Blighted Urban Renewal

The embattled Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has been having a tough time making the case for a massive redevelopment project in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

It just got tougher.

The issue is not whether the proposed redevelopment area, which covers parts of Pacoima, Sun Valley, Lake View Terrace and Arleta, needs help. Families are doubled up in houses and apartments. Retail hubs are aging and in need of rehabilitation. The area lacks jobs, and a large percentage of the jobs that are there are low-paying; per capita income is just $9,266, compared with $16,188 citywide.

The question is whether the CRA can deliver the goods.

Stories in last Sunday’s and Monday’s Times back critics’ claims that the CRA, after spending 20 years and $117 million, has not been able to turn around another Valley community, North Hollywood. At least not yet.

To be sure, reviving rundown neighborhoods is difficult, slow work. The North Hollywood project area’s resistance to redevelopment is apparent to anyone, CRA friend or foe, who walks its shabby streets and sees the empty lots and boarded-up buildings. CRA officials have always countered that, without their efforts, the area would have deteriorated even more.

But the Times stories showed that this is not necessarily so. Reporters Patrick McGreevy and T. Christian Miller analyzed census, property and employment data from 10 Los Angeles neighborhoods that were statistically comparable to North Hollywood 20 years ago. Today most of them enjoy the same or better quality-of-life standards as North Hollywood--without the efforts of the CRA.

Yes, per capita income in North Hollywood is up a little and poverty down (as was the case in all but two of the comparable neighborhoods). But the number of vacant and deteriorating homes in North Hollywood--a key indicator of blight--has doubled in 20 years. The number of jobs has declined. The CRA has built only a fraction of the new businesses and homes it promised two decades ago. There is no hotel, as was planned, no commercial movie theater, just 13% of the promised office space and less than 40% of projected housing units.

What makes the CRA think it can do better in the northeast Valley? That’s the case it has to make before the City Council can approve creating Los Angeles’ largest redevelopment project ever, a four-decade-long project that will cover 6,835 acres and cost $490 million.

The CRA was created more than 50 years ago to fight urban blight. Los Angeles today has 31 redevelopment areas, credited, according to a recent study commissioned by the CRA, with supplying thousands of affordable apartments for low-income families.

But the CRA has plenty of enemies. Among its more controversial tools is its power to condemn property for big projects. Opponents object to such hardball tactics, as well as to property taxes from redevelopment areas being used for more redevelopment instead of for police, firefighting, schools and other services. The agency is in debt, understaffed and suffering an exodus in upper management.

CRA officials argue that extenuating circumstances--the recession of the early 1990s, the Northridge earthquake, the loss of aerospace jobs and the upheaval caused by construction of the Metro Red Line--set back progress in North Hollywood. And they claim that North Hollywood lacks the advantages of location and reputation enjoyed by some of the communities used in The Times’ analysis, such as Venice and Silver Lake.

They can certainly make the location and reputation argument for the proposed community redevelopment area in the northeast Valley, which is not exactly known for its beaches or its bohemians or even, as is North Hollywood, for its proximity to entertainment industry jobs and downtown.

But a more useful exercise would be to examine what went wrong in North Hollywood, how efforts there can be righted--and whether and how redevelopment efforts would be different in the northeast Valley.

For starters, the CRA should examine:

* How its use of eminent domain--used to obtain one-third of all the properties taken in North Hollywood, the highest percentage of any redevelopment project in the city--created such frenzied opposition that foes took over the citizens advisory committee and blocked future actions.

* How lack of cooperation between government agencies--in North Hollywood’s case, the CRA and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--caused waste and delays.

* How broken promises, such as not to cluster low-income housing in a single location, angered homeowners already wary of replacing single-family homes.

* Whether plans were overly ambitious and unrealistic in the first place.

The City Council needs answers to questions raised about the North Hollywood redevelopment project before it can make an informed decision on how to best help the northeast Valley.