Suit Claims Bias in Building Moratorium : Housing: Activists sue Long Beach, in part to restrain Councilman Wallace Edgerton for remarks linking poor people with crime.

Housing activists have filed a lawsuit against the city claiming that a recent moratorium on development in the waterfront district discriminates against the poor.

The Long Beach Action Assn. claims in a suit filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court that the moratorium is illegal because it runs counter to the city’s own policy document, the General Plan, which calls for the development of high-density housing along the city’s major thoroughfares.

“The city wants to separate Long Beach into bastions of the upper-middle-class and gate the poor into ghettos,” said Carla Biersdorff, a plaintiff in the suit. Biersdorff, a telephone repair worker who earns $35,000 a year, said the only place in Long Beach where she could afford to buy a home recently was North Long Beach. “If I can barely afford affordable housing, who can?” she asked.

The moratorium under attack was passed Aug. 28 and bans construction of buildings over 25 feet high (two stories) along major arteries in the city’s 2nd Council District, including Broadway, 4th, 7th and 10th streets.

The General Plan developed a year ago calls for the city to concentrate multistory housing along such thoroughfares.

But increasing numbers of residents and a few councilmen, most notably 2nd District Councilman Wallace Edgerton, say that mostly poor people have moved into such developments, resulting in crime and congestion.

Edgerton said his constituents would be enraged if the lawsuit succeeds in lifting the freeze on development in their neighborhoods. “You can’t continue to jam in a lot of poverty people and people who are on government subsidies. They are overburdening our police and school systems and increasing crime dramatically,” Edgerton said. “Working people will move out and the property values of this city will be destroyed if we let Long Beach become the capital of poverty.”

Plaintiffs said they sued the city in part because of such remarks, fearing they are evidence of a citywide backlash against the poor. Poor planning, not poor people, are responsible for the city’s crime and social problems, they say.

“We’re not going to let anybody get by with using the poor for a scapegoat. The poor didn’t make city policy,” said Dennis Rockway, a lawyer with Legal Aid who helped write the lawsuit.

In fact, Rockway said, one of the association’s objectives is to muzzle Edgerton, who at meetings of the City Council has repeatedly attacked “poverty people” for the city’s crime. “He’s trying to create apartheid right here in Long Beach,” Rockway said. “He’s appealing to the bigotry in people.”

Edgerton said: “I will keep speaking out. All I’m trying to do is reflect what our community wants. I have taught politics for years. I donate to the poor. The point is, when you continue to lower the economic status of your city and put more and more welfare and poverty people in your city, and do more and more to attract the homeless, you will damage the economic viability of the city.”

Local officials are squeezed in a political vise by pressure from anti-growth residents and in this instance an unusual alliance between housing advocates and developers. In fact, several officials said this week that they had been braced for a legal challenge to the moratorium, but from other quarters.

“I’m surprised. I had been told a developer was going to sue the city,” Planning Director Robert Paternoster said when informed of the recent lawsuit.

Other city officials said they did not wish to comment in detail on the lawsuit until they had a chance to read it.

Paternoster said, however, that city policy is constantly being updated. It is true that the city can not pass laws that contradict its own General Plan, he said. But “the moratorium is not a permanent land-use decision. It is putting things on hold while you decide something. It is perfectly reasonable to have a moratorium while you restudy the General Plan,” Paternoster said.

After approving the moratorium in August, the City Council asked the Planning Commission to reconsider that part of the General Plan providing for the development of high-density housing along the city’s major roads. The commission is still studying the matter.

During a recent joint meeting between the City Council and the Planning Commission, Tony Tortorice, a planning commissioner, argued with Edgerton over these issues. Tortorice said he almost welcomes the lawsuit. It will force the city to confront what he calls a “strong political current to exclude poor people from Long Beach,” he said. That current, Tortorice said, has recently led to several moratoriums like the one in the 2nd District on construction of the kinds of buildings poor people live in.

“Adopting moratoriums has become our de facto way of making policy,” he said. “Land use has become a hammer and now everything looks like a nail. If this procedure can’t be examined politically, maybe we’ll have to examine it in the courts.”