Dead-End Realities and Recovery

Peter V. Ueberroth says Los Angeles is the victim of bad publicity, a line you’ll probably be hearing frequently in the months ahead.

“I think Los Angeles should take offense at how we are being portrayed around the world,” the co-chairman of Rebuild L.A. told a meeting of business executives at the Biltmore on Tuesday morning. In other words, blame the media.

In taking this line, Ueberroth was following an old L.A. custom that I thought had been long buried.

Back in the days when the town was run by rich civic bosses, they covered up L.A.’s troubles, dwelling instead on the Southland’s sunshine. If a muckraking reporter wrote of police brutality or how the Great Depression was hurting the City of Angels, the oligarchs and their trained seals in the local press would excoriate the messenger.

Ueberroth said that though he wasn’t adverse to some criticism, he was offended at the way “your family, your L.A. is being portrayed in the worldwide media. . . . It is OK for us to internally criticize our own family because it is our family. . . . But let somebody outside your family start criticizing your mother or your father or some other family member, and that’s something you can take offense at.”

Well, Peter, I’m an L.A. resident. That makes me a member of the family, with a relative’s right to criticize.

The message Ueberroth wants to get out is this: L.A. is changing for the better. Public-spirited corporations are putting money into riot-damaged South-Central Los Angeles. Stores are reopening. Los Angeles is far ahead of other cities in riot recovery. And it sounded good, especially as portrayed on a tape he showed full of happy images--a Chief Auto store rebuilt, supermarkets reopened, busy-looking entrepreneurs.

A couple of hours later, I saw recovery was not as simple as Ueberroth had implied.

I’d gone to Vermont and Manchester avenues in South-Central for a news conference by Rep. Maxine Waters, who announced she was distributing 350,000 copies of a letter telling young African-Americans: “Our anger and our frustration must not drive us to the streets. Let’s get smart. It’s time to chill.”

Afterward, I walked around the area. At 84th Place and Vermont, a small mall was being rebuilt. But across the street, two entire blocks had been leveled to vacant lots full of dirt and weeds, as empty as the land when Indians and Spaniards crossed it centuries ago.

I got a lesson in the complexity of rebuilding when I stopped at a small store, IMS Stationery at 950 W. Manchester Ave.

Shelves of stationery and office supplies lined the walls and filled the center of the pleasant store. The proprietors, Alvin Oldham and his son, Alvin Jr., who are African-Americans, were behind the counter.

Business wasn’t good. Trade has been down since the riots, largely because of the loss of the stores that once filled the vacant lots on Manchester and Vermont. Shoe stores, a Bible store and a dentist’s office were among the businesses once across the street. About 600 people a day walked around the neighborhood, the Oldhams said.

Why don’t the owners rebuild the stores? I asked.

They said they believed the Korean-Americans, who ran most of the stores, just leased them. Many of the buildings’ absentee owners were old-time residents or business people in the neighborhood. When the buildings were destroyed, the owners took their insurance money and left. “Would you invest $350,000 or $400,000 in a new building there if you were 65 or 70 years old?” asked Alvin Oldham Jr. “I wouldn’t.”

If the stores on the now-vacant lots aren’t rebuilt, surviving businesses like IMS Stationery will continue to suffer. And the desolation of Vermont and Manchester will continue.

In his speech, Ueberroth was eloquent in his praise for what big corporations and their executives are doing for L.A. These are his kind of people, and it was just what they wanted to hear.

But the economic realities holding up the recovery of Vermont and Manchester are too nitty-gritty, too humble, maybe too close to the ground, to be within the experience of many of his high-level audience. These realities involve trying to get some 75-year-old retired man to embark on a huge reconstruction project with his insurance money, which is, in essence, his life savings. Or else a new buyer, willing to rebuild, must be found.

South-Central L.A. always has been an area of small businesses, housed in one-story buildings, an unglamorous, hard-working place that doesn’t fit easily into grand economic plans.

South-Central Los Angeles is a victim of dead-end economic realities, not of the bad publicity Ueberroth dislikes.