Activists Are Urging Low-Cost Housing at Auto Plaza Site

The Rev. William R. Johnson Jr. is among a group of community activists promising to muster 1,500 people for a rally this afternoon to pressure city officials to sell a site alongside the Artesia Freeway for low-cost homes.

Alfonso Benson Sr. is a member of Johnson’s Curry Temple congregation and a city planning commissioner. Benson says he will fight “tooth and nail” against selling the site for housing.

At issue, in what could become a bitter confrontation among people who all believe they have the city’s interest at heart, is how to best use a 55-acre parcel in the southern end of the city where Compton Auto Plaza now stands.

For more than a decade, the city has been pinning its revitalization dreams on the site and pouring its redevelopment resources into it. Today, though, just one auto dealership is operating on the site; a 288-room hotel that was to open there a year ago has been stalled several times by financing and construction delays.

Owner-Occupied Townhouses

As Johnson and other members of the South Central Organizing Committee (SCOC) see it, an owner-occupied townhouse development with peaceful, tree-lined streets would provide inexpensive housing and also show Compton residents that “gangs and drugs do not have to control the area, that (residents) can control it,” he says.

Johnson agrees that city officials have the responsibility to see that the land is used in ways of greatest benefit for the community. “But we are saying that many of the suggested uses they are proposing are more like pipe dreams than they are practical,” he says.

Benson says: “We’re trying to build a tax base for the city.” Pressuring an economically disadvantaged city such as Compton to sell its most valuable commercial land at a discount for housing, he says, would be “pitting poor against poor.”

What makes the site attractive to SCOC, an activist group working in Compton and several other Southland inner-city areas, is the same thing that makes the site so valuable for development.

Street and other improvements are already in place. And freeway access is good: The land is alongside the Artesia, a major east-west traffic artery, and a mile or two from two other major freeways--the Harbor to the west and the Long Beach to the east. In addition, the light-rail line that is to begin operating next year will stop at the site. The station has already been built.

Michael Nuby, redevelopment project director for the site, says: “The city has a direct need for a development that is income-generating and, basically, the (housing) would not bring the economic return to the city that retail/commercial development would.”

Several developers, Redevelopment Manager Cynthia Coleman says, are knocking on the city’s door asking to locate on the site.

The council is trying to determine the best use of the site, she says, with the plan to develop a new auto plaza largely abandoned.

At the afternoon rally at Compton Auto Plaza, SCOC leaders say they will ask the city to hold off making commitments to developers for 120 days to give the organization time to conduct an an independent study of the site.

The SCOC, Johnson says, proposes that the city sell 10 to 12 acres on the north side of the property along Greenleaf Avenue. To make homes affordable to people with annual incomes of less than about $26,000, SCOC leaders say, hundreds of homes must be built at once in assembly-line fashion, which would require a large, vacant site.

Money for Construction

Another key to the success of a low-cost housing development, SCOC says, is a pool of money to pay for construction.

Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony has committed $3 million of the Los Angeles Archdiocese to develop low-cost housing and has promised to raise $5 million more. Bishop E. Lynn Brown of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church has promised $250,000.

SCOC is also considering sites in South-Central Los Angeles for low-cost housing, which would be modeled after a successful development in New York City.

The organization also says it would have to buy land for the homes at a discount. Compton officials say the city has tried that approach for two decades to encourage new development, but several failures have made officials and residents wary of that strategy.

City Councilman Maxcy D. Filer says: “As I understand it, the council is not in a mood to give any write-downs or give any more land away.”

Filer says he has told SCOC leaders who approached him about the housing development that the best use for the land would be commercial, which would allow the city to reap sales tax revenues and also provide jobs for its residents, a quarter of whom receive some sort of public assistance.

Councilwoman Patricia A. Moore--who ousted longtime incumbent Floyd A. James in the April 16 election, in part, she says, because residents were unhappy with the council giveaways--echoes Filer’s sentiments.

“There is definitely a need for affordable housing, because we’re a poor community,” she says. “I’m just not sure that’s the best site.”

Moore also points out that the city’s lower-income homeowners are paying much higher property taxes than residents in surrounding cities because Compton’s only source of tax revenue is from property. A commercial tax base is important, she says, to bring in sales tax revenues.

The Rev. Reuben Anderson, another SCOC leader and pastor of Tower of Faith Evangelistic Church in Compton, says the city will never be able to attract businesses until it “stabilizes” its population. Most current residents are renters, he says.

The city, Anderson says, “has had a shot” at trying to draw development to Compton. Now it should consider the SCOC plan to create a community of homeowners who would have a “vested, instead of an investment” interest in the city.