EAST LOS ANGELES : Buyer Sought for Prison Site
A grass-roots organization that fought plans to put a prison in East Los Angeles is trying to find a corporate buyer for the site.
The Coalition Against the Prison in East Los Angeles, headed by landscape architect Frank Villalobos, wanted to see a manufacturing plant established there long before Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation killing the prison proposal. But the group wants to scrutinize the type of jobs to ensure livable wages and environmentally sound manufacturing.
“We’re out there trying to figure out what would be the best and what would be the ideal and where can our people profit from the eight years of sweat that we did here,” Villalobos said.
The battle over the proposed $100-million medium-security prison near 12th Street and Santa Fe Avenue was settled this month when Wilson agreed to sign a bill authorizing funding for a prison in Lancaster and dropped plans for the Eastside facility. The state owns the parcel.
Organizers hope occupants of the 20-acre site will hire workers laid off in the past decade because of automobile assembly plant closures in Van Nuys, Pico Rivera and South Gate.
“That whole area can now be looked at differently than before, from the viewpoint that it was not a good place to invest because there was a prison going in there,” said Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who authored the measure to defeat the prison. “Now, that site has an increased value and increased opportunity for business ventures. We’re now looking at the site from an entirely different perspective on how to revitalize an area that has long been neglected.”
The area, which Villalobos said has a long tradition of manufacturing, could support a light- or heavy-rail assembly plant. “That would give us a sense of pride, give us a sharing of economy with other countries and sharing of technology,” he said. “But it would (also) give us the motivation to rebuild Los Angeles with jobs and let our people have an access to the high-scale paying jobs that those kind of industries generate.”
Villalobos and his company, Barrio Planners Inc., are in the midst of a 14-month study of a 10-square-mile area of Boyle Heights and El Sereno. The study, commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency, is a demographic and economic look at the city’s first suburb. So far, the study indicates that Boyle Heights contains Los Angeles’ largest concentration of skilled and semiskilled laborers, Villalobos said. Those skills are primarily in manufacturing, toxic-waste handling and construction.
In addition to being near a pool of workers, the site is the area’s largest parcel of available land, he said.
“That has got to be a premium,” Villalobos said. “So we have to protect it and prevent an incinerator from being proposed there or any other kind of stupid use that people will see fit to put next to an impoverished community.”
