New Geography

Tag: Los Angeles

  • A Twice-Told Tale of Black, Brown & LAPD Blue

    This is a story of heartbreak and hope – and neither end of the tale made the news.

    A curious combination of factors recently led me to these events on a street in South Los Angeles, where worn houses and skinny palm trees can sometimes trick you into seeing nothing much.

    Then a crumpled baby bottle near a truck’s tire caught my eye and kicked me in the gut.

    The bottle belonged to a toddler who had just been crushed to death.

    The mother lost track of the baby. The baby crawled behind the wheel of a neighbor’s truck. The neighbor didn’t notice the child there.

    That’s how death came to this street, a place where African Americans and Latino Americans live side-by-side in a “Black-Brown” slice of the city – the sort of streetscape where so much of the potential and tension of our famed diversity resides.

    The scene leaned toward tension for several reasons.

    The mother of the baby was African-American.

    The neighbor was Latino-American.

    The mother was still in her teen years, and preliminary reports indicated that she had been having some trouble with the responsibilities that come with a baby.

    It appeared that the neighbor – an immigrant – didn’t have a driver’s license.

    It was hot and Santa Ana winds were blowing, sucking all the moisture out of the atmosphere, working the nerves.

    African-American folks gathered on front walks, whispering among themselves. They peered toward the yellow tape that marked off the house down the block, where a distraught woman occasionally appeared on the porch.

    There wasn’t a Latino-American neighbor in sight.

    The tension hung there, deciding whether to shrink or grow.

    The drone of the Harbor Freeway provided a monotonous soundtrack, seemingly ready to drive its tempo crazy or cool.

    Hope didn’t follow on to the scene naturally, but it did arrive to stake a claim. The first foothold came with uniformed cops and plainclothes investigators of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), who went about their grim duty quietly, efficiently, respectfully.

    Authorities had transported the baby from the scene in hopes of some life-saving treatment. The mother of the child had gone along. Social service agencies had been notified. The sorry details of an autopsy and funeral arrangements would be handled from the hospital. The driver of the vehicle was in custody, also away from the scene.

    Curiosity continued up the street, with neighbors now forming clusters, their whispers growing into not-quite-hushed tones. One group of youngsters started getting a bit louder.

    That’s when hope went on the offensive, able to do so because word of this incident had already gone from the streets of South Los Angeles to the highest levels of LAPD.

    A member of the agency’s command staff got there quickly. He received his briefing, took a measure of the situation, and headed back to his car. He stopped short of the vehicle, though, turning toward a group of five or six neighbors as they looked toward the scene. He approached them, ramrod straight, and asked if they knew what had just happened down the block on the street where they live.

    No, they didn’t, they replied.

    The high-ranking officer told them in clear, calm tones.

    A collective gasp came from the neighbors. What a shame, they said, wondering aloud how such a thing could happen.

    The gasp soon yielded to shaking heads. The tension eased toward sympathy.

    I can tell you that the neighborhood could have gone either way until then. I know that LAPD’s work at this scene will go largely unnoticed in our workaday world. I can report that the beat cops and investigators presented themselves with a professionalism that held tension at bay. I saw the high-ranking officer make sure that clear, courteous communication on the street trumped skepticism.

    The neighborhood stayed right-side-up in the face of the heartbreak at the end of the block. A baby died and folks felt the loss, leaving the Black-Brown dynamic out of the equation.

    The whole thing was awful—but it could have been worse.

    Things didn’t get worse, so none of this made the news.

    I just happened to be there, and I thought you all should know.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts.

  • California Disconnect: Don’t Get Out the Vote for Congress, State Legislature

    Have you heard about the current election season in Los Angeles?

    Sure, we’ve all gotten word about the presidential campaign. But how much have you heard about races for the U.S. Congress or State Legislature?

    The member of the U.S. House of Representatives who represents my neighborhood is up for re-election, along with his 434 colleagues. So is the fellow who represents me in the California State Assembly—and his 79 colleagues.

