to discuss Brewer’s editorial and invited him to attend.

The meeting was called for 6:30 p.m. Brewer showed up at 6:40 and spoke to no one as he was led into the meeting room by Toberman Executive Director Howard Uller. He took a seat in the front and hung his head as residents unleashed their anger.

“I am flesh and blood and I’m a human being,” declared Paulette Meyers. “There is only one race--the human race. We’re all children of God, whether or not we’re black or white or red or brown or poor or rich or middle-class, whatever that means.”

Janisse told Brewer it might do him good to spend some time at Rancho San Pedro. “We live, we work, we breathe, we have goals, we have aspirations. We do all these things that other people do in their daily lives.”

Declared resident Sandra Barbb: “Let us live where we can afford to live. You live where you can afford to live, and let us live where we can afford. . . .Come to my house. My house is clean. I am not ashamed to bring anyone into my home.”

Equally vocal were those who do not live in Rancho San Pedro. Lawyer Diane Middleton issued a stinging criticism, as did David Arian, president of the Southern California District Council of the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union.

Apology Not Enough

Both complained that Brewer’s editorial reflected the attitude of an insensitive society. They decried a government that blames poor people for not working when there are no jobs, blames street kids for the nation’s drug problem while failing to stop drugs from coming across the border and complains about housing projects when the Department of Housing and Urban Development is entangled in scandal.

“We don’t appreciate what you did,” Arian shouted at Brewer. “An apology ain’t enough, because the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

When the venting was finished, Brewer stood up to speak. His voice was so shaky and soft that a fan whirring in the back of the room drowned him out until somebody switched it off.

“I need your forgiveness,” Brewer told them. “In a moment of anger and ignorance I shot my mouth off and I shouldn’t have done that, not only because what I wrote was wrong, but what I thought was wrong.”

He promised, at Janisse’s request, to deliver 500 copies of Friday’s issue to the Rancho San Pedro office. (Among the residents’ many complaints was that San Pedro Weekly, which prints only 27,000 copies, does not deliver to Rancho San Pedro.) Brewer also promised to print “positive news” about the Barton Hill neighborhood and to work with residents to create change.

Although Brewer seemed devastated by the effect of his editorial, reaction to his apology was mixed.

Some residents said they believed it to be sincere; others said they thought Brewer had come to Toberman Settlement House simply to fight for the survival of his newspaper. (His chief competitor, Random Lengths, also turned out for the meeting, sending a photographer, the general manager and the director of sales, who handed out business cards afterward, promising to print the residents’ views.)

“Can people forgive and forget?” Uller asked. “I think it’s a question of words, not deeds.”

Peggy Ettlinger, the Rancho San Pedro resident who chaired the meeting, summed it up this way:

“I hope Mr. Rex Brewer has received an education from us undereducated ethnicities.”