The Unhappy Consequences of Good Intentions

One of the best kinds of news stories involve good intentions gone bad.

They are sad stories, about well-meaning people ground down by the law of unintended consequences. They interest me because they reflect my view of politicians and bureaucrats. Only a few are crooks. Most want to do good. But, like the rest of us, sometimes they just screw things up.

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Nobody had better intentions than the Los Angeles Unified School District board when it decided in the late 1980s to build a high school on the 24-acre site of the defunct Ambassador Hotel in Mid-Wilshire. The apartments north and south of Wilshire Boulevard had become crowded with the Latino working poor, many of them immigrants whose children had swollen the enrollments of Los Angeles and Manual Arts high schools.

The new school was going to be named after Robert F. Kennedy. This dedication would be especially meaningful since the late senator was assassinated at the Ambassador while he was running for president in 1968. Many hoped his concern for the poor would inspire the teachers and curriculum.

Mid-Wilshire property owners had good intentions too. Wanting to restore the fading elegance of Mid-Wilshire and protect their investments, they came up with another plan for the Ambassador site. Their plan, by UCLA architects and planners, called for retail stores, a hotel, office buildings and residences, a vast project they felt would revive the entire area.

Then Donald Trump, the flamboyant New York builder, and other developers bought the Ambassador site and began to move ahead with a version of the UCLA plan--with one typically Trump touch--a proposed 125-story high-rise, the nation’s highest building.

At that point, the school district, rapidly going broke, should have bowed out. Despite its good intentions, it could not afford a financial war with Trump. But remember, the Los Angeles Unified School District governs with its heart rather than its head. Roughly around this time, you may recall, the district granted its teachers a budget-breaking pay raise that proved disastrous to its precarious financial situation.

The district moved ahead to take the property through eminent domain. That is, condemn the land and then purchase it at a fair market price negotiated with the seller or, that failing, set by the courts. The district said the site was worth $48 million. Trump offered to settle for $89 million. The district turned him down. Eventually, the district gave up its quest. But Trump isn’t finished. Barbara Res, his representative here, said the builder intends to sue for damages he said he suffered because the eminent domain action prevented him from developing the land. “It will cost them a lot of money,” Res told me.

So after four years of negotiations over grandiose plans for the land, here’s the score: No high school. Hundreds of Mid-Wilshire kids still have to ride buses each day to San Fernando Valley schools. The Ambassador site remains a ghost town, used occasionally as a film location. Mid-Wilshire continues to deteriorate.

And we taxpayers are going to be out several million dollars before the lawsuits are settled. It’s pretty sad when you think of the teachers’ salaries, books and computers the money could have paid for.

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This isn’t the end of the story, however.

The district has found another site--24 acres of vacant land at Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue, costing $30 million.

I know the spot, and I know why the land is vacant.

In the midst of the ‘80s real estate boom, a group of developers came up with a plan almost as grandiose as Trump’s proposed 125-story building. Called Central City West, it would have consisted of high-rises, stores and up to 10,000 housing units in the rundown area just west of the Harbor Freeway. A substantial number of the apartments would be low-rent housing for residents displaced by Central City West’s high-rises.

The real estate market collapsed and Central City West was never built. The only trace of it is block after block of vacant lots, the remains of crowded residential neighborhoods bulldozed by the developers.

The councilman who represents the area, Mike Hernandez, recalled that the Central City West plan approved by the City Council envisioned low-income housing, not a school, at Temple and Beaudry. “If you ask me what we need most there, it is affordable housing,” he said.

Hernandez also questioned the idea of putting a new high school just 700 feet from the existing Belmont High School. Nearby would be a proposed intermediate school and the existing Evans Adult School, which operates 24 hours a day and has an enrollment of 15,000, the majority of them under 25.

“They are concentrating all those students in one pocket,” Hernandez said. “We don’t have a place in the city where there are that many schools. We don’t know what it will be like to have all those students in one area.”

Although the new school would relieve overcrowding at Belmont, it would do nothing to help the youngsters of Mid-Wilshire, located several miles southwest of Temple-Beaudry.

Their plight started this whole saga, and they end up with nothing. Meanwhile, vacant lots remain where there was supposed to be affordable housing for Temple and Beaudry’s displaced residents. So much for good intentions.