COLUMN RIGHT/ MICHAEL M. BERGER : First, the Riots, Now Looting by City Hall : A double-standard rebuilding policy unfairly targets liquor stores and other businesses.

LULUs, they’re called in the planning industry: locally unwanted land uses. Anything can qualify; it isn’t hard. All it has to be is a use of property that some of the neighbors or some of the local bureaucracy don’t like. Or don’t want in a particular location. A “pig in the parlor,” as the Supreme Court once described them.

Everyone is doing a lot of hand-wringing over the plight of those whose businesses were burned out during the riots, and proposing solutions to cut through the normal bureaucratic gridlock so that the owners may rebuild and reopen as soon as possible. But some people in City Hall have quietly gone about trying to eliminate certain businesses that they (or someone with some clout) didn’t particularly like in the first place.

Thus, while we hear about plans to cut out (not merely cut through) some of the usual red tape that property and business owners go through before they can begin converting vacant land into something productive, some business proprietors will get no such break. Under an ordinance swiftly passed by the City Council and signed by the mayor, owners of liquor stores, gun shops, secondhand stores, swap meets and auto-repair shops cannot rebuild without enduring the full, labyrinthine approval process, including detailed environmental analyses, comparisons of the desired use with the existing, and often outdated, planning and zoning maps, and several rounds of public hearings at which city officials make discretionary, and often unreviewable, decisions.

Let’s look at these businesses in two groups because, like it or not, some plausible rationalization may exist for not immediately re-injecting liquor and weapons into a recent riot area.

But swap meets? Secondhand stores? Auto-repair shops? These smack much more of someone’s idea of social engineering. Rather than providing these riot victims the same opportunity to rebuild their lives, city planners appear to have seized the opportunistic moment to rid fire-swept neighborhoods of businesses viewed by some as either slightly unsavory, like secondhand stores (a generality that probably embraces pawn shops) or “out of place” in the area, like auto-repair shops, or perhaps too competitive with mainstream businesses because of low overhead, like swap meets.

Whatever the validity of that sociological theory, this is the wrong time and the wrong way to implement it. We’re talking about the victims of crime, after all. These are business owners who were doing nothing but carrying on lawful enterprises--in a part of the city desperately in need of lawful enterprises--that employed some local residents and provided service to others.

If there really is some valid reason for banishing certain types of businesses from this (or any other) part of town, then the question of banishment deserves to be faced directly rather than by maintaining expensive hurdles for a chosen few. It cuts across every grain of fairness that is supposed to characterize our system of government to make sacrificial lambs out of some categories of riot victims who have already suffered grievous losses.

Even stores that sell weapons and those loosely labeled as “liquor stores,” which generally sell more than liquor, deserve a better break than they seem to be getting from City Hall. What have they done, after all? What was their crime? Perhaps they are being singled out for failing to foresee the violent firestorms that swept the city, or for failing to realize that police protection would not arrive.

Whatever arguments one might like to make about the propriety of banning the sale of weapons, and whatever arguments one might like to make about either the sinfulness or social wastefulness of providing alcohol to people who ought to be doing “better” things with their resources and time, neither the sale of weapons nor the sale of liquor is illegal. Quite the contrary. And unless there is something inherently illegal about the operation of these businesses, the city has no business discriminating against them by subjecting their owners to onerous reconstruction requirements not imposed on others.

It has been a long time since Earl Warren was chief justice of the United States. Those who remember him, however, will recall how he used to cut through one-sided legal arguments by leaning toward the lawyer and asking, “But, counsel, is that fair?” That question seems to have eluded City Hall in the zeal of some to capitalize on the opportunity provided by the riots to rid South Los Angeles of certain pet LULUs.