Staples Plan Spotlights ‘Invisible’ Communities

Ana Valenzuela doesn’t consider herself an activist. Her form of organizing has been private: keeping her seven children fed and clothed, tidying the three-room apartment where they live with Valenzuela’s husband--a gardener and day laborer--and taking on the landlord on everything from roaches to threatened rent hikes.

But the Guadalajara native, who speaks little English, found herself in a radically different setting in recent months, across the negotiating table from Staples Center developers in suits.

A coalition of community groups, labor and residents won an unprecedented package of benefits this week from the developers of a massive hotel and entertainment complex in return for a promise by coalition members to support the project.

Developers--including billionaire Philip Anschutz and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who are also owners of the arena--agreed to build affordable housing and parks, hire locally and pay “living wages,” among other concessions. The deal has been hailed as the first of its kind nationwide in its scope and could set forth a new model to ensure that low-income communities are taken into account by major developments in their midst.

Behind it all were people like Valenzuela, who live in run-down buildings throughout the neighborhood and have never pulled together to form such a united front. The coalition of 28 community groups, five unions and about 300 residents came together in a period of months, community activists said.

It brought people such as Valenzuela into a world where they have often felt invisible. It also forced many activist groups to radically alter their culture, succumbing to corporate-style negotiations and signing away their right to protest in exchange for the benefits package.

“I don’t know how I arrived at this point. It was little by little,” Valenzuela said in Spanish as two of her daughters played near her in matching blue-and-white dresses. “I said to myself, ‘If I don’t get involved to help myself, I’m not sure who will.’ ”

Valenzuela was among a core group of residents who spread the word of the impending development to others beginning last fall. A friend who had been displaced by construction of the sports arena two years ago first told Valenzuela of the plans. She in turn notified neighbors at her worn 11th Street apartment building and owners of a nearby dry cleaners.

Together, they attended meetings at the First United Methodist Church on Flower Street, sometimes with Staples Center officials. The early gatherings were venting sessions. Fresh in their minds was the Democratic National Convention in August: the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the fear that kept them cowering in back bedrooms or near-frantic when they were denied access to their apartments by police battling protesters.

Life after the DNC brought its own parade of problems. They spoke of the danger posed by reckless motorists to their children, who have no parks to play in. They detailed shattered car windows, stolen radios and beer bottles thrown from car windows by rowdy fans after sports events conclude and police officers leave.

And they presented stacks of $60 parking tickets to Staples brass, fallout of the traffic congestion that has permanently altered their lives. The four adults living in Severiana Ortiz’s Olympic Boulevard apartment, for example, have racked up $1,500 in tickets since the arena opened--equivalent to three months’ rent.

“There’s . . . a lot of traffic and a lot of noise that doesn’t allow us to sleep,” said Ortiz, 50, also among the resident organizers who helped craft the neighborhood demands and sat in on negotiations.

As plans for the massive new development--known as the downtown L.A. Sports and Entertainment District--unfolded, talk shifted from problems of the day to demands for the future.

The project, expected to come before the Los Angeles City Council this month, would be anchored by a 45-story hotel with at least 1,200 rooms at Olympic Boulevard and Georgia Street. The project also would include a 7,000-seat theater for musicals, award shows and other live entertainment. Restaurants, nightclubs and retail stores would be built around a plaza. A 250,000-square-foot expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center is also in the plan, as well as two apartment towers with a total of 800 units and a second smaller hotel.

In exchange for the coalition’s support for the project--which probably will require a substantial public subsidy for the hotel--developers agreed to the broad benefits package that now becomes part of the development plan.

Ortiz, a grandmother who is unemployed, hopes to land a better job through the training programs that developers agreed to. Her daughter, a garment worker, also is dreaming of higher-wage work.

When formal negotiations began in March, Ortiz pushed hard for the job concessions, as well as a residential parking permit program that will be funded by Staples developers. Valenzuela, whose seven children sleep in bunk beds in what would otherwise be the apartment living room, pushed for affordable housing. Developers agreed to dedicate 20% of total units--between 100 and 160--to low-income residents, and Valenzuela helped ensure that some of those will be reserved for large families.

Spearheading the resident organizing was Enrique Velasquez, a former tenant organizer who now works for Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, one of the lead groups in the coalition. He helped conduct a survey of neighborhood conditions shortly before the Democratic convention and, in doing so, identified potential resident leaders such as Ortiz and Valenzuela. They in turn recruited others.

Meanwhile, Strategic Actions got to work to broaden the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, a group of community activists, churches and labor unions that had worked together on other neighborhood issues surrounding USC.

The 28 groups that ultimately came together--one dropped out to focus on concerns about liquor licenses affiliated with the project, an issue not addressed by the benefits package--were wildly diverse, with sharply differing styles and experiences.

They included immigrant rights groups such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and Central American Resource Center; housing advocates such as Esperanza Community Housing Corp.; health advocates Clinica Oscar Romero and Coalition for Community Health; and the Environmental Justice Project office of the national organization Environmental Defense. Other economic justice organizations--the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, Agenda and Coalition L.A.--were also heavily involved, said Strategic Actions organizer Sandra McNeill, who helped pull those groups together. Labor organizations negotiating separately but as a block also backed the group, and vice versa.

Different organizations brought different strengths to the table. Environmental Defense staff attorney Jerilyn Lopez Mendoza, for example, helped the group craft a 42-page comment to the developers’ draft environmental impact report.

Still, the negotiations were a culture shock to some, and the prospect of muzzling future protest wasn’t easy to swallow.

“Usually, we support people when we support them, and we yell at them when we yell at them,” Strategic Actions Director Gilda Haas said.

But organizers say the result was more than worth it.

“If they comply with everything they agreed to, then we get something that we’ve never been able to get before, from any developer,” said Victor Narro, workers’ rights project director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “If they don’t comply with even one portion of the agreement, then the whole thing is void.”