    I haven’t heard a peep from either one of them – no automated phone calls, signs, brochures, or door knockers. I’ll bet most of you could say the same for your representatives.

    There are a couple of reasons for all of this quiet, and the first is that elected officials don’t want to campaign.

    The U.S. Congress is just as unpopular as President George W. Bush. They’ve earned the low esteem, too, because many members of both major parties have been asleep at the switch these last eight years, dozing off while our nation continued to conduct warfare abroad and inflate a housing bubble at home, putting both ends of the deal on credit.

    Members of the State Legislature just did some foot stomping with the governor that caused their annual budget to be a couple of months late—a case of tardiness that has and will cost us all plenty.

    The second – and more discomforting – reason for the quiet campaign season is that an overwhelming number of the elected officials who represent Los Angeles in Washington and Sacramento don’t need to run hard. They have “safe seats,” with boundaries for their districts carved up to give them a lock at the polls.

    There’s also a measure on the November 4 ballot that claims to fix the process of drawing up boundaries for state offices in California. Rest assured that politicians have a hand in the deal, so don’t expect much.

    Where does that leave unhappy voters?

    It seems clear that there only a couple of ways to deal with a political system that’s in such shape. The first is for everyday folks to get together and start looking for individuals they know and trust as possible candidates for various offices. Forget about political experience—all the experience in Washington and Sacramento hasn’t done us much good. Just look for bright men and women whom you know to be honorable. Tell them you want them to run for office. Then help them make the race.

    Of course it’s too late to take such steps in this election, which leaves the matter of how to make the current crop of elected officials feel your displeasure.

    Voters could make a powerful statement by withholding their votes for members of Congress and the State Legislature. This is not suggested lightly, and it’s not to say that anyone should skip the presidential election, which is simply too important to sit out.

    It’s also understood that this will hit the few legislators who have actually been working in the best interests of their constituents lately. That’s a tough break, but it’s become clear that mass punishment of the legislative class is the only way to convince them of what poor use they’ve made of our hallowed institutions. Voters must let them all know that we know the game is rigged.

    The legislative class might get the point if its members see large numbers of us vote in the presidential election but find no reason to cast a ballot for other offices. They’ll win their rigged game, but victory will come with a warning. Maybe they’ll figure out that we’re tired of safe seats choking off any hope for vibrant campaigns where ideas matter.

    Again, this is nothing to take lightly. The right to vote is sacred. Yet the very same right is abused by the current system.

    So it’s true that your vote is your voice.

    Yet it’s also true that silence can sometimes speak volumes.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts

  • Why Omaha?

    I lived in or near cities for 30 years because that’s where the jobs are. I left southwestern Pennsylvania in 1977 as the closing of coal mines and steel mills wrecked the local economy. It cost almost $1,000 per semester to attend the state college, many times that for the state university. There were no opportunities for a young person. I moved to California where residents received free tuition at state universities. I earned 2 college degrees in California and advanced my career from Prudential Insurance through the Federal Reserve Bank and to the Pacific Stock Exchange. When the stock exchange closed my subsidiary, I was hired by the Depository Trust Company and moved to New York. Working in the city gave me the opportunity to further advance my career and my education. In 2000 I graduated with a PhD in economics and was hired by a think-tank in Santa Monica. In 30 years, I moved cross-continent 3 times, worked in 5 countries on 4 continents, and earned 3 college degrees.

    In 2004, I started my own business in Santa Monica to provide research and consulting in economics and finance. I attended a lot of local networking meetings for the financial services industry, chambers of commerce, economic development groups, etc. After 3 years, my business was proving quite successful, but I didn’t have any clients in Southern California. My clients were in Houston, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, London, Cairo and Taiwan. It occurred to me that I didn’t need to live in or near a city anymore. I might be able to work from anywhere that had phones and internet access.

