Liquor Store Density Doesn’t Follow Pattern
After years of impassioned discourse on the link between alcohol and crime, it is practically written in stone that South-Central Los Angeles has a heavier concentration of liquor stores than most other Los Angeles area neighborhoods.
Actually, that’s wrong.
A comparison of liquor licenses to population, the measure used by the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, shows no more booze sellers there than in most other places in Los Angeles County--and maybe fewer.
Contrast that with San Francisco, a city that does have a high concentration of liquor stores and establishments but isn’t widely perceived to have a problem. Under state law, San Francisco has so many liquor licenses that the overall number cannot rise until its population more than doubles, an event unlikely until late in the next century.
This tale of two cities illustrates the way California alcohol sales policy strains under the burden of trying to regulate a multitude of community styles and tastes according to a single standard that applies equally from the bistros of Brentwood to the hardscrabble industrial zones of southeast Los Angeles County to the restaurant rows of San Francisco.
A Times computer analysis of the 70,000 retail licenses issued by the ABC shows that the way the agency measures the impacts of liquor licenses on communities often bears little resemblance to real conditions on the streets. Complicated laws intended to lessen the perceived harms of alcohol sales in one locality often put a crimp on the perceived benefits somewhere else, leading to a vicious cycle of legislation for special interests.
“There doesn’t seem to be any one system that works for every community,” said Joan Kiley, president of the Oakland-based Council on Alcohol Policy.
Consider the revised state law that took effect last year governing beer and wine licenses.
It was written by former Assemblyman Curtis Tucker (D-Los Angeles), who saw a problem in his south Los Angeles County district of proliferating convenience stores selling fortified beer and wine.
Traditionally, the license restricting sales to beer and wine, called a Type 20, has been cheaper and easier to get than a permit to sell hard liquor, called Type 21. But “the Type 20s are really the liquor stores of the ‘90s,” said Tucker aide George Wiley. “Usually the beverages that cause the most problems are high-alcohol beer and wine.”
Now, no new Type 20 license can be issued in any city or county where there was already one license for each 2,500 or fewer inhabitants when the law took effect Jan. 1, 1995.
Although Tucker’s law affects some of the small cities of his district, he concedes that it did nothing for South-Central Los Angeles, where the problem is perceived as most serious. That’s because Los Angeles, like the county as a whole, was below the limit on the day the law took effect.
But the new law did affect bucolic Napa County, where the tradition of winemaking has earned the respect of even the French masters, not to mention supporting a lucrative tourist industry.
After leading the state the last five years in the number of new alcohol licenses issued, Napa far exceeded the one-per-2,500 limit of the Tucker bill.
“Because of population restrictions, we get no winery tasting licenses, but you can open a convenience store in South-Central L.A.”--the original target of the law--complained John Hinman, whose San Francisco law firm, Hinman & Carmichael, represents alcohol retailers in licensing and enforcement cases.
The upshot was another law, passed this year, exempting winery tasting rooms.
A bigger anomaly is San Francisco, which has 803 hard liquor licenses with a population that under state regulations would warrant only 303. The city has been over the limit since the first such regulations on Type 21 sales passed in the 1960s, but even so, some businesses would welcome new liquor stores if they could get them, said the ABC’s chief deputy director, Emanuel R. Espinoza.
“San Francisco has a drink ethic unlike any other parts of the state,” Espinoza said. “They like their restaurants. They like their corner grocery store. It’s a high-rise town. People don’t drive their cars. They hop a trolley or they walk. That’s the character of San Francisco. You don’t do that in L.A.”
However, noted Bevan Dusty, an aide to Mayor Willie Brown, there are community groups, particularly in the Mission and Bayview neighborhoods, that have sought moratoriums on issuing new liquor licenses when old licenses are retired or sold to new owners. “Actually, they want to see those stores closed,” Dusty said.
Such sweeping inconsistencies in the effects of state alcohol laws are exacerbated by constant lobbying wars featuring the liquor industry and its allies vs. community anti-drunkenness advocates.
The peril of writing alcohol law piecemeal was never so clear as in the late 1980s, when local leaders statewide became alarmed over the sale of beer and wine at gas stations. Cities began writing laws to outlaw the practice, but then the Legislature, under intense oil company lobbying, preempted municipalities, clearing the way for the proliferation of gas station minimarkets selling beer and wine.
“That was one of the more unseemly processes I’ve seen in this building,” Tucker aide Wiley said.
After the Los Angeles riots of 1992, however, the pendulum swung the other way toward community demands to stamp out “undue concentrations” of liquor outlets--clusters of stores that activists say cause blight and attract crime.
But the way those concentrations are measured has spelled trouble for even the best-intentioned reform.
The rule is that a new license can be denied in any census tract with a higher ratio of liquor stores to population than the county it is in. The census tract method was strengthened last year in a law, written by Assemblyman Louis Caldera (D-Los Angeles), that gives local governments the power to keep would-be alcohol retailers from even applying to the state for a license in census tracts with high ratios or high crime rates. The local government need only set up a procedure by which a declaration of “public convenience and necessity” would be required before the license application could go forward.
