Rebuild L.A. With Stones the Current Builders Left Out : Inner city: Ueberroth’s resignation sheds light on our need of an urban policy.

Too much commentary is likely to be spent on whether Peter Ueberroth’s departure from RLA represents a personal failure. That might be appropriate if resolving the urban crisis was like managing baseball or the Olympics, Ueberroth’s previous successful endeavors. In this situation, Ueberroth should be congratulated for making the attempt to “rebuild L.A.” and for knowing when it’s quitting time.

The question now is not a crisis of leadership, but of strategy. Ueberroth was an easy target for the accusation of being, as an Orange County businessman, not representative of the inner city. But his replacement by a more representative elite is not an answer to the deeper crisis.

America does not have an urban policy agenda. Both political parties abandoned the cities for the suburbs years ago. Corporate America has disinvested from the urban core as well.

The assumptions of Rebuild L.A. now need rebuilding themselves.

* The first premise was that private investors can be enticed, with the promise of sufficient profits, to invest in major job creation in the inner city. Thus far, there is little evidence that “enterprise zones” or “empowerment zones” build anything more than mini-fiefdoms while the next generation of young people is abandoned. The RLA goal of 55,000 jobs in the “riot zone” in five years is unachieveable at the present pace, and does not even begin to replace the jobs lost in the past few years.

* The second premise was that a private parallel decision-making structure can rebuild Los Angeles better than the elected government and official bureaucracy. Rebuild L.A. certainly has activated a creative network of community and business leaders, but it is not accountable to voters, not required to hold open meetings and its power is purely advisory. It is not an alternative to reforming official governing bureaucracies from the ground up.

* Then there was the classic boosterism that has made L.A. famous as the world capital of escapism. In a New Year’s message, for example, Ueberroth asked that everyone in Los Angeles pledge never to make negative comments about the city again. But only good jobs and good schools, not platitudes, can restore a viable city.

Los Angeles needs new thinking even more than new leadership. Then we would not be subsidizing megadevelopment at Playa Vista and Warner Center while the inner city waits for supermarkets, or spending billions on suburban rail when we could employ young people now in retrofitting cars to run on electric batteries.

We can only rebuild Los Angeles with the stones the current builders left out.