Quake May Erode Efforts to Rebuild Riot-Torn Areas : Recovery: Focus on politically powerful Valley raises fears of neglect. Riordan aide reaffirms commitment.

The devastating earthquake that toppled buildings and freeways across Los Angeles is also threatening to knock ongoing efforts to rebuild Los Angeles’ riot-torn inner-city neighborhoods off an already teetering foundation.

With attention predictably riveted on the latest calamity to strike the city, and with as much as $15 billion to $30 billion needed to repair freeways, streets and neighborhoods, inner-city advocates worry that the limited government and private business commitments that have been made to their communities as a result of the riots will erode.

South Los Angeles, Pico-Union and other areas at the center of the riots also suffered earthquake damage last week, but the lion’s share of the damage--and the attention--has been focused on the politically powerful San Fernando Valley.

“I am concerned that the understandable Valley focus does not become a total preoccupation,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “That could have the practical effect of a continual and further neglecting of the serious problems of South-Central Los Angeles, which were dramatically highlighted by the civil unrest.”

William McCarley, chief of staff to Mayor Richard Riordan, said such concerns are misplaced. The commitment to aid inner-city areas “is still there and I think it’s as strong as ever,” McCarley said. “There’s going to be a massive reconstruction effort citywide. . . . The mayor feels strongly that it is one city.”

Some economists and political observers say that the reconstruction of Los Angeles’ damaged infrastructure and neighborhoods could reverberate to the benefit of poor areas by providing jobs--possibly more than have been provided as a result of direct aid in response to the riots.

“Who do you think is going to rebuild the freeways?” asked economist Richard Rothstein.

Although Mack acknowledges the potential that construction contracts and jobs could go to African Americans and members of other minority groups living in riot-torn areas, he cautions that history shows this is not likely to happen unless government requires it.

“It’s important that we seize the moment (by pressing for) tight policy guidelines” that will give minority group members a fair share of contracts and jobs, he said.

City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the Pico-Union area that was hard hit in the riots, said he has been in touch with trade union leaders to seek guarantees that they will provide training opportunities for the chronically unemployed.

Concerns that inner-city needs could be forgotten as federal, state and local officials rush to aid more affluent areas are rooted in part in history, and are fueled by the recognition of the Valley’s political muscle. It was the Valley that provided the margin of victory for Mayor Richard Riordan.

But political observers say there is the potential that this clout could help inner-city residents. That could happen if Valley voters, who ordinarily tend to be fiscally conservative, help themselves by approving taxes or bond measures to pay for new government programs that would cross neighborhood lines.

“They’ll be the people who will vote to decide whether to raise taxes for things that impact them directly but that have long impacted the inner-city constituency,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior associate at the Center for Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate School. She cited as possible examples transportation and school construction bond measures and small business development loan programs.

But the best possible result for inner-city residents would be jobs. In recent weeks, Riordan has said that the key to inner-city recovery may be job opportunities located outside the inner city. The recovery effort will likely provide a strong test of the mayor’s theory. Riordan has been critical of Rebuild L.A., the private recovery effort that has served as the city’s main response to the riots, for putting too much emphasis, with little success, on creating jobs in inner-city neighborhoods.

He is not alone.

Rothstein, the Los Angeles-based research associate for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said: “The notion of trying to create jobs in South-Central L.A. for South-Central residents is in my view not terribly realistic for South-Central residents or for anybody. Who works in the neighborhood where they live?”

In the wake of the riots, the decision by Mayor Tom Bradley to appoint 1984 Olympic czar Peter V. Ueberroth to create Rebuild L.A.--now known as RLA--was one of the key strategies for defusing the crisis atmosphere. In the current disaster, when wider swaths of Los Angeles clearly need to be rebuilt--including some sections affected by the riots--RLA has been practically invisible.

As an organization, RLA is on shaky ground, plagued by a diffuse leadership structure, an inability to attract new industry to riot-scarred neighborhoods, and the far-ranging scope of its assignment. Last week, one person close to Riordan privately referred to the organization as “dead meat.”

In a large sense, even the name Rebuild L.A. was inapt. Last week’s earthquake will result in a pure rebuilding challenge. But RLA’s mission was far broader: to invigorate the economy of long-impoverished neighborhoods, a task that governments have long sought but seldom managed to achieve.

Most of the relatively few large retail outlets in riot-torn areas that were damaged in 1992 have begun reopening. And the mayor’s office said that in the midst of its earthquake efforts, it was still working Monday on getting portions of South-Central and the Eastside included in a new federal “empowerment zone” program to stimulate business.

