In Dispute / SEEKING CREATIVE LOCAL SOLUTIONS : Liquor Stores: Give a Helping Hand to Owners : Another Way: There are ways to satisfy both sides, but first everyone involved, including the news media, has to stop calling it a racial dispute. Then we can start talking solutions.
Point:
It was a blessing in disguise when so many liquor stores in South Los Angeles burned down. Life is better without the drunkenness and crime that go with alcohol sales and the city should forbid their rebuilding.
Counterpoint:
Business owners have an absolute right to their livelihood, and small shop-owners can’t afford to sell just food--they need the profit from alcohol. Besides, the protests smack of anti-Korean racism.
Six months after Los Angeles’ “rainbow revolt,” racial and economic tensions are far from healed. Contributing to the tension is the labeling of longstanding community issues and problems as racial conflicts. When the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment launched a campaign to “Rebuild South Central Without Liquor Stores,” suspicions were voiced about possible racial motives.
The expectation of racial conflict even raised concerns about the wisdom of holding public hearings. More than 10 hearings have been held thus far, but the media have not once remarked on the absence of racial conflict in those hearings. The Los Angeles Planning Commission has heard requests from store owners of almost every ethnic background in the city; residents protesting the re-establishment of stores that sell liquor have reflected this same diversity.
There are no instant solutions for healing Los Angeles. Some positive steps forward could begin with Rebuild L.A. focusing resources and providing technical assistance to liquor store owners interested in converting or relocating businesses. But while alternatives are explored, emergency benefits need to be extended to owners.
Ten years ago, the South Central Organizing Committee mobilized thousands of homeowners, renters and church members to protest problems associated with an over-concentration of liquor stores. At that time, South-Central liquor stores were owned primarily by African-Americans. In 1984, after trying unsuccessfully to have a number of problem stores closed, residents did win the right to determine when and how alcohol is sold and to impose conditions on lighting, security and hours of operation. The resulting conditional use permit process worked so well in South-Central that it was adopted citywide in 1986.
Community Coalition members have recently interviewed residents door to door near stores currently planning to rebuild. In some instances, residents do not object to the rebuilding of a neighborhood store, but in other cases they do mind the public nuisances connected with alcohol sales. In one such case, teen-agers described how easy it was to purchase alcohol; other residents had witnessed drug deals inside the store. Senior citizens provided compelling testimony about how life improved after the store was closed. One senior reported that he no longer begins each morning cleaning up alcohol containers from his front yard, and isn’t afraid to walk down the street now that the clusters of drinkers are gone.
Although every ethnic group owns and operates businesses that sell alcohol, Asian merchants are undeniably the majority. Merchants are understandably upset when they discover that they are underinsured or uninsured, that they can’t get emergency relief and that they face community opposition. They should not be driven into poverty, but neither should residents have to suffer from the return of problem stores.
The historic problems related to alcohol sales in South-Central transcend the ethnicity of the merchants. Jews, Japanese, African-Americans, Latinos and Korean-Americans have all owned and operated liquor stores; no group has been immune to the nuisance problems. Although not all of South-Central is impoverished or suffers from drug and alcohol problems, when poverty, drug and crime problems do converge in a community saturated with alcohol, tragedy often results.
Eliminating public hearings in order to expedite the rebuilding of liquor stores will not ease ethnic tensions and heal the wounds of April. Positive steps are needed, like the convening of the Mayor’s South-Central Community/Merchant Liquor Task Force, which issued its preliminary recommendations last week.
Several large corporations have stepped forward and offered millions of dollars in the effort to rebuild Los Angeles. The multibillion-dollar alcohol industry should now join the rebuilding effort by contributing funds to compensate and relocate businesses that sell their products. Rebuild L.A. should also focus on providing technical assistance to liquor store owners who want to convert or relocate their businesses. And while a variety of alternatives are explored, emergency benefits should be extended to merchants.
If we focus public and private resources properly, the city can further recover from its trauma without harming either merchants or neighborhoods.