    In May 2007, I went to Honolulu for 5 days. The time difference allowed me to work in the morning, answering emails and writing research reports. In the afternoon, I took conference calls on the beach and set up business meetings in DC for the end of the month. Pretty cool. In August 2007, I considered a job in Santa Barbara and that was the jumping off point. I didn’t take the job but I realized I could leave Santa Monica. I spent five or six months looking around in Southern California before I realized I couldn’t afford to expand there. I couldn’t increase revenue without getting more office space and bringing on staff; and I couldn’t afford the office space and staff without increasing the revenue. Call it the SoCal Catch-22: it’s just too expensive to do business there.

    In December 2007 I started looking around for a city with a lower cost base and an educated workforce. I have relatives and siblings spread around the country, so it could be any one of a dozen cities that have universities, military bases and research hospitals. I was looking for a city that understands that small-businesses are the fundamental driver of economic development. I found it in Omaha. Because my clients are outside the area, my small business also provides a layer of insulation to the local economy.

    Omaha has several universities, including the University of Nebraska and Creighton University. Offutt Air Force Base, home of Strategic Command (and the bunker where they secured the President on 9/11) is in Sarpy County, just twenty minutes to the south. Omaha ranked #22 by CNNMoney for best places to live and launch a business. The “Nebraska Advantage” tax incentives reach down to businesses of my size. By investing $75,000 and creating 2 jobs, my business receives tax incentives that can be used to recover sales tax and/or to offset my personal income taxes.

    Instead of a 6 hour flight from Los Angeles, I can reach my New York clients with a non-stop flight under three hours. I’m still only twenty minutes from the airport. For what I was paying just for a residence in Santa Monica, I have a residence, a 3-office suite and 2 assistants in Omaha. That means I can grow my business. As my business grows, the local economy will come with it.

  • Villaraigosa’s Housing Proposal: Billions of Dollars and Too Little Sense

    The matter of whether private companies should be required to include so-called affordable housing units in residential developments is worthy of debate. Perhaps any developer who takes public funding ought to be subject to such requirements. A developer who doesn’t take public money is a different story.

    There is room to debate a number of points between those two notions, and we hope that interested parties will do just that as Los Angeles considers its future.

    That’s why we regret that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has confused the debate with a proposal that offers precious little clarity as it aims to spend $5 billion on affordable housing.

    The proposal counts an initial commitment of $700 million to be invested by a Columbia, Maryland-based non-profit organization called Enterprise Community Partners, along with $300 million that apparently would come from the city, although no specifics were offered there.

    The next $4 billion would be raised through borrowings, grants, and “tax-credit equity”—whatever that turns out to be. In any case, Villaraigosa claims that the city will “leverage $1 billion in public funds into a $5 billion investment in affordable housing throughout local neighborhoods.”

    The Garment & Citizen appreciates Villaraigosa’s willingness to step up to a challenge. We like politicians who want the spotlight when the going gets tough. We also appreciate Villaraigosa’s political instincts, which are usually well-honed.

    We must, however, respectfully inform the mayor that he has gone tone deaf on this one.

    Our nation is currently amid a crisis wrought by a lot of folks who talked in vague terms about the financial aspects of housing, and a bunch more who didn’t listen closely enough. We have a bunch of elected officials trying to figure out what to do about our problems, and it’s a safe bet that many of them still can’t explain how Wall Street’s exotic financial instruments figure into the misery. We have a big chunk of our corporate class that used to revel in the sharp edges of the free market but now await government rescue.

    Now is not the time to launch a $5 billion proposal that relies on “tax-credit equity” for even a single bit of its funding. Not unless you are willing and able to explain the meaning of tax-credit equity, and how it benefits taxpayers. Nor is this the proper climate for putting 20% down on a $5 billion proposal and “leveraging” the rest of the funding.

    There are many other problems with Villaraigosa’s proposal, which talks about the $1 billion in public money for starters. But that total appears to count the $700 million from Enterprise Community Partners, which is not an agency of government.

