Is Anyone Still Serious About ‘Rebuild LA’? : Riordan appoints a visionary liaison, but will name an old-guard chairman--a muddled strategy for community renewal.

“Any worker’s life is a whole, not a Jekyll-Hyde personality, half-machine from 9-to-5 and half-human in the hours preceding and following,” wrote business professor William Ouchi in his 1981 book “Theory Z”. Unless community life is restored, he warned, we soon will be a “dust heap of individuals” without a fabric in common.

These passages are relevant today when Ouchi is Mayor Richard Riordan’s liaison to RLA (formerly Rebuild LA).

Riordan’s initial response to the city’s social and economic crisis has been to beef up the police force. Now, with Ouchi as adviser, the mayor is attempting to change the direction of RLA.

Unfortunately, Riordan’s new economic approaches to our urban crisis seem rather old and far from Ouchi’s text.

First, the mayor wants to appoint an elder member of the Los Angeles corporate Establishment, probably retired, to take sole leadership of RLA. The problem, according to the mayor’s office, is that the organization is being killed by “political correctness”; that is, having four co-chairs (including racial minorities and a woman) make it unwieldy.

But is the answer to political correctness a return to the patriarchal plantation of the old guard? The corporate commitment to rebuild after 1992 has peaked and is declining. RLA press releases no longer proclaim the original goal of $6 billion in private investment and 75,000 to 95,000 jobs by 1997. The 1992 assertions of having received $500 million in corporate promises have been discredited as overblown. One year after the rioting, only 31% of the structures lost in South Los Angeles had been rebuilt, and progress was slowing.

The mayor’s second idea is to give up on inner-city investment by blue-chip corporations and promote small businesses instead. “Don’t think that you are going to get large, national businesses to put large manufacturing plants in the inner city or any place in L.A.,” the mayor advises, and he should know.

The official candor is welcome, but the message is chilling. Corporate America is abandoning the cities, and small vendors should pick up the slack. While local businesses obviously should be encouraged with loans and credit, this is hardly a strategy for recovery in a riot-and-poverty zone that encompasses 100 square miles.

Peter Ueberroth is gone from RLA, as he left, saying, “The obstacles are much more formidable than I thought”; his close associate Barry Sanders is departing; co-chairman Bernard Kinsey says that “what’s most discouraging is the business leadership hasn’t stepped forward.” So why continue with RLA at all?

The city already has a Community Development Department and a Community Redevelopment Agency with staffs of 350 each, not to mention the mayor’s own business and development office. Together, these agencies spent more than $400 million in fiscal 1992-93; by contrast, RLA’s budget is minuscule.

This is a long, dreary distance from Ouchi’s humane concerns for creating employment, community fabric and personal meaning. The growing truth is that traditional leaders are out of answers to the crisis of joblessness. The most recent bromide, “enterprise zones,” resulted in only 1,000 jobs in the city from 1987 to 1990. And that figure is highly inflated, according to one city audit. In the San Pedro/Wilmington area, there were only 89 enterprise-zone jobs, despite $737 million worth of building permits.

Local officials are now engaged in spending $150 billion on transit mega-projects that benefit corporations and campaign contributors but do little to address hard-core unemployment.

If corporations are abandoning urban areas, they should be charged an exit fee to rebuild the human and social debris they leave behind. Such funds could contribute to a vastly expanded Civilian Conservation Corps to restore both the inner city and our devastated canyons. Let the fires of 1992 and 1993 be heeded. Build, not burn.

To create both decent jobs and stable communities is a choice of moral values, not an outcome of supposedly objective economic laws. Ouchi knew this when he wrote that human community is “threatened by our present form of industrial life.”

President Clinton, speaking from the Memphis pulpit where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last preached, warned last week that we cannot “repair the American community and restore the American family until we provide the structure, the values, the discipline and the reward that work gives.”

To rebuild Los Angeles means translating those words into reality.