Thus far, efforts to improve economic and social conditions in neglected neighborhoods have met with decidedly limited success.

RLA’s early estimates of the cost of fulfilling its assignment were an investment of about $6 billion and the creation of 75,000 to 94,000 jobs. However, the effort to raise that sum--a small fraction of the estimated price tag for repairing the earthquake damage--has fallen dramatically short.

At last count, private corporations have committed about $585 million to new inner-city investment, according to RLA officials. But even that figure is inflated. It includes new supermarkets as far from the epicenter of the riots as Pomona and Las Vegas. Only one new industrial plant is even on the pledge list--a $30-million soft-drink bottling company for which financing has not been found.

Inner-city advocates such as Brenda Shockley, director of the riot recovery organization Community Build Inc., are concerned that even the limited government funds that have been targeted for revitalization may now be threatened as officials scramble to come to the aid of earthquake victims.

Three days before the quake, federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros pledged new assistance to riot-torn neighborhoods during a tour of South-Central.

Last week, he hopped another plane to Los Angeles to pledge assistance to victims of the earthquake.

“It sounded like the same money he was talking about for the inner-city,” Shockley said. “There’s only so much money HUD is in a position to commit.”

“We have to be sensitive and respectful of the crisis that people in the Valley have come to face,” Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said. “But you don’t have to do a disservice to South Los Angeles while attempting to improve conditions in the Valley.”

The extent of political will to fix inner-city problems is apparent in government ledgers. Direct federal and state aid to individuals and businesses that suffered riot damage totaled about $500 million. But only a tenth as much has gone for jobs, most of them temporary, and training programs.

In contrast, political observers expect elected officials to fall over themselves to find money to make mammoth repairs to the area’s damaged infrastructure. One reason is that politicians find it less complicated to fix a broken bridge than lives shattered by bleak social and economic conditions.

“You have a collapsed bridge, you bring in certain technical experts,” said Korean American attorney and activist Angela Oh. “There’s no moral issue or imperative here. . . . With a natural catastrophe, you subconsciously can’t even blame anyone.”

There are also pure economic imperatives. “The city can’t function very well as an economic entity without a sufficient transportation system and today we don’t have one,” said Jeffe, the political analyst.

Valley business owners who were earthquake victims are expected to fare better than South-Central business owners who were riot victims for another reason: They are expected to have access to more private capital.

Although the same low-interest government loan programs that were available to business people after the riots will now be available to earthquake victims, entrepreneurs seeking to rebuild in the Valley will have greater options. “The Valley is not a redlined area,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. “Property owners and developers in the Valley can get (private) financing for projects . . . without (having to overcome) racial discrimination.”

It also may be more politically palatable to deal with a natural disaster as opposed to a man-made one, even if, as Ridley-Thomas puts it, the cause of the 1992 damage was injustice.

In a natural disaster, everyone senses that he or she could be a victim. In a man-made disaster, it may be tempting to blame one’s fellow man.

“The riots were so divisive,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Center for the New West, a public policy think tank. “Nature showed itself to be an equal opportunity employer. Now there is much more of a sense of unity, a feeling of camaraderie.”

Then there is the matter of public attention, which has shifted swiftly in Los Angeles in the last two years as one catastrophe has followed another--first riots, then fires and now earthquakes.

In any number of ways, the devastating quake has already changed public agendas.

Last week, a major fund-raising banquet for Korean American grocers who were riot victims had to be postponed. The earthquake has also led to a delay in the selection of a new chief executive for RLA. Even the hottest issue of the day--crime--has been at least temporarily shoved aside.

Last week, Gov. Pete Wilson scrubbed his heavily promoted summit meeting on crime-busting here to talk quake.

As far as those engaged in riot recovery work are concerned, short attention spans are a big danger. Economic development issues and the deep sociological problems that plague the inner city are too complex to yield to quick solutions.

Inner-city leaders warn that further upheavals could loom if more is not done.

“Although we’re not as badly affected by the earthquake, we’ve clearly had our own ‘people quake’ in terms of unemployment, lack of safety and lack of business opportunities,” said Mark Whitlock, director of FAME Renaissance, an economic assistance program sponsored by the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central.

“The people quake we had in April, 1992, must not recur,” Whitlock said. “But the only way it won’t is that the federal government has to play an intimate role in making sure we eradicate the poverty of money, of safety and of opportunity.”