    The proposal mentions 20,000 new housing units, but then says that some of the money would go toward “addressing the foreclosure crisis” and “preserving the affordability of 14,000 rental units.”

    We wonder if those 14,000 rental units to be “preserved” are part of the overall goal of 20,000. Are we adding 20,000 units of housing? Or will we preserve those 14,000 and see only 6,000 new units? Is this a bailout for over-extended landlords whose tenants are having a tough time making the rent as the economy dips?

    Then there are the hints of a taxpayer-financed smorgasbord. Villaraigosa says he also wants to build the housing units along heavily used transit corridors. There’s a call to shift the “city’s strategy from managing homelessness to moving people out of it.” He says he wants to “transform L.A.’s public housing sites into vibrant, mixed-income communities.”

    Is this proposal aimed at reducing the city’s carbon footprint by getting residents to trade their cars for train rides? Is it about social services for the homeless? Poor folks in housing projects? The middle class?

    All of those subjects merit a clear focus, but this is a mish-mash.

    Villaraigosa should review his proposal and think again about whether he wants to pursue these goals in this way.

    Perhaps it’s worth his effort, and there might be more to like with a better explanation.

    For now, however, this is a $5 billion proposal that just doesn’t add up.

    That’s not a line Villaraigosa or any other elected official ought to be walking in today’s world.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com).

  • With Debate in Town, St. Louis is the Nation’s Capital for a Day

    In 1869 L. U. Reavis spoke for many when he made the case for moving the nation’s capital from, as he put it, “the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Mississippi.” Citing St. Louis’s location in the exact center of the nation, the growing population of the Mississippi Valley, the presumably temporary expediency that had led leaders to place the capital in Washington in the first place, and the commercial advantages of a capital city on the Mississippi River, Reavis thundered that just as Mohammed had gone to the mountain, so the nation would go to St. Louis. Predicting Congress would make the move within five years, Reavis concluded: “Before 1875 the President of the United States will deliver his message at the new seat of government in the Mississippi Valley.”

    140 years later, the mountain waits. St. Louis today is not without the advantages that led Reavis to paint it as a bustling river town. The city hosts a federal reserve bank, a growing financial sector, a Boeing factory, excellent universities, and a collection of museums, gardens, and theatres that do, in fact, rival D.C.’s. Local demographics reflect the nation as a whole. Behind the Obama and McCain signs that dot my neighborhood are union members, Catholics, college professors, veterans, Jews, Reagan Republicans, pro-lifers, Muslims, and Hillary supporters. I can walk to the city where residents debate gentrification, community continuity, the quality of schools, and the costs of segregation. But if someone had asked me to describe the political vibe of the city when I first moved here in 2006, I would have settled on “resigned.”

    Compared especially to residents of my previous home, Los Angeles, St. Louisans seemed reluctant to admit that they or their concerns mattered at all. At its best, this attitude comes across as midwestern plain-spoken humility. Whereas I couldn’t spend a day in LA without hearing about its status as the city of the future, few folks here mentioned that Missouri is a bellwether state, voting for the winner of every Presidential election since 1904 except that of 1956. And while St. Louisans regularly express familiarity with LA’s geography or its demographics or, at least, its Hollywood productions, I have had to tell Angelenos that St. Louis is on the Mississippi River, that it’s a union town and that, with a greater metro-area population of well over 2 million, we do, in fact, get first-run films in our theaters. At its worst, local humilty seemed to mean passivity and obeisance to national whims dictated by the coasts. When the rest of the nation figured out how to handle crumbling downtowns and failing schools, maybe they’d let us know what to do.

    But in the past month, there’s been a slow rise in local pride. I’ve noticed more signs out for political candidates. Maybe that’s just because the election is nearing. No doubt, too, McCain’s surprise selection of Palin had similar effects here as elsewhere in the country. I see “Hockey Mamas for Obama” scrawled in shoe polish on the backs of mini-vans and sealed with a lipstick kiss. Local moms are writing their suburban papers to say they see themselves in the governor of Alaska and it feels good. The city turns its collective head to Phyllis Schlafly to hear what she has to say. But there’s also suddenly interest in who gets to attend the vice-presidential debates. And the St. Louis Post Dispatch is interviewing a retired high school debate coach on pointers for Biden and Palin, not for Obama and McCain.

