ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Brea’s Wayward Redevelopment Plan

Brea has approached some of its ambitious downtown redevelopment plans with all the care of a wrecking ball on the loose.

Since the mid-1980s, hundreds of low-income residents have been forced by redevelopment to move out of their homes. But the city did not meet that dislocation with adequate affordable housing, prompting the county’s homelessness task force to express concern that some of the displaced were joining the ranks of the homeless. This situation developed after Brea won court permission in 1985 to spend $25 million earmarked for affordable housing on roads in low-income neighborhoods--on the ground that the roads ultimately would benefit the city’s poor people.

It is not just the poor who have been unhappy with Brea’s redevelopment strategies. A Superior Court judge now has surveyed the city’s haphazard treatment of small businesses forced to relocate and has ordered a halt to most of the downtown redevelopment program until officials get their act together.

Judge Robert C. Todd’s ruling was foreshadowed by an unusual rebuke delivered to the city only days before his ruling. He said the city had given “very little assistance” to people and businesses forced to relocate, and he called the information that was given “muddled and far from clear.” The city had tried unsuccessfully to persuade him that it had not been obvious that plans had to be submitted to the state Housing and Community Development Department.

But ignorance of the law is no excuse, and to comply with state requirements, officials now must show a relocation assistance plan for businesses and residents. That means a suitable plan must be given to the Housing and Community Development Department for approval. In fact, the city has relocated 255 residences and 41 businesses since 1985, but it submitted a relocation plan to the state agency only last April.

The judge ordered the city to furnish people remaining in the redevelopment site with copies of its relocation plan and to give instructions on how to comply with it.

The city’s shortcomings in this area now mean, among other things, that a shopping center set for construction this summer on a 22-acre downtown redevelopment site has to be put on hold. So the bottom line is that the city’s redevelopment strategies, which previously have been so disruptive for poor people, now end up meaning delay for a new shopping center that the city has wanted all along.