Plan for Redevelopment Zone Dropped; Businesses Credited With Cleanup

Pleased with the way businesses along Parthenia Street in Northridge are trying to clean up their neighborhood, Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson said Friday he is dropping his proposal to create a redevelopment zone there.

Last November, Bernson had agreed to delay for six months a redevelopment study of the 40-acre area north of Parthenia Street and east of Vanalden Avenue, where business owners strongly opposed redevelopment and wanted a chance to upgrade the area themselves.

“I asked them to show me and they did,” Bernson said Friday.

The councilman said he is satisfied with the businesses’ cleanup efforts in the past six months and with their plans to use landscaping, remodeling and private security guards to improve conditions he described as “blighted.” He said he will write a letter to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, telling it to abandon the redevelopment study.

“I don’t think it’s necessary for us to use the CRA if they’re going to be willing to do it themselves,” Bernson said.

Bernson’s previous support of redevelopment in the area had put him at odds with many of the business owners, one of whom launched an unsuccessful attempt to force a recall election against the councilman.

“Maybe he went a little too strongly in the beginning, but it almost might have been the very same threat of redevelopment that got the business owners off their duffs,” said Sandra Dack, executive director of the Northridge Chamber of Commerce.

Bernson’s decision to relent on redevelopment came a day after a key business group ousted the leader of the failed recall drive from his post as its president. Walter N. Prince, owner of a janitorial service, had made Bernson’s redevelopment plans a central issue during the recall campaign last year.

The Parthenia Property Owners and Tenants Assn. replaced Prince on Thursday with Greg Baker, of Ross Baker Towing Service. The installation of Baker, who has headed the six-month cleanup effort in cooperation with Bernson’s office and the Chamber of Commerce, signaled a more conciliatory approach by the group toward Bernson.

“The environment has changed considerably,” said Baker, whose firm performs towing services for the Police Department. “The councilman’s office is working very much in harmony with the Parthenia property owners . . . I do not want this to be a political group.”

Prince said, “We’re all after the same bottom line, which is to get the CRA project stopped.”

For some of the business owners, fighting off redevelopment was a matter of survival, Baker said. Redevelopment is a financing tool in which the CRA funds new development on land parcels it can acquire by purchase or, in some cases, by condemnation. If forced to move, many of the affected Northridge businesses would have been hard-pressed to find new sites with proper zoning and without neighborhood opposition, Baker said.

“It was very imperative that we stay here because we couldn’t go anywhere else,” he said.