    The debates will be here, in St. Louis, at Washington University (what the father of a friend of mine used to call “the best university you’ve never heard of”) and people are excited. WashU has hosted presidential debates before. In fact, it’s hosted more than any other institution in history. And I confess that I detected the slightest disappointment among locals when we first learned that it would be the vice presidential, rather than presidential debates, that would be held there on October 2. But no one complained too loudly. After all, what are you going to do? It’s just St. Louis.

    But all that has changed now. Although the sentiment may be tacit, people are beginning to think that St. Louis matters. Maybe instead of waiting for the nation to tell us what to do, we should be telling the nation. On my way to class at St. Louis University, in the city, I stop and chat with an African American man out registering voters. He’s an Obama supporter. I ask how I can get a handle on which way different St. Louis neighborhoods will go in the election. He tells me to stay in the city: “That way you can talk to immigrants, black people, white people – you’ll get diversity.” It’s an unusually gray day for September. We shiver. I ask him what he thinks of the vice presidential debates. He lights up. “They’ll decide everything!” he tells me enthusiastically. “The debate will determine Missouri, and Missouri is a bellwether state – and it’s going to make all the difference. I’m going to be there! I’m going to be there!” It is the most enthused he’s been in our conversation, the most enthused I’ve seen anyone here about the election.

    I wonder if he’s heard of L.U. Reavis.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • How Low Can House Prices Go?

    There is much speculation among economists and others about how close we are to the bottom of the collapse of housing prices. This is, of course, an important question, and goes to the heart of the wisdom or folly of the proposed $700 billion government bailout of financial markets, which is a consequence of their own profligate lending practices.

    You would think that the experts would look at history. We have decades of experience with housing prices. Indeed, for at least the past six decades, median house prices have tended to be around three times an area’s median household income. It bears looking at where house prices are today compared to that standard.

    And looking at it from the perspective, we may have a long way to go. As late as 1999, there was only one major metropolitan market among the top 100 with a median multiple (median house price divided by median household income) exceeding 5.0 (Honolulu), according to data compiled by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The national median multiple was less than 3.0. By 2006, 23 markets, all highly regulated, had median multiples of more than 5.0.

    Last week, we estimated that the aggregate value of the owned housing stock in the nation had risen nearly $5.3 trillion since 2000. Approximately 85 percent of that figure – $4.5 trillion – had occurred in metropolitan markets with severe land use regulations (strategies often called “smart growth”). These areas accounted for only 30 percent of the nation’s population. The large, more traditionally regulated markets experienced an estimated value increase approximately $200 billion, while outside the major metropolitan markets, the increase was approximately $500 billion.

    If you accept this logic we may not be close to the bottom yet in many markets. Based upon an analysis of housing price declines from the peak, it appears that the losses in the highly restricted markets have taken back between one-third and, at most one-half, of the unprecedented house price increases relative to incomes.

    If the economists and analysts had been paying attention, they might have looked at what happened in the last bubble, in bubble-land itself, California. From the middle 1980s to the housing bubble of the early 1990s, median house prices rose nearly 40 percent relative to household incomes in California’s largest markets (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Riverside-San Bernardino, San Diego and Sacramento metropolitan areas). By 1996, after a particularly deep recession in the early 1990s, the median house prices had declined to their previous household income relationship.

