Watts Wary of Huge Proposed Redevelopment

The selection of Watts as the site of the biggest redevelopment project in the history of the city was supposed to be a cause for celebration this summer, the 25th anniversary of the rioting that made Watts a national symbol of inner-city distress.

Instead, the proposed $200-million revitalization project has hit the community like a brick thrown through a storefront window. It has sparked widespread fears of eminent domain, displacement and gentrification; many survivors of the riots are worried that their homes and businesses once again are on the firing line.

After a series of tumultuous meetings over the last two weeks, the first phase of redevelopment was postponed. Officials hastily offered a compromise while critics vowed to halt the project until they are given a guarantee that not a single house will be touched or a resident forced to move.

“We wait 25 years for officials to fulfill their promise to do something about Watts, and we find out what they want to do is build a residential annex for downtown office workers,” said the Rev. Louis Brown of the Friendly Friendship Baptist Church on 101st Street in Watts. “What’s going to happen to the people who live here now? The old, the poor, the unskilled. It’s not hard to see them getting swept aside in a project like this.”

Extending over 15 years, the Watts project as now designed would direct private and public capital toward development of offices and industry as well as to the building of several hundred new homes and apartments. It also calls for establishment of a cultural corridor of theaters and art centers.

Actually an expansion of an earlier, much smaller redevelopment effort, the project was undertaken at the behest of the Los Angeles City Council. A continuing backlash would be an embarrassment for the project’s political backers, including Mayor Tom Bradley, who grew up nearby and pledged 20 years ago to make Watts a better place to live.

Today, city officials insist that displacing community residents is the furthest thing from their minds, but a variety of factors have impaired their credibility on this matter. Specifically, they have stopped short of issuing the requested guarantee against tearing anyone’s house down.

Officials and community leaders have been laying the foundation for the massive redevelopment plan for the past 18 months, but little effort was made to inform residents until June--just days before the City Council voted to let the project get under way.

What most unsettles anxious residents is the possibility that Watts may now represent much too good a thing to the investors and developers who have long dismissed the place as an urban dead end. The community is a stop on the city’s new light-rail line, and within a few years it will be at the center of a network of new rail, bus and freeway lines that will link the Los Angeles International Airport, the region’s two harbors, Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles.

“Watts is an area of the city that has been rediscovered,” said John Tuite, the administrator of the city Community Redevelopment Agency, the arm of government in charge of Watts redevelopment. The network of new transportation systems “puts Watts on the map again,” Tuite said.

Yet, CRA officials argue that, given the community’s history of poverty and crime, the transportation improvements alone will not make Watts a magnet for social and economic change.

The 2,000-acre section of Watts targeted by the CRA is home to about 50,000 people, 40% of whom live below the poverty line. A study commissioned by the CRA found that the unemployment rate is close to 20% and that the number of college graduates less is than 5%.

With the resources that the CRA could bring to bear, however, Tuite and others believe that Watts can overcome its handicaps. According to Tuite, the CRA--in addition to creating cultural institutions and encouraging commercial and residential building--would provide money for desperately needed social services such as drug and alcohol counseling and child care.

As with other CRA projects, the agency’s most controversial role in Watts grows out of its unique power to condemn property for private development. Through eminent domain, the agency would be able to assemble large tracts for new offices, apartments, stores, restaurants and theaters. With vacant land at a premium, developers said, the CRA could be hard pressed to lay the groundwork for a new Watts without tearing down some portion of the old.

Complicating the situation in Watts is the CRA’s stormy past in several other neighborhoods. It has been accused in lawsuits and on the floor of the City Council of championing big development at the expense of tenants, homeowners and small business owners.

“Beware of redevelopment. It is brutal and deadly,” Norton Halper, an opponent of the CRA’s Hollywood project, told a gathering in Watts last week. “The CRA is the only agency that can take your property and give it to a developer.”

