Middle-Class Clout Sends High-Density Developments Into Poor Part of Town : Housing: Planners struggle to balance complaints of activists against city’s burst of apartment construction, which is mostly near downtown and on the west side.

Sharon Douglas, a life-long resident of Loma Avenue, minces no words about the kind of development that has turned many a Long Beach neighborhood into an ill-planned jumble of old bungalows and nondescript new apartment buildings during the past decade.

“They’re junk piles,” she says scornfully, referring to the condominiums and apartments that have gone up in her neighborhood near Pacific Coast Highway and the Signal Hill border. “There’s just so much building here it’s ridiculous,” she fumes. “They’re overcrowding us. We don’t have school facilities. . . . They won’t put any parks in.”

Douglas’ bellicose comments are part of the continuing community backlash against the wave of apartment and condo development that marked the mid-1980s in Long Beach and called into question many of the city’s planning policies.

Harangued by neighborhood activists incensed over the invasion of apartments on their blocks, city officials are confining high-density residential development to fewer and fewer parts of Long Beach. And those projects are winding up primarily on the poorer side of town.

The changes mark a continuing retreat from the anything-goes days of the 1970s, when most of the city was zoned for high-density development, regardless of what was already there. In 1978, density limits were lowered somewhat, but not enough to avoid a burst of apartment construction a few years later.

“All hell broke loose from a development standpoint,” recalled Robert Paternoster, the city’s planning director.

City leaders were taken to task as a result. In 1989 they overhauled Long Beach’s master land-use plan, somewhat belatedly paying homage to a neighborhood preservation ethic. New high-density residential development was to be kept out of most neighborhoods and largely restricted to the downtown area and some of the city’s main traffic corridors. In those districts, planners reasoned, the new projects would replace dilapidated housing and commercial strips and conform to the more dense profile of the city center.

But that did not satisfy Douglas’ group, the Zaferia Neighborhood Assn., which declared war over a proposed condo development on Pacific Coast Highway. While the project was ultimately approved with some changes to make it a less jarring contrast to nearby neighborhoods, the Zaferia hoopla and similar community concerns elsewhere in the city prompted officials to further revise zoning plans. Density limits are now being scaled back on parts of Pacific Coast Highway, Redondo Avenue and 7th Street.

“It’s such a difficult issue,” observed Nancy Latimer, a city planning commissioner. “It’s been difficult to find where higher-density housing will fit in the city.” It has to go somewhere, Latimer said, because she does not believe the city is prepared to stop residential growth.

For the most part, that “somewhere” is areas in the poorer half of Long Beach, west of Redondo Avenue. The clamor over development has come largely from politically influential middle-class neighborhood associations. The poor in Long Beach are not organized, they do not show up at City Council meetings and they live in run-down rental housing that has few protectors.

Indeed, downtown, where many poor people live--and which city planners have slated for extensive residential redevelopment--is about the only place in the city where new housing development is not controversial.

“That’s kind of the dilemma of zoning,” Paternoster said. The areas that people want to protect through zoning tend to be in more affluent districts, because they can afford housing that is worth preserving.

For some, the mounting density restrictions and the concentration of larger projects raise thorny issues.

“What I’m afraid of is that this whole strategy serves to make a certain set of people happy in the short run, but in the long run may do a disservice to the entire city,” said Tony Tortorice, another planning commissioner.

Tortorice sees the sweeping density rollbacks of 1989 as “an exercise to keep homeowner groups more or less quiescent.” They associated the city’s mounting urban woes with growth, and saw development as an instrument of the destruction of their neighborhoods.

But what, Tortorice asked, are all the underlying meanings of neighborhood preservation? “For a lot of people it means don’t bring anybody in here that doesn’t look like me.”

He argued that there is nothing the matter with density itself, although he concedes that it has gotten a bad name because “we tend to build these condo fortresses--a little fortress here and a little fortress there.”

By steering more dense projects to only certain parts of Long Beach, Tortorice continued, the city is engaging in a tacit form of economic segregation that fosters political and racial segregation.

Planning Commissioner Latimer--while conceding that she has concerns about putting most of the dense housing west of Redondo Avenue--vehemently denied the charges of implicit segregation.

“No one on the Planning Commission or the council would tolerate any steps toward economic or racial segregation,” she insisted. “I hope the kind of housing we’re going to put in--everyone is going to be proud of--and will upgrade areas.”

Alan Lowenthal, president of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a citywide watchdog group, agreed that the new projects could encourage gentrification and improve areas.

“The problem is we don’t take into consideration the tremendous number of people already living there,” he said. “They don’t count because they don’t have political clout.”

Especially in the downtown area, low-income residents are forced out of older, smaller apartment buildings as they are cleared to make way for the new, exacerbating Long Beach’s shortage of housing for the poor.

Nonetheless, Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, whose district includes downtown and will be the recipient of much of the denser residential construction, called the latest land-use plan “the best possible compromise we can come up with.”

“I’m not convinced we couldn’t have more density (on the east side of the city), but on the other hand, there appears no likelihood in the near future that’s going to happen.”