A Fragile Detente Over Redevelopment : Renovation: Activists criticize lengthy delays in stemming decline. But belated approval of a plan, and looming subway construction, seems to unify old foes.

It is seven years and $50 million into what will be the longest-running and most expensive drama to ever play in Hollywood. To date, no one involved with the production is happy.

“So far, so bad,” said Hollywood activist/gadfly Robert Nudelman, who some say has made a career of fighting the city’s proposed 30-year, $922-million effort to redevelop Hollywood. “Most of it has been a failure.”

“The end result has been nothing,” said Los Angeles Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who represents the area. By her own admission, she has been treading cautiously so as not to any make irreversible blunders.

Even the project manager of the city’s redevelopment effort is hard-pressed to find a bright spot in the past efforts to revive 1,107 acres of one of the world’s best-known neighborhoods.

“I don’t know if it’s defensible or excusable,” said Len Betz of the Community Redevelopment Agency, “but that’s the way it is.”

So it goes in Hollywood, where the redevelopment process is complicated, divisive, litigious, and above all, tortuous.

First envisioned by the City Council a decade ago, the Hollywood Redevelopment Project has been in a near-constant state of delay for the last several years, thanks to various lawsuits and bureaucratic and political disputes. Last week, however, the project passed a significant milestone when the city Planning Commission finally gave conditional approval--five years behind schedule--to a significant part of it, the Hollywood Boulevard Urban Design Plan.

Perhaps even more remarkable than this sign of actual progress has been the recent emergence of a sort of truce between the city and the fractious group of Hollywood activists. Peace may not have broken out, but the level of hostilities has greatly diminished. Nudelman and other veteran critics are hardly singing the praises of the CRA, but members of citizens groups such as the Hollywood Citizens Advisory Committee (HCAC) say change is in the air and, for better or worse, redevelopment is gaining momentum.

“The story and the attitude has absolutely changed,” said Jerry Schneiderman, an advisory committee member who said the CRA used to be so secretive, “you had to have a bank of detectives to run around and find out what was happening.”

The election of Goldberg and new leadership at the CRA have a lot to do with the change, Schneiderman said. “Mike Woo (Goldberg’s predecessor) had kind of an elitist approach,” he said.

Goldberg says the push now is simply to get all the parties into one room and converse sensibly about how to work together.

“It’s a difficult thing to please everyone here,” she said. “Some people have elevated cynicism to a religion, and we can’t win them over. But we can’t wait for them, either.”

Amid all the delays and battles, there actually have been redevelopment achievements in Hollywood. Along the western end of Hollywood Boulevard, the historic El Capitan theater has been restored, and the Hollywood Galaxy, a 140,000-square-foot retail complex with six theaters, has been open for almost two years. Plans have been approved for construction of 600 units of low-cost housing, and ground was recently broken for a 75-unit housing complex for Korean-American senior citizens in the heart of the project area.

In the middle stretch of the boulevard, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) are scheduled to soon occupy the old J. J. Newberry building between Hudson and Whitley avenues.

And since June, a private security force has been patrolling the boulevard to help keep it safe for the several million tourists who, decay notwithstanding, descend on it annually--a factor that makes Hollywood unique among redevelopment areas.

“Communities would give their eyeteeth to have the number of tourists who visit here,” said Leron Gubler, executive director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. “Our challenge is to make Hollywood like tourists imagine it.”

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Indeed, much of the reason for the new spirit of cooperation can be chalked up not only to the realization that the process can no longer be stopped, but also that the longer it drags on, the worse the area will become in the meantime.

“Being opposed to redevelopment is like being opposed to a fact,” said attorney Marshall Caskey, the former chairman of the Project Area Committee, the original advisory body to the CRA. “Redevelopment has been here awhile. . . . It’s not going to go away.”

Probably contributing to the detente is the emergence of what many residents regard as an even greater menace than the CRA: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Next spring, the MTA will break ground on Metro Rail stations along Hollywood Boulevard at Vine Street, Highland Avenue and Western Avenue. Opponents and supporters of redevelopment agree that the impact on the area will be enormous and unsightly as the MTA uses the “cut and cover” technique, instead of tunneling, to build the subway and stations. The cut and cover technique is cheaper, but critics say its highly disruptive impact, as entire streets are torn up during construction, will be an effective counter to efforts to revive the area. Hollywood Boulevard merchants predict that 40 months of construction will drive customers away and force some of the stores out of business.

The appearance of MTA in the midst of a redevelopment just now gathering steam is not seen as fortuitous, to put it lightly.

“Were we asked?” Goldberg asked rhetorically. “If I had a choice, I would have said, ‘Not good timing.’ ”

Caskey, who now chairs the Citizens Committee on Metro Construction, the advisory body to the MTA, added: “It’s going to be terrible for four years.”

MTA officials are trying to assuage worries that Metro Rail construction will ruin the physical and economic landscape. MTA spokesman Gil Saldana cites the $27.8 million that has been set aside to help businesses within a two-block radius of the construction survive the process, and research that the agency has done in Hollywood, saying that officials have talked with 140 merchants about their concerns.

Yet not all are comforted. Although the CRA’s redevelopment plan is a piecemeal effort, MTA’s construction will be massive and invasive. And merchants and residents are well aware that previous MTA constructions employing cut and cover in Downtown and along Wilshire Boulevard have taken longer than expected and severely affected retailers.

Caskey and other members of his committee say that although the CRA is used to dealing with communities, the MTA has had little experience in listening to, and acting upon, the suggestions of citizens groups. And they note that there are no guidelines yet on how the $27.8 million in mitigation money is to be spent, or what it will be spent on. One item recently paid for by MTA: $10,000 worth of Christmas lights for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to hang over the boulevard.

“The question of mitigation has been defined rather loosely,” Caskey said. He acknowledged that the Citizens Committee on Metro Construction, though part of its mission is to make recommendations on mitigation spending to the MTA, has not drawn up specific plans for distributing the money. “Obviously, it’s going to become essential for us to establish some kind of standards.”

Saldana acknowledged the criticism of MTA, but said the agency has learned from its Downtown experience. In Hollywood, he said, penalties will be imposed on contractors for delays, and a resident engineer will remain on the site to enforce construction guidelines. “It’s an ongoing daily monitoring effort,” he said.

Saldana added that the current vagueness regarding mitigation expenditures is a result of MTA’s wanting the community to tell it what it should be spending money on. “We decided that it would be best for the community to help us help them decide what their mitigation needs would be,” he said.

Activists such as Nudelman, predictably, are highly skeptical of the mitigation process. “People are going in there asking for money, and people don’t know if they can give them money or not,” he said, adding that the Citizens Committee can only advise the MTA on expenditures, not authorize them. “The mitigation committee doesn’t know what its powers are.”

Whether the building of Metro Rail will mean a new lease on life for hard-line activists--who these days are being recalled with more and more admiration by some of their previous foes--is not yet clear. But certainly, some of the results so far of MTA’s efforts have been to make the CRA look almost good by comparison. And CRA officials are not discouraging their being seen in a better light, openly expressing concerns about the effects of Metro Rail construction.

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“They’re doing more in their time than we’ll do in 15 years,” said the CRA’s Betz, adding that merchants, in his view, have good reason to be worried. And in what some would say is the irony of ironies, Betz said the transportation agency could have used a few lessons in community relations.

“MTA has realized that you don’t come into the community and tell them what to do,” he said. “Their impact goes beyond digging a tunnel.”