Halper’s warning is felt keenly in a community that over the years has been buffeted by real estate pressures. More than 700 people were displaced by the CRA’s first Watts project, and many more were forced to sell their homes to make way for the Century Freeway. Lately, stories abound of people bilked out of their equity by con artists posing as home repair experts and of homeowners persuaded by cash offers to sell cheap.

With a number of Latino and Asian developers in the market for Watts property, ethnic tension stiffens people’s resolve to hang on to what they have.

“Don’t walk away,” Watts businessman Ben Beraiah advised his neighbors at a recent community meeting, “from the greatest thing that ever happened to you--L.A. real estate. Sit on it. It is gold.”

Critics of the project insisted that they are not trying to stand in the way of progress by taking issue with redevelopment. They will support it, they said, if the project means affordable loans for people to fix up their houses, new opportunities for locally owned businesses and new jobs.

CRA officials said that all of those goals can be realized. They pointed to the agency’s achievements in the community: helping to pay for the construction of 465 new dwellings and building the Martin Luther King Jr. shopping center, a post office, a neighborhood center and a health center. To make these improvements, the CRA spent $11 million condemning and acquiring over 500 pieces of property

For now, the toughest challenge facing the agency is to overcome widespread concern by residents that the CRA has secret plans to drive them from Watts. It also has been accused of attempting to stack the project’s oversight committee with developers, landowners and others who stand to profit most.

“We don’t have a plan, and we’re not trying to jam anything down anyone’s throat,” said Leroy Willis, the CRA’s director of operations.

For now anyway, the debate over the project has focused on the somewhat narrow issue of the oversight committee. Fourteen of the 25 members are to be elected by the affected residents, property owners and business people, and critics argue that they received too little notice to know the issues well enough to cast informed votes.

Formal planning for Watts redevelopment cannot begin until the committee is in place.

At the request of the mayor and two council members who represent Watts, Robert Farrell and Joan Milke Flores, the CRA postponed the election of the committee from July 9 to July 26. The agency also said it will recommend to the council that neighborhoods encompassing 65% of all homes within the project territory be protected from eminent domain.

Even that proposal would leave unprotected hundreds of households--many of them owned by elderly people who have lived in Watts 30 years or longer and who have no desire to leave.

“They’ll have to kill me first if they’re planning on taking my house,” said Bertha Lias, who has lived for 28 years in a house she owns on Juniper Street. “I don’t care whether they offer me $50 million. I got nowhere else to go.”

Like many people in her neighborhood, Lias said she was not aware of the redevelopment project. Others interviewed by The Times said they received notices in the mail, but had no idea it could mean the loss of their homes.

Spokesmen for the CRA said they sent two batches of mailings in June to all potentially affected residents, notifying them that the City Council was about to put the project in motion and informing them of community meetings scheduled to discuss formation of the oversight committee.

Farrell nevertheless faulted the agency for not spreading the word sooner, at the same time conceding that he did nothing to notify his constituents. “We had deferred to the CRA, fully expecting that they would see to it that the people were sufficiently aware of what was going on,” he said.

Farrell said he would support delaying the committee election, if necessary, beyond July 26 if residents want more time to familiarize themselves with the project. Flores said she would be willing to let any portion of the project area be withdrawn if residents want to do so in order to protect their neighborhood from eminent domain.

The people are by no means of one mind regarding the project.

“Sometimes, I feel like if they gave me enough money, they can have the house,” said Corena Boykin, a homeowner on Croesus Avenue. “Other times, I feel different. Maybe I’d get my gun and chase them out the gate.”

Alice Harris, a teacher and community activist who has lived and worked in Watts for 30 years, speaks glowingly of the community’s first redevelopment project and said she thinks most residents would welcome the proposed project if they knew what the first one accomplished.

But Harris acknowledged that the first project forced a number of people from their homes, and she said she understood people’s apprehension.

“A burnt child dreads the fire,” Harris said.

But she said that progress carries a price tag and people would have to be willing to pay it--even if it meant more displacement--in order to build a better Watts.

“In order to build a new home, you hope the old one doesn’t have to come down,” Harris said. “But sometimes it does. In order to live, some things have got to die.”