It’s Easy to be Overlooked When You’re Not Even Included in the Picture : Los Angeles: South-Central and other areas are left out of redevelopment. For the city’s sake they must be made well.

Over the past quarter of a century, South-Central Los Angeles has been shaped by external forces and outside interests. Its needs have been minimized or overlooked, resulting in what the newly formed Economic Justice Group describes as a “wasteland with few jobs, no industry, inadequate social services, an acute affordable-housing crisis and an intolerable crime rate.”

Does this mean that nothing has been done, or that nothing good has happened in South-Central Los Angeles? No, but it does mean that what has been accomplished is virtually insignificant when compared to what could have been done.

These and other concerns intensified last year when discussions began about raising the spending limit for the Community Redevelopment Agency from $750 million to $4.2 billion. Critics citywide attacked the CRA for its failure to equitably distribute the resources at its disposal. They charged that the CRA, more than any other city agency, had contributed to the demise of under-served communities.

The African American community’s voice in this chorus of criticism sounded a particularly disturbing note. The downtown Central Business District has been the agency’s No. 1 priority. The agency’s agenda was set, plans were implemented, tax-increment funds were allocated, developers got richer--and South-Central Los Angeles paid.

Granted, with every policy decision there are calculated trade-offs--some good, some bad. What has happened over the past 10 years was not an accident. By design or not, South-Central has gotten very little good and a whole lot of bad from CRA policies and priorities.

Now the agency suffers from a serious credibility problem because of the allegation that about $1 billion in tax-increment revenue used to redevelop the Central Business District over the past several years could have been used to address some of the problems in South-Central. Industrial and commercial development--the backbone of economic opportunity in South-Central--has suffered substantial erosion. Since 1971, 321 companies have moved out of the area. At present, less than 5% of the land is zoned for industry. Again, a question of priorities.

While the blame for all the problems in South-Central cannot be placed at the CRA’s doorstep, many can. For example, the agency’s use of tax-increment financing, eminent domain and its encouragement of an “office-based economy” have all been detrimental to communities in need. More specifically, real-estate speculation driven by the tax breaks, combined with the CRA’s use of the power of eminent domain, has forced thousands of low- and moderate-income residents out of the Central Business District into neighboring South-Central. More than 11,000 units of low-income housing have been destroyed in the business district. This mass displacement has aggravated the housing crisis in South-Central Los Angeles, which now has the largest homeless population in the city.

Even without overcrowding, displacement and homelessness, the state of housing stock in South-Central warrants immediate attention. The neglect of the area becomes undeniably apparent when it is realized that only 2% of the area’s housing stock was built after 1970. Is it because less than half the property in South-Central is owner-occupied that its residents get less than they deserve?

How does the city’s Community Development Department defend allocating 55% more of Job Training Act Partnership funds to West Los Angeles than to South-Central? On what basis does the department allocate its funds to cause South-Central to rank last among the six community development regions in both human services received per person and per family in poverty?

Surely, with the level of poverty that exists, and while two of the city’s most important agencies compound the economic ills of poor communities, the economic state of the city cannot be very good. The city and all of its agencies must resolve or be forced to resolve that such disparities will not be tolerated.

An “office-based economy,” as represented by the Central Business District, won’t work in South-Central. The social and economic costs associated with that approach are too high. Displacement and racial stratification in employment--high-salaried whites and low-wage people of color--are two examples. Equally unacceptable is the “shopping center” model that has been prescribed for South-Central. This model provides scant benefits to residents--low wages and dead-end jobs-- while developers, who are typically from outside the community, benefit greatly. Now is the time for innovative approaches driven by a different set of assumptions and priorities. If Los Angeles is to enjoy a healthy economy, South-Central must be made well.

Last Thursday, the City Council’s two-day special hearing on the “economic state of the city” heard a comprehensive neighborhood reinvestment policy introduced by the Economic Justice Policy Group, whose members include urban planner Denise Fairchild, attorney Mary Lee and community activist Anthony Thigpenn. Their proposal entails three key concepts: development for the social and physical economy; moving residents along the access-control-ownership continuum; and self-determination for neighborhoods affected by development plans. This policy should be implemented.

Making South-Central the priority it should be is not a matter of analyzing the economic state of the city, it is a matter of economic justice for which the city and all of its agencies must be held accountable.