Council Race--It’s a Matter of Emphasis : Sharon Lowe: The Chinatown attorney sounds Molina’s populist themes and says hers is clearly a woman’s agenda.

Close your eyes and you would swear that the strident words railing against insensitive developers were coming from Gloria Molina.

“I don’t think (being anti-developer) is going to get in my way,” the woman said. “The reality is, developers aren’t going to disappear. Developers are going to still want to develop in this community. They may not like dealing with me. They don’t have to like me. But they’ll have to deal with me and they’ll have to deal with the communities that I represent.”

The political candidate speaking, however, was not Molina, the scrappy populist who parlayed a tough stance for public accountability into a victory in February for a seat on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Instead, the words came from Sharon Mee Yung Lowe, a 36-year-old activist attorney in Chinatown who is seeking to win the 1st District seat held by Molina for the last four years on the Los Angeles City Council.

She came in second, behind Cypress Park bond agent Mike Hernandez, in the June 4 primary with 21% of the vote. The runoff is scheduled for Aug. 13.

Lowe on the stump sounds Molina’s populist themes as she recounts her positions in favor of building more affordable housing in the district; creating elected neighborhood advisory councils; demanding the immediate ouster of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, and requiring that all staffers in the 1st District City Council office live within the district.

But Molina has endorsed her runoff opponent, Hernandez. That and the more than $100,000 he has raised makes him in the eyes of many the odds-on favorite to win the election and fill the last two years of Molina’s unexpired council term.

That, however, doesn’t seem to faze Lowe, who hopes to raise $20,000 for the runoff. She also has picked up the endorsements of City Councilman Michael Woo and former Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg.

“Mine is clearly a woman’s agenda,” she said. “She (Molina) beat the old-boys network (in winning the supervisorial election). Now, the system called in a card. It would have been difficult for her to endorse a woman . . . who is not a Latino.”

Lowe traces her underdog activist style to her days growing up in the eight-square-block Chinatown community in downtown Philadelphia. The youngest of nine children, Lowe said her father’s willingness to aid Chinese workers who were illegally in this country made a lasting impression on her.

On more than one occasion, she recalled, agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service swept through Chinatown, hoping to snare people in early-morning raids. But the illegal workers scurried away, sometimes running over to Lowe’s family home to seek protection.

“The workers knew that my family had a history of protecting them,” she said. “At age 14, I learned that they could enter if they had a search warrant. If not, they could not enter.”

Her father, a chef who came to the United States from southern China, took her along to Philadelphia-area senior citizens centers where they chatted with the Chinese elderly, many of whom had little contact with the outside world, she said.

Those contacts, plus her father’s admonition never to put him or her mother in a nursing home, help explain Lowe’s support for affordable housing projects for senior citizens and the poor. Her father, 92, and mother, 72, still live in Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

Lowe attended New York University, where she graduated in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. It was also there that she met a future husband, an engineering student named Chi Mui.

He quickly learned what others, including bureaucrats at Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency and unfriendly developers, would discover about Lowe. She is an independent sort who won’t be mollified by promises.

In 1980, after she came to the West Coast to attend law school at UCLA, she put off a wedding to Chi Mui. “He had to buy into my lifestyle,” Lowe said, “and I wasn’t quite sure about him yet.”

Her community activities, including work in L.A.’s Chinatown and in New York, came first, she said. She was also wrapped up in the student strike against proposed cutbacks in affirmation-action programs at UCLA.

She and Chi Mui eventually married in 1983, and now live in Montecito Heights with their sons, 4-year-old Kevin and 6-month-old Brian.

Lowe’s involvement in Chinatown in recent years has ranged from her work as chairwoman of the Alpine Recreation Center Advisory Council to her fight for sensitive development there. She was active in the fight against the expansion of the County Jail, located across Alameda Street from Chinatown.

Her politics, at times, have been at odds with some of Chinatown’s powers that be. In the early 1980s, for example, the late Gilbert Lindsay, who at the time represented Chinatown, fired Lowe from a Community Redevelopment Agency advisory committee, charging that she was too anti-development.

On another occasion, she and other activists opposed construction of a luxury apartment complex on land occupied by a Chinatown parking lot. Lowe’s plea to build affordable housing on the site led David Lee, one Chinatown businessman, to scoff that the suggestion was like “making hamburger out of steak.”

Some detractors have suggested that Lowe may be too inflexible on vital issues to help the mostly impoverished inner-city councilmanic district. “I think she’s going to have a problem working with some groups or listening to other people,” said primary election rival Sandra Figueroa, who finished third behind Lowe and who has endorsed Hernandez in the runoff.

Lowe dismisses such criticism, using her opposition to the Grand Plaza project, a CRA-supported plan on the south end of Chinatown, as an example.

The project, when first proposed in the mid-1980s, had too few affordable units and too much commercial space, she said. “I fought it to get more and more out of it for the community,” she said.

Today, she proudly pointed out, 86% of Grand Plaza’s 301 rental units are earmarked for low-income and elderly people. The project, currently under construction, is scheduled to be completed next year.

“I am confrontational and I am demanding,” she said, “but I can also achieve.”

1st City Council District at a Glance

The 1st City Council District winds from the impoverished Pico-Union area to the hills of Mt. Washington and the middle-class neighborhoods of Highland Park. Nearly 74% of the district’s residents are Latinos, with Asians making up 17%, Anglos 7% and blacks 2%.