Hopeful that the new law would at last solve the conundrum of establishing one policy for the whole state, community activists have been disappointed by local governments’ lack of interest. Only a handful of cities in the state have established a “public convenience and necessity” process.
Kiley of the Oakland-based Council on Alcohol Policy says the ABC has scuttled the Caldera law by neglect.
“Some of the cities just had no clue how to go about doing this,” Kiley said. “The ABC refused to get involved in trying to help people determine public convenience and necessity. The state abdicated responsibility for that when there should have been follow-up.”
Now Kiley anticipates unending assaults on the law, and this year the Legislature took the first chip out of it by giving cities only 90 days to reject a license application before the authority would revert to the ABC. Cities that have not established processes for handling application requests, like Los Angeles, will lose the authority.
Despite the widespread misconception that it is packed with outlets, South-Central Los Angeles has fewer high-ratio census tracts than much of the county, especially after 200 liquor stores were burned during the 1992 riots.
The county’s highest concentrations of liquor stores is found in regions that don’t generally come to mind as notorious havens of alcohol consumption.
Consider south Santa Fe Springs near Orange County. In this industrial/commercial panhandle, there are 15 alcohol outlets, or one for every 1.5 residents. The reason: Virtually nobody lives there, but many shop there, and the tiny population skews the ratio.
The same principle is at work at the opposite corner of the county in the mountainous Newhall Pass. There are nine alcohol vendors to serve 1,787 people--about one vendor to 200 residents--which wildly exceeds the ratio of roughly one to 1,250 people countywide and one to 1,386 in South-Central.
Neither of these lightly populated commercial areas can now pass the census tract standard for new liquor stores, even if nearby residential communities want one.
Overall, census tracts that fall above and below the county average are scattered like salt and pepper from the San Fernando Valley to the tip of San Pedro.
The heaviest concentrations of stores that sell liquor, beer and wine fall into two distinct areas: downtown Los Angeles and the swath of blue-collar cities between the Long Beach and 605 freeways.
ABC officials speculate that community acceptance of these stores and a laissez-faire attitude by city governments, along with an absence of perceived harm, all contributed to the buildup, probably before population-based limits for hard liquor sales were established in the 1960s.
The fact that license ratios are low in most of South-Central Los Angeles is no surprise to anti-alcohol activists.
“I’ve felt for a long time that the census tract method is an inappropriate one,” said Mary K. Lee, an attorney and policy analyst for several community groups, including the San Fernando Valley Partnership.
“It’s hard to keep these problems confined neatly within their census tracts. They spill out. That is the difficulty when you try to apply a scientific measure in controlling human activities.”
Lee says the census counts could be made more relevant by excluding everyone under the legal drinking age of 18. That would raise ratios in neighborhoods with lots of children.
“Because South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles have younger populations, you can’t reach the limit,” Lee said.
She is also among a chorus of activists who think the ABC could help communities like South-Central by making its antiquated license categories more meaningful.
As far as the ABC is concerned, there is no difference between a supermarket and a liquor store. Both require the same licenses, either a Type 20 for beer and wine or a Type 21 for spirits, or both.
In many neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs, the liquor sales licenses belong to big supermarkets, which also sell meat, vegetables, soap and just about everything else. In South-Central Los Angeles however, “you don’t have a lot of the large supermarkets and grocery stores,” said Carl Falletta, assistant ABC director for Southern California operations.
The licenses are held instead by stores that concentrate on liquor sales, Falletta said. “So the perception is they’ve got too many licenses.”
But the regulations provide no means to deny new license applications for liquor stores without turning down new grocery stores as well, because the law does not allow the ABC to discriminate between applicants on that basis.
“We’re preventing not only the little liquor store or market from going in, but we’re preventing the large supermarkets or the large drugstore chains that I think anybody would admit are going to be positive types of operations,” Falletta said.
After the 1992 riots, the ABC tried to persuade Los Angeles officials to allow the 200 burned-out merchants to reopen quickly by transferring their licenses to nearby locations, Espinoza said.
The city put its foot down--and instituted new zoning requirements that force a merchant to get a city permit before applying to the state for an alcohol license.
The result has been that, for better or worse, almost five years later, South-Central Los Angeles has shown no resurgence of alcohol licensing and remains overall below the county average.
Reflecting society’s age-old ambivalence toward the use and abuse of alcohol, that news strikes some as evidence of economic malaise while cheering others as a pure boon to a beleaguered community.
“We’re preventing those folks from going into business, providing jobs for some of the local folks and from providing tax revenue,” the ABC’s Falletta said, taking the downbeat view.
Lee says the problem in South-Central hasn’t changed, even though the numbers may look better. “On the major thoroughfares, there still is a liquor store on every corner,” she said. “There’s so little of anything else that the liquor stores become the dominant retail option.”
Espinoza of the ABC agrees that the ABC Act needs a complete overhaul, but he doesn’t think it can be done. “I don’t think that any administration wants to take that on, because it’s huge,” he said. “It’s so political. It’s so emotional. You’re never going to achieve consensus. All you can do is just improve on what you’ve got.”
Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this story.
