Getting Into the Game : The city, which watched as neighbors lured high-profile businesses, ponders a more modest goal: keeping its firms from leaving.
Not long ago, the best adjective to use in describing Bellflower would have been “complacent.” Sleepy would also do.
This was a city that boasted of having more churches per capita than any other town in the state. Sales tax revenues in 1960 also were the highest per capita in southeast Los Angeles County. Broad, tree-lined streets were bracketed by pleasant middle- and working-class homes.
Residents went to work at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and other booming defense companies, then came home to shop on Bellflower Boulevard, the classic Main Street, USA.
Suddenly, the rules changed in an economic survival game that Bellflower didn’t know was being played. The game was called redevelopment, and those who garnered the biggest retail establishments won.
Bellflower sat on the sidelines while other, more aggressive cities lured these regional sales-tax producers during recent decades.
Scores of new car dealerships, including three from Bellflower, moved into splashy auto malls in Cerritos, Signal Hill and Downey. Gleaming high-rise hotels and office buildings sprang up in downtown Long Beach.
Multiscreen theater complexes drew hordes of moviegoers to Lakewood, Whittier and Montebello. Such retail giants as Wal-Mart, Price Club and Home Depot opened in Cerritos and Paramount.
“There was some thought [in Bellflower] at the time that these new ideas, like indoor malls, wouldn’t really work,” said Deputy City Administrator Mike Egan.
The result was that by 1980, Bellflower had the lowest per-capita sales tax revenue in the region. And Bellflower Boulevard today looks much the way it did 20 years ago--a hodgepodge of mom-and-pop shops, some with hand-lettered signs, where people can rent tuxedos, buy pet food, bring their vacuum cleaners, cameras and clocks for repairs, get their hair cut, consult their accountant, pawn their valuables and duck into a bar for a cold beer.
But the city now is ready to change that. This summer, the council will consider its first redevelopment plan. City leaders concede that, at this point, their ambitions will have to be limited.
“There’s no way we can achieve the same results that Cerritos did,” said Linda C. Lowry, city administrator. “The days of wooing large franchises are gone.”
So the city plans to use its money mostly to keep existing businesses from moving out.
While other cities were building up blighted areas--Long Beach approved its redevelopment agency in 1961--Bellflower leaders went along with the complaints of residents and existing businesses who feared that a redevelopment agency would push them off their property.
In 1988, Bellflower voters had a change of heart and approved an agency. But the city had to fight years of court battles with other government entities, which either wanted to gain or stood to lose from the new arrangement.
The residents’ initial distrust of redevelopment is indicative of a longstanding dislike of quick changes.
In 1954, neighboring cities were incorporating one by one, while Bellflower residents were overwhelmingly defeating a proposal to incorporate amid rumors that new city taxes would be imposed.
Only after the state Legislature passed a 1956 law allowing incorporated cities to grab 1% of sales taxes did voters change their minds.
By the end of the 1950s, Bellflower, like much of southeast Los Angeles County, had been transformed from farms and dairies to rows of new housing.
“Everyone was moving here for jobs with companies like Douglas,” recalled Councilman Ken Cleveland, whose family came to the area in 1942.
Soon the carefully subdivided city was built out, but the demand for housing remained. So, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the graceful, deep lots that had been marked out in the early 1900s for “gentleman farmers” were rezoned for apartment buildings, Cleveland said.
As the housing market shifted from single-family owned dwellings to more transient renters, the nature of the city changed. “Most of those stores [on Bellflower Boulevard] were single-proprietor stores,” Cleveland said. “And then the owners got old, then some died.”
Less established stores took their places.
With the little redevelopment capital they have, city officials hope to entice their business owners to stay, to put down the kind of roots--and investments--that make a “Main Street” work.
After all, Cleveland pointed out, other cities have revitalized their downtown areas. Even without malls.
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Bellflower Inside Out City Business Date founded: 1957 Area in square miles: 6.14 Number of parks: 3 Number of city employees: 70 full time, 50 part time. 1994-1995 budget: $22 million *
Ethnic Makeup Lation: 24% Black: 6% Asian: 10% Other: 1% White: 59% *
People Population: 61,815 Households: 22,921 Average household size: 2.67 Median age: 30.7 *
Money and Work Median household income: $32,711 Median home value; $194,600 Employed workers (16 and older): 30,458 *
Average Yearly Household Expenditures Eating out Gasoline Health insurance Education Tobacco products Reading Floor coverings Source: Claritas Inc. Household expenses are averages for 1994. All other figures are for 1990. Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number. *
SOUR APPLES: What’s in a Bellflower? The city is named for the now-defunct Bellflower apple that once grew in orchards around town. The green, tart fruit had the shape of a Delicious apple, the color and taste of a Granny Smith.
BUILDING A REPUTATION: By the 1940s, as the World War II defense industry spurred a building boom and concrete replaced orchards, town leaders wanted to be known for more than sour apples. Thus was born the area’s first slogan: “Twenty-nine churches, no jails.”
TIMES OF CHANGE: The slogan proved to be a stationer’s dream because the number of houses of worship kept increasing, until the motto grew in the mid-1950s to “Fifty-one churches, no jail.” When the city incorporated in 1957, city leaders replaced the motto with one they could stick with: “The Friendly City.”
WHAT DIDN’T CHANGE: Bellflower still doesn’t have a jail.