    Yet there the bubble of the 2000s dwarfs what happened in the 1990s, a decline set off by a severe economic decline, particularly in Southern California. In the latest run-up California house prices doubled relative to household incomes in the five largest California markets by 2007. In effect the present bubble topped out at about a 2.5 times increase from pre-existing prices relative to the previous bubble. In 1985, the median multiple in these Golden State markets was 3.7, not much above the historic norm. By 1990 the median multiple had peaked at 5.3 and fell to 3.9 by 1996, rising to 4.2 by 1999. By September of 2007, the median multiple in these markets had risen to 9.1, far above the 1990 peak of 5.3.

    It is not inconceivable that history will repeat itself – that prices will fall to the equilibrium level that has been the rule for so long. That would mean that the bottom may not yet be in sight. Moreover, it could well mean that the house prices reached at the peak of the bubble will never return except in another bubble, or in a hyper-inflating economy (another potential consequence worthy of concern).

    In the next few weeks there will be no shortage of speculation about whether or not the bottom has been reached. Before house prices began to collapse in the highly regulated markets, many analysts gleefully reported on the unprecedented house price increases as if could continue without relation to the economy. The law of gravity appeared to have been repealed.

    But my guess is Newton is still a very relevant person. If so, we should expect additional price decreases of 30 percent or more could occur in already declining markets such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Miami. Similar declines from now could take occur in places like New York, Boston and Seattle, which have only recently experienced a downturn in prices.

    Of course, it is always possible that smart growth regulation in these markets might have created a new floor that prevents prices from falling to historic norms. That would be good news for the owners of real estate – largely older and Anglo – in these areas. On the other hand, it would be disastrous news for millions of households and the next generation, many of them younger and minority, who will now have to remain on the sidelines of the housing markets of their choice. For many the choice may be moving to one of those places – like Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth or Kansas City, Houston or Atlanta – where the opportunity to own a home still will exist for those without trust funds and elite occupations.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • How to Protect Main Street While Saving Wall Street

    The current discussion in Washington can either lead to a rapid processing and recovery at the local level or a long drawn out destruction of local economies. This is particularly true of regions – Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Bernardino-Riverside, much of Florida – that have been hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

    The current discussion is being limited to maximizing the yield on the securities that the Federal Government would acquire and then sell at auction nation wide. The disconnect that needs to be bridged lies with the focus on securities. In reality, these mortgages, however arcanely packaged, represent residential real estate. The smoke and mirrors of securities too complicated to understand must be cleared away. Otherwise, a few Wall Street interests will do even more damage and reap all the returns.

    The key issue, then, is not how the paper gets marketed but how to maximize real estate values locally. If the Feds dump securities that then lead to high levels of absentee ownership in local communities for example, many neighborhoods will be seriously damaged. If local regions can manage the disposition of these assets – higher returns will be realized and goals such as home ownership and local economic development can be advanced.

    We have seen this before. In the 1980s, the Federal Home Administration dumped large numbers of foreclosed homes on the market in San Bernardino. Instead of finding buyers, speculators preferred to rent these residences out. The result was a long-running decline in parts of the city, one that could now be further exacerbated.

    Again in the 1990s, the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation dumped apartments, commercial, office and Industrial properties. Depressing real estate values in local economies, it killed many deals and devastated local property taxes.

    But this time the Inland Empire will not be alone. If these securities are purchased nationally, Wall Street speculators could transform significant parts of formerly middle class suburban areas into largely renter-dominated badlands.

    What we need is a locally controlled intermediary – perhaps a Regional Asset Value Recovery Corporation (AVRC) – that would seek to maximize asset value by taking full advantage of local real estate knowledge. Such a regional public-private partnership could help retain value for real estate assets while stabilizing communities, and minimizing the fiscal impact on the taxpayer.

    These local groups – using both government and private matching funds – would be able to use the crisis to bring new life, and new homeowners, to these communities. This is something we are already working on in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, geographically known as the Inland Empire. This area is among the most impacted regions in the country.

    San Bernardino and Riverside county governments, along with more than 15 city governments within those counties and over 30 business owners, are prepared to come together to manage the acquisition and disposition of properties. The group would manage the unraveling of income streams so that packaged mortgages can more suitably be restructured for the benefit of homeowners. It would also capture other current Federal resources, for instance the New Market Tax Credits, and fully utilize them in order to “prime the pump” of housing recovery.

