Mayor Picks 2 for Redevelopment Board : City Hall: Appointments may signal change at CRA, with less emphasis on commercial development, more on social programs.

In what is seen by many City Hall observers as a major shift in the direction of the Community Redevelopment Agency, Mayor Tom Bradley on Friday appointed two new members to its board, including a prominent public interest attorney who is expected to advocate vastly increased attention to the poor and less to high-rise development.

Carlyle Hall, founder of the Center for Law in the Public Interest, and Larry Kirk, general manager of the Los Angeles Hilton and Towers, will join the seven-member board as soon as they are confirmed by the City Council as expected, the mayor’s office said.

Bradley, in a statement, said Hall will play a key role in his plan to shift the CRA’s emphasis from commercial development to social programs in the 1990s.

In particular, Hall will join Bradley’s two-year effort to raise the CRA’s legal spending limit of public funds from $750 million to $5 billion. Approval of the controversial 20-year spending plan is the Bradley Administration’s single biggest goal, said Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani.

Hall and Kirk will replace two board members who recently resigned their posts midterm, Fabiani said.

He said Daniel Horwitz, founder of a Century City mortgage brokerage company, was asked by Bradley to accept a new position on the city’s telecommunications commission. Edwin W. Steidle, a prominent retailer, voluntarily resigned to pursue personal interests, Fabiani said.

One well-connected downtown lobbyist who asked not to be named said Hall’s appointment is part of a snowballing effort to “force the redevelopment agency to reassess its role in the city, and turn its efforts to homelessness, affordable housing, child care and all the other pressing needs.”

The agency has come under steady fire by critics, including many members of the City Council, who have accused its board of emphasizing too much high-rise development while remaining aloof from the needs of the poor.

Hall, now in private practice on public interest and environmental issues, was hired by the city in 1988 to work with angry citizen groups who object to Bradley’s proposed downtown spending plan.

The poverty groups, housing interests and others have demanded that most of the proposed $5 billion be spent on affordable rental housing, child-care programs and other services. Bradley has proposed that half the money go to such needs.

“I think it’s necessary that the agency begin focusing much of its attention on the problems of Skid Row, homelessness, families in poverty and other urgent needs,” Hall said.

He added that if the spending limit for downtown is raised--a plan that needs the approval of Los Angeles County officials and the City Council--”the kinds of changes I am talking about will become inevitable.”

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, one of the agency’s fiercest critics, said he hoped the two appointments “will represent a change in direction for the CRA.”

However, Yaroslavsky said that as long as CRA Chairman Jim Wood runs the board, “then I’m skeptical about whether the tough decisions that need to be made are going to be made. I think the problem with the agency is with the chairman, and the person who is chairman of that board and has been for, what, a decade now, has to take responsibility for the agency.”

Wood, in a telephone interview, said he did not want to respond to Yaroslavsky’s criticism, but said of the new appointments, “I feel very good about what’s happening.

“I don’t think there’s anybody that’s more knowledgeable about redevelopment and its scope than Carlyle Hall,” Wood said. Of Kirk, he said: “One of the things that we’re all concerned about is a balanced downtown and a 24-hour city with residential, retail stores, and a grocery store indeed would be nice. So he will be very helpful to us.”

Dan Garcia, a prominent lawyer and lobbyist who clashed with the CRA many times as former head of the city Planning Commission, expressed optimism over the appointments. He said it will be “a challenge for the agency to show it can change some of its behavior. . . .

“Anyone who knows Carlyle (Hall) will know he won’t be a passive member of the board, and frankly from what I have heard of Kirk, he will not be a yes-man either,” Garcia added.

It is hoped that Kirk, 48, a longtime hotelier and a member of the executive committee of the Central City Assn. of downtown businesses, will take a lead role in streamlining the bureaucracy of the agency, Fabiani said.

“I frankly am not going into (the CRA appointment) with a so-called planned agenda,” Kirk said. “I both work downtown and live downtown, so I obviously have a strong sensitivity to this entire downtown situation.”