Poor Join Their Affluent Neighbors to Oppose Plan to Build Restaurant

Tending her tomatoes or hanging up her washing in the small, tidy yard of her public housing project apartment, Maria Sepulveda has more than a nodding acquaintance with the subject of a heated local land-use debate under way at the base of the affluent Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Her home in the venerable Harbor Hills project, a well kept, 300-unit complex, abuts a narrow strip of weed-choked land at Western Avenue and Palos Verdes Drive North, one of the area’s busiest intersections. The strip has been the focus of a year-long fight between a developer, who wants to build a fast-food restaurant there, and area residents, who fear it would add still more traffic and be a magnet for crime.

But this dispute is a bit different from your run-of-the-mill zoning debate. It has united poverty-stricken public housing residents with their more affluent, home-owning neighbors, and they are advocating an unusual solution: they want Los Angeles County, which runs the project, to use federal housing funds to buy the land from the developer and set up a child care center or other facility to help Harbor Hills residents improve their prospects.

“I can’t afford child care,” Sepulveda said in Spanish, explaining through an interpreter why she had to drop out of a job training program to prepare her for work, as required by the recent overhaul of federal welfare rules.

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Toni Steele, one of the neighboring homeowners opposed to the restaurant development, said Sepulveda’s plight illustrates the urgent need for safe, convenient child care at Harbor Hills and other low-income communities.

“What better use [of the land] could there be than to get little kids off on the right track?” Steele said. She added that residents have learned that $1.3 million in Housing and Urban Development comprehensive grants earlier earmarked for a landscaping and garden project at Harbor Hills could be used to buy out the restaurant developer and build a child care center.

Steele and others in the Lomita/Peninsula Coalition for Responsible Land Use, however, acknowledge they face long odds.

For one thing, the developer, Irvine-based Advanced Capital Group, already has won a conditional use permit from the planning commission in Lomita, the small South Bay city in which Harbor Hills is located. After making a number of changes to meet officials’ concerns about the project, developers emerged with approval for a Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell restaurant with a drive-through facility.

The developers could not be reached for comment. But in documents filed with the city and during hours of public meetings, they said the restaurant would be an improvement and a convenience to the area and would bring jobs and add tax revenues to city coffers.

Opponents have appealed to the City Council, which will take up the matter on Aug. 17.

Another obstacle opponents face is the reluctance of county housing officials to use their thinly stretched federal grants to buy the land, especially since they already are considering another way to add child care and other services at Harbor Hills.

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Carlos Jackson, executive director of the county Community Development Commission/Housing Authority, said the funds residents have identified are earmarked for a landscape/job training project at Harbor Hills. Other grant funds are being allocated based on public hearings to determine residents’ priorities, he added.

“I wish we could buy that vacant land and put it to a compatible use,” Jackson said, “but we receive only about $8 million to $10 million a year to upgrade and maintain our 3,600 units throughout the county. We are constantly having to upgrade and we try to be as comprehensive as possible in the services we offer.

“To buy that land and build a child care center, that’s a big chunk.” He cited staff estimates of around $400,000 to buy the property plus an additional $1 million to build the center.

Moreover, the county already is planning to build a community center, which would include a child-care facility, on the south end of the public housing complex, Jackson added.

Restaurant opponents, however, say the eatery site would be a much better choice for a community/child care facility because it is more centrally located (the housing project is divided into two segments by Palos Verdes Drive North) and because it would be a far more suitable “neighbor” than a drive-through fast-food establishment.

“We all like fast food, but this is not the place for it,” said Gladys Ponce, a mother of five and an officer of the Harbor Hills Resident Council.

A project resident for 10 years, Ponce works as teen director for the project’s Boys and Girls Club, just across the street from the proposed restaurant site, and she is concerned about the potential for its becoming a hangout for project teens and gang members from nearby communities.

“We have a lot of children here, and we work very hard to see that they have positive things to do, to keep them away from the gangs. There is no crime here now. This is a really good place, and we want to keep it that way,” Ponce said.

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Designed by a prominent consortium that included Reginald Johnson, architect of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Harbor Hills’ immaculate clusters of cinder-block apartments are separated by green, rolling lawns. Residents have supplemented the plantings of hibiscus and other shrubs with pots of colorful flowers and small vegetable plots. The 800 residents--the majority of them children--congregate in the project’s small offices and community rooms for computer classes, tutoring, youth activities and other programs.

The developers have said they have made or agreed to many changes to address residents’ concerns, including reserving a parking place for a sheriff’s patrol car. They also changed the planned 24-hour operation to 10:30 a.m. till 11 p.m. on weekdays and till midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Additionally, they agreed to changes to ease traffic congestion, promised measures to control graffiti and designed lighting that would not shine into residents’ homes.

Although county housing officials wrote a memo to the city outlining several concerns with the original project, Jackson said his staff has not yet had time to review the proposal in its present form.

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In a March 11 letter to the city, Ivano Stamegna of Advanced Capital said he found strong support for the project in and around Harbor Hills and submitted signatures to back his point. Several project residents “shared with me that they would like the KFC/Taco Bell because they have to travel some distance to get any kind of fast food,” Stamegna wrote. “But for some reason, someone is trying to sabotage the project.”

Both sides are trying rally supporters to attend next week’s City Council meeting. Its vote could put an end to the contentious debates that have flared periodically over the last decade as various development proposals for the site have come and gone.