Almost Lost in the Gristle of Government

It happens sometimes--too many times for my liking--that the dullest parts of life can be as crucial as they are tedious.

Car maintenance comes to mind. So does flossing. And shingle repair. Boring, boring, boring. But without them, I’d be motionless, toothless and roofless.

Now take City Hall. It has been abuzz over this summer’s Democratic Convention, the arrest in the murder of Chief Parks’ granddaughter, the Lakers’ playoff prospects.

Yet the daily dietary fiber of civic life is the dull stuff. Like affordable housing, the insomniac’s cure-all. The TV vans do not encircle City Hall like prairie wagons when affordable housing is on the agenda. Who wants to hear about that? Who notices? Who cares?

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The Community Redevelopment Agency, the CRA, has been a big shot in City Hall for a long time, an outfit accustomed to having its way, and to having a lot of dough in its pockets.

The CRA hung out its shingle in 1948. It drove the bulldozers in the 1960s when the crumbling mansions of Bunker Hill were replaced by high-rises. The money in the CRA’s housing trust fund came from such downtown development and it has bankrolled affordable housing across the city.

But now the CRA is asking the City Council to let it off the hook. It has big plans for two choice parcels on Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill, down the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, and it wants to do so unencumbered by the ironclad 11th-commandment requirement that 20% of its housing be affordable.

In exchange, the CRA promises to use some of the money from selling or leasing this silk-stocking property to build affordable housing somewhere “south of the Santa Monica Freeway.”

How, in good conscience, can a city bursting at the seams with poor people, working people, most of them crammed into New York-sized apartments with New York-sized rents, dodge its affordable housing obligations?

The way that Carol Schatz sees it, the CRA has earned this waiver. Downtown has earned this waiver.

Besides, contends Schatz, who is the head of the Central City Assn., “the Bunker Hill trust fund has produced 17,000 low-income [housing] units throughout the city, $316 million worth. Downtown has more than given at the trough.”

But when you subtract from downtown’s affordable housing the SROs--the single hotel rooms often occupied by welfare folk--the numbers of affordable versus market-rate apartments are closer to even. Then, take away the thousand senior citizen apartments of Angelus Plaza, and downtown’s choices for low-income families are even fewer--and many of those are thanks to the 20% requirement.

Schatz says it’s the middle class that can’t find a place to hang its neckties downtown. Put affordable housing where it’s needed, south of the Santa Monica Freeway, and don’t stand in the way of downtown’s comeback.

The CRA staff is reportedly displeased with the waiver. Real estate magnate Doug Ring stood against his fellow board members and opposed it. Some City Council members smell in this first-ever waiver a bad precedent. Nate Holden evidently fears that waivers, like cockroaches, never come singly, but in hordes.

And when it comes back for a vote on June 27, Rita Walters, whose district will get those south-of-the-freeway affordable houses, will “hold my nose” and vote yes.

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Some years back, San Marino, one of the richest burgs in the Thomas Brothers’ book, was ordered to comply with affordable income housing requirements. “Affordable” housing in San Marino is anything below seven figures. So the city had a couple of ideas. One was to farm out its affordable housing, maybe paying the town of Duarte, a working-class town seven miles away, to take on San Marino’s quota. In the alternative, it could count as affordable housing all of its servant quarters.

I love downtown, and I laud the people making it happen. But do we want this new downtown to envision itself as a kind of vertical San Marino? Do we want to waive one of the few public policies fighting the isolated class and race enclaves of the city?

There’s a tidy little irony here. At the turn of the century, Bunker Hill was the ritziest neighborhood around. Then the millionaires moved west and the mansions went from boardinghouses to flophouses. When the bulldozers finished, 7,000 people of modest or no means were homeless.

At issue here is not 140 affordable apartments, but a definition of the city. How can downtown be “back” without the full complement of Angelenos making it so?

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Friday. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.