    Among the priorities of this entity would be to ensure the housing stock is maintained or renovated to meet basic health and safety standards. Abandoned housing stock is posing a serious public health risk. Addressing those risks has a direct impact on federal, state and local governments and on asset value.

    It would also work to create opportunities to meet low and moderate income housing needs. On the one hand, not everyone can buy. Making units available to rent in the right areas would be a good way to maintain and support value. On the other hand, eventually, price stability and performance by tenants makes those same tenants candidates as future homeowners. The AVRC would be the right vehicle to undertake those efforts.

    Another primary focus would be to maintain local property taxes and critical services. Depressed property values have an obvious ripple effect on local government’s ability to provide basic government services. Local communities stand ready to partner to protect our economy, their communities, their taxpayers, and their homeowners. We cannot leave the health of our communities solely to the discretion of either Washington or Wall Street.

    Tony Mize
    President, Workforce homebuilders

    Jeff Burum
    President, Inland Empire Opportunity Fund
    Chairman, National Community Renaissance

    Steve PonTell
    President, La Jolla Institute
    Germania Corporation

  • Rx for ‘Residential Renaissance:’ Take Two Years and Ease Up on the Hype

    A big going-out-of-business sign on the Rite-Aid store at 7th and Los Angeles streets tells a bigger tale—a story I’ll call “Hype Happens.”

    The Rite-Aid opened a few years ago with fanfare, arriving at just about the high-point of the hype over the “Residential Renaissance” of Downtown. Rite-Aid set up shop in the Santee Village project, an ambitious effort that saw a developer get plenty of help from various government agencies in order to convert a collection of mid-rise buildings from garment shops to residential lofts.

    The project won plaudits as the latest in a trend that was bound to remake Downtown into a place where folks with lots of disposable income could “live, work and play,” according to boosters.

    Rite-Aid’s arrival appeared to offer a clear signal that the trend would go on unabated. The new, young, and relatively upscale residents of Downtown would need a proper drugstore, after all. It all seemed quite modern for a section of the city where mom-and-pop corner stores were the only option for aspirin or chewing gum, and pharmacies were still just that—not places that offer shampoo and light bulbs and soda to customers waiting for their prescriptions to be filled.

    The hype apparently failed to meet the expectations of the marketplace, though, and now Rite-Aid is leaving.

    Get used to it—but also realize that this is a phase, and there can be some benefits to a slowdown.

    Also keep in mind that Downtown has, indeed, seen a great deal of change with the latest round of residential redevelopment. Much of it has been good, even with the strains that have come as wealthier newcomers bumped into the many poor folks who called the area home long before its latest star turn. Take some solace in the thought that such strains will likely find room to ease now that the hype fading.

    The pending closure of the Rite-Aid, meanwhile, offers lessons to be absorbed by boosters and others. The chain is no stranger to inner-city retail, but you can bet that its executives overlooked a few things on the way to the corner of 7th and Los Angeles, especially in regard to the chances for crowds of upscale loft dwellers filling their aisles. All the gushing press and publicity couldn’t change the fact that the location still backs up against Skid Row, one of the toughest precincts of the city. It still takes a walk of several blocks—through territory that can be pretty scary at night—to get to the next section of Downtown where bright lights and activity provide a perception of public security.

    Add that up and you’ll see that Downtown has not reached the sort of critical mass that matches the “live, work and play” sloganeering. There are pockets of the city’s center that have established an active, commercial nightlife. The Old Bank District centered at 4th and Main—a collection of several residential buildings, a few restaurants, a convenience store, and a DVD shop—comes to mind. For the most part, though, many gaps remain and the larger scene just hasn’t been knitted together.

