Los Angeles Is Becoming More Neighborly

Despite its promotional motto, “Together we’re the best,” Los Angeles--the fat and sprawling city of quartz--has to fight a reputation as a balkanized and inhospitable place for building community.

In fact, even with deepening poverty and social divisions, Los Angeles is one of many major cities on the rebound, showing “surprising vigor at the neighborhood level, where residents have led government and private industry” in finding solutions to diverse problems, according to a report issued today in Washington by the private, nonprofit Center for National Policy and the Local Initiatives Support Corp.

Actually, hundreds of exciting experiments are underway, and they are growing exponentially, said USC social work professor Jacquelyn McCroskey, who is chairing an analysis of community building for the Los Angeles Roundtable for Children. “Almost anybody you talk to over the course of the last five years has become involved in many kinds of partnerships they were not involved in before. A lot may not start with the notion of building community, but almost all of them get to it.”

They include:

* Dozens of community-based initiatives from Pasadena to San Pedro, including a showcase grass-roots model, the Pacoima Urban Village, an initiative that has spread from a school-based parent involvement program to a career and job service for neighbors.

* A city program, Neighborhood Networks4KIDS, created by the new Commission for Children, Youth and Their Families, which will help residents restore their neighborhoods, starting with Cypress Park.

* An eight-area regional council, proposed by the county’s Children’s Planning Council, to serve as an intermediary between neighborhoods and county government.

* Sixty neighborhood projects ranging from health to safety to education, funded by Community Partners, an intermediary funding group.

* At least 400 coalitions devoted to improving social conditions for children and families.

* About 60 more traditional community development corporations, focusing mostly on housing, funded by the private sector through the Local Initiatives Support Corp. Among them are four neighborhood-based groups in South-Central Los Angeles that are chipping away at the social and economic roots of turmoil: the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., the Esperanza Community Housing Corp., Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. and the Dunbar Economic Development Corp.

Recognition of Los Angeles neighborhoods and support for community-based efforts are also increasing through Los Angeles Urban Funders, a collaboration formed after the riots in 1992, and the California Community Foundation, which recently announced a $25-million, five-year program to fund neighborhoods interested in community building.

Some activists contend that the wide range of efforts reflects L.A.’s mobile, global, culturally and geographically diverse nature, encouraged by a diffused political and administrative structure.

Because Los Angeles lacks a strong central locus of political power, solutions will have to emerge community by community rather than from “some master plan in City Hall,” according to the Center for National Policy’s new report.

“There isn’t any one organization like ‘the Los Angeles Community Building Network,’ and if we run true to form, there never will be one,” USC’s McCroskey said. “We don’t trust concentrated power.”