Former Allies Bicker Over Housing Issues

The 2nd District race has evolved into a heated confrontation between former allies who accuse each other of campaign distortions.

On one side is Wallace Edgerton, a 17-year council veteran who has embraced and discarded political stands with such regularity that he is known as “Waffling Wally.”

On the other is Alan Lowenthal, a longtime community activist who was so eager to challenge Edgerton that he moved back into the district after reapportionment carved him out of it last year.

Also in the race is Daniel K. Rosenberg, a frequent candidate and gadfly who was convicted of disrupting a 1990 council meeting and sentenced to three years of probation. Now, when he goes to the council podium, he doesn’t talk, he just holds up signs and sighs.

Edgerton is attempting to keep the Cold War alive by blasting Lowenthal and the political watchdog group he belongs to as “basically very radical, left-wing.” In joking response, Lowenthal, a past president of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved (LBACI), bought a hammer-and-sickle tie.

He dismisses Edgerton’s labels as “bizarreness” and points to a 1984 letter that Edgerton wrote on LBACI stationery, telling supporters that he belonged to that watchdog group.

“They’ve changed, I haven’t,” retorted Edgerton, who has attacked Lowenthal’s support of affordable housing programs, especially single-room-occupancy hotels.

Yet Edgerton has also supported affordable housing, including higher-density projects. In 1989, he supported a requirement that developers who demolished low-cost apartments replace them or contribute to a city housing fund. After two years of pressure from builders, Edgerton joined the council in replacing the law with a weaker program that allows developers to add apartments to a project if some of the units are for low-income residents.

Edgerton also has an old letter to wave in Lowenthal’s face. Although Lowenthal is blaming Edgerton for extensive apartment development that ravaged many neighborhoods in the 1980s, he wrote a 1988 letter to the Long Beach Press-Telegram praising Edgerton’s efforts to preserve single-family neighborhoods.

Lowenthal concedes that Edgerton has worked to stop apartment development. But he cites a 1986 council vote as evidence of the incumbent’s erratic record. Edgerton was absent for a vote that would have slowed, if not halted, apartment projects while new parking standards were considered. The measure failed.

The following week the Planning Department received 131 applications for apartment houses, the amount normally received during an entire year. Edgerton, who could not recall why he was absent, said the key votes on development took place later that year, when he was present and voted for moratoriums.