Man With a Plan Wants a Shiny New Face for Grimy Industrial Core : A South-Central businessman’s organization helps local companies solve their problems, regain confidence. Lewis Kramer hopes this will result in more quality jobs.

When he was a boy, Lewis Kramer would hear his father lament the decline of the South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the family has run a scrap-metal processing plant for nearly half a century. Businesses began leaving the crime-ridden area. Property values fell. The area spiraled downward. Kramer, now 27, was determined to make the neighborhood friendly to business once again. Two years ago, he founded INCORE, Industrial Community Revitalization Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps improve and rebuild the area. “We want to provide high-paying, skilled jobs in manufacturing and industry for local residents,” he said. “Not $5-an-hour fast-food jobs. We need jobs with wages that allow someone to raise a family. You can bring as much commercial development as you want into an area, but if people aren’t making enough to spend there, those businesses are going to fail.” Kramer was interviewed by Catherine Gewertz.

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The industrial base has deteriorated in Los Angeles and no coordinated effort is being made to stop the exodus from the city. We want to preserve and expand the industrial base by making it attractive for businesses to stay here. This will preserve the city’s tax base so we have funds to fix our streets and pay our police officers. Without a strong industrial base, L.A. is going to be harder strapped than it is now.

I was involved in helping design Los Angeles’ application for federal empowerment zone money. I was extremely frustrated by the whole process, and I can see why (the federal government) rejected our application. There was a lack of coordination on every level. No one would talk to anyone. The city itself spent entirely too much time fighting over the boundaries of the zone and left itself with an extremely limited time to prepare the application.

The zone was L.A.’s to lose and they did a good job losing it. I kept telling them they had to be more specific about the scope of their proposed projects. But they didn’t want to hear me because I’m a newcomer to this commercial development field.

Without the empowerment zone money, INCORE will have a much harder time luring businesses to come here. The empowerment zone money would have allowed us to provide real incentives. We could have offered grants for physical improvements, wage credits for hiring local workers. Maybe even loan guarantees. We could have offered capital improvement credits, including the purchase of real estate and equipment.

So much needs to be done to revitalize the area. After the riots, the confidence of landowners and business operators was very badly shaken. We are trying to restore that confidence. We work mainly in the area bounded by Central Avenue, the Harbor Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway and Florence.

Our main project right now is an industrial park where the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. was. We are working on the northern half of that tract, which has 110 businesses on about 137 acres. We are representing the landowners and business operators there, advocating the formation of an assessment district so they can assess themselves fees to improve the area. I am working with the City Council to get that assessment district approved. We got a $150,000 planning grant from the city to work on this.

The assessment would pay for trees and other plants to beautify the area. It would pay for a security patrol to ward off graffiti, vandalism and other crime. Streets and sidewalks would be cleaned and graffiti removed. The security could stop the illegal dumping of trash that now blights the area. All this would raise property values, encourage businesses to stay and make it more attractive for new industry to move in. If we filled the northern half of that parcel with tenants, it could create 1,500 jobs.

Another of our projects is co-developing a seven-acre shopping center in the Slauson/Central area. We want to bring in a supermarket, Laundromat, family restaurant and financial institution. The area is grossly underserved. People need these services.

We need to let businesses know the problems to remaining or starting here are not insurmountable.