Retail Spark for Crenshaw Area
After several rounds of futile finger-pointing, the revitalization of an underused segment of Los Angeles’ small-business community is nearer.
The aging Santa Barbara Plaza in the Crenshaw district used to be a shopping center with many bustling stores. But the old-fashioned, sprawling outdoor layout, as well as the declining fortunes of the adjacent mall, led to hard times. The mall, later renamed the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, was redeveloped more than 10 years ago, but the Santa Barbara Plaza remained wanting. It’s taken nearly two years of negotiations to finally agree on tentative terms of a partly city-subsidized $100-million project. All the while, property and business owners, as well as shoppers, have been in limbo.
Ideally, of course, such revitalization would be purely a marketplace affair, but in depressed areas the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, at its best, helps identify and coordinate redevelopment efforts. In the long run, the public money investment not only helps create jobs, as it will in the building of the downtown sports arena, but it helps turn around whole blocks of underused or unused spaces that have been an economic drain.
For a variety of reasons, the redevelopment of Santa Barbara Plaza has been snarled in unusual and protracted delays that have caused nervousness and uncertainty for both the developers, who include former basketball star Magic Johnson, and businesses at the plaza, about 40 property owners and 200 tenants.
Under the reported deal, which would still need approval by the CRA and the City Council, the city would provide the 21-acre project a $20-million subsidy, in the form of federal grants to the city and temporary exemption from sales, utility and other taxes typically turned over to the city general fund. The businesses there now would be relocated, using a yet-to-be-approved fund of up to $10 million, and given financial assistance and business advice. The city should examine whether the relocation fund is adequate for the job at hand.
There has been a lot of laying of blame among the developers and city over who is responsible for the delays. Some attribute the stalling to a separate flap between Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represents the area and is a member of the L.A. Coliseum Commission, and Johnson. What matters now is that there finally is movement at Santa Barbara Plaza and that it continue.
