Plan May Be Another Strikeout For Fairness

We’ve come full circle -- sort of.

In 1950, when homeowners in Chavez Ravine near downtown Los Angeles got notices that their homes were to be razed, it was with the promise that mixed-income public housing would be built in their place. Those who lost their homes were promised first chance at the new units. Then politics entered. After several years of political turmoil and string-pulling by the city elite, the housing project was abandoned. Dodger Stadium was built instead.

Now comes developer Alan Casden, who wants to move the Dodgers downtown and put up housing (although certainly not a public housing project) in Chavez Ravine.

But there’s a cautionary tale for politicians backing the project. Fifty years ago, the first battle of Chavez Ravine helped launch the career of Norris Poulson, who became mayor of Los Angeles in 1953. But it was also Chavez Ravine that helped end his career.

I heard the story of what happened from Poulson himself.

Poulson was living in a retirement community in Tustin when I tracked him down 30 years ago as part of the research I was doing for a book on the Los Angeles Times. He greeted me at the door with a weak handshake and a raspy voice that testified to his bout with throat cancer, and he seemed genuinely pleased to tell his story. At one point, he stopped the conversation and, with a twinkle in his eye, said he had to show me something.

Poulson disappeared and then came back with a wrinkled letter from then-Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler dated Dec. 26, 1952. “Dear Norrie,” began the letter, written on Times letterhead. Chandler went on to describe a luncheon meeting of a group of L.A. power brokers who had decided that Poulson should be the one to challenge then-Mayor Fletcher Bowron. Bowron had been mayor since 1938 and had at different times during his tenure been supported by these same power brokers. But in the early 1950s, Bowron had run afoul of them based on his support for an ambitious program of public housing, including the development at Chavez Ravine. As the lunch group considered its options for someone to take on Bowron, someone suggested Poulson, then a Republican congressman. “ ‘Why did we not think of Norris in the first place?’ was what went through all of our minds,” Chandler wrote.

The Chavez Ravine project was anathema to the luncheon group, which included such figures as James (“Lin”) Beebe of the O’Melveny & Myers law firm and Asa Call of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. These men were focused on reviving downtown with imposing buildings and cultural monuments like the Music Center; they weren’t interested in public housing so near the city center. And so they had decided to defeat Bowron with a candidate of their own.

They settled on Poulson, who had become a lead figure in the Colorado River water wars in Congress. The L.A. group promised to provide ample campaign funds if Poulson would run for mayor, the letter explained, and would make sure the mayor’s salary was increased. To top it off, Chandler wrote, the group would provide Poulson with other perks, including a Cadillac “to strut around in” as well as a “chauffeur supplied by the city.” Chandler seemed to expect the response to his letter that he eventually got: “Looking forward with great anticipation to receiving the ‘right answer,’ ” his letter concluded.

The 1953 mayoral campaign was not a polite one. Poulson labeled the public-housing plans for Chavez Ravine a communist plot, which helped kill the project -- even though many residents had already been evicted from their homes with the promise of new ones once the development was completed.

During his first term in office, Poulson, with the backing of his benefactors, met with Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley about moving his team to L.A. and put together a deal, replete with city subsidies, to build Dodger Stadium on the Chavez Ravine site. But to build the stadium, even more families had to be evicted, which turned out to be a political boon for Sam Yorty, who ran against Poulson in 1961.

Where Poulson had characterized his predecessor as backing a communist plot, Yorty skewered Poulson for evicting honest, working families from their homes. It was another bitter mayoral race -- and didn’t prevent the stadium from being built -- but this time Poulson came out the loser. “Take the letter,” Poulson told me when I visited him. “I’m sure you’ll use it well.”

Since then, Chavez Ravine’s history of a neighborhood disrupted has hung like a ghost over Dodger Stadium. Now comes Casden. His plan might well create a new Chavez Ravine situation in downtown Los Angeles by potentially undermining a nascent renaissance of downtown residential life. At Chavez Ravine, any housing that might go in would probably be upscale condominiums and expensive apartments -- with just enough affordable units to satisfy city requirements. There would again be a neighborhood in Chavez Ravine, but not for people like those who lost their homes more than 40 years ago.

So how could we better honor those displaced people of Chavez Ravine? By permanently funding the $100-million Housing Trust Fund passed by the City Council to build desperately needed housing for low- and moderate-income people. And by passing a stricter inclusionary housing law that would require developers to include a specified number of affordable units for lower-income people any time they build apartments or homes.

Meanwhile, if Casden wants some good ideas for Chavez Ravine, he doesn’t have to look far. Just a couple of miles away, a proposed housing development near the new Avenue 26 Gold Line station is an excellent model for future approaches to housing. The area around the Avenue 26 station used to be largely one of warehouses and light manufacturing. But as businesses moved to other locations, some buildings were left vacant or underutilized. The proposed development, which got direction and input from community activists, would establish a new neighborhood of primarily affordable housing for seniors and low-income families, along with some middle-income condos. Existing vacant buildings would be transformed into housing. It is hoped that the new housing -- along with the Gold Line -- would attract retail, office and other kinds of jobs to the new neighborhood.

With new homes close to downtown for families like those who were displaced to make way for baseball, and with programs like inclusionary housing and the Housing Trust Fund, the ghosts of Chavez Ravine might be, if not exorcised, at least placated. But to truly honor the displaced people who made way for Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles would have to shift its entire approach to housing and become independent of power brokers intent on building monuments.

Consider it Norris Poulson’s last will and testament.