    Consider the once-a-month Art Walk for a clear illustration of the over-sell of Downtown. The event has inspired an outsized helping of hype even by Downtown standards, getting regular and uncritical boosts from print media, broadcasters and the blogosphere, with reports offering it up as evidence of the success of Downtown’s upscale makeover. The Art Walk does draw hundreds of upscale visitors to galleries at 5th and Main and a few adjacent blocks on the second Thursday of each month. That’s great, but turn the proposition on its head and think about it this way: The Art Walk imports visitors who account for a vibrant sidewalk scene once a month. That’s not “live, work and play.” It’s more like “drive Downtown, look around, and leave.” Check 5th and Main on the other nights of the month and you’ll seldom see anything like the Art Walk crowds.

    Does this render the boosters’ dreams for Downtown dead?

    Certainly not—but expect them to go on hold for awhile.

    The economic turmoil that’s shaking the nation is hitting Downtown, too, and will continue to do so. The city’s center is not some chic pocket of creative energy that’s somehow able to escape the mess.

    So Downtown is in for a tough row to hoe, but there’s also a chance to learn some lessons in preparation for its next phase, which will surely start with plenty of hype at some point in the next several years.

    Perhaps by then our boosters and builders will have learned enough from the last go-round to ensure that the new corner drugstore will still stand tall when the next hot streak comes to an end.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com).

  • Creating an Authentic Place: Tales from Two Southern California Cities

    What makes a place “authentic”? In places we cherish, we look for something unique and tangible. But personal experience of a place is not merely a product of the landscape and “built environment.” It is also shaped by myths and perceptions.

    As City Manager of two California towns, I’ve grappled with the treacherous crosscurrents of reality and myth, of change and preservation.

    Azusa, California is a working-class suburb where the majority of the population are from the stock of Mexican immigrants over the past century, along with a largely comfortable mixture of the rest of Southern California’s extraordinary diversity. Ten years ago, Mayor Cristina Cruz Madrid memorably described it as “the caboose on the foothill train,” standing in sad contrast to its more affluent middle-class neighbors along the majestic (but often smog-obscured) San Gabriel Mountains. An ambitious effort to shake that image has had mixed results but some very real accomplishments.

    Ventura, California is a beach town with higher aspirations. Its city government promotes it as “California’s New Art City” and aims to be a model of smart growth, environmental sustainability and civic engagement. Ventura’s citizens laid the foundation for this ambitious agenda when more than a thousand of them participated in a citizen-driven “visioning effort” at the beginning of this century. But it remains unclear how deep or widespread the public enthusiasm for these notions truly is.

    Both these towns struggle with distinguishing their actual, imagined and desired identities — and destinies.

    People have lived in Azusa. for six thousand years. Phonetic variations of “Azusavit” were recorded by Spanish padres as the village origin of the native “neophytes” inducted into labor at the nearby Mission San Gabriel. Yet despite this long history, today’s Azusa blends with little distinction from the tract homes, apartments and commercial strips of the thirty other cities that two million San Gabriel Valley suburbanites call home. But it’s making considerable strides in re-anchoring a sense of place.

    The symbolic turning point came in 1995, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a scheme to introduce casino gambling as the panacea to the city’s declining fortunes. Voters installed a new City Council and chose instead to focus on beautifying the sagging Downtown. When the pedestrian-scaled street lamps that were installed were mistakenly painted purple, the Council persevered despite ridicule. Two dozen new businesses made believers out of skeptics. Purple was embraced as the city’s distinctive color.

    Development of new homes sought to attract middle-class homebuyers. Public schools adopted a “no excuses” determination to boost test scores. A rash commitment to plant 2,000 new trees in the year 2000 ended up adding over 3,500 new trees. The seeds of those efforts have flowered in a renewed spirit of citizen volunteerism. Neighborhood improvement zones were launched to “improve all of Azusa, one neighborhood at a time.” An ambitious new General Plan proclaimed “a 21st Century vision for Azusa” as “the Gateway to the American Dreams.” More than a million square feet of office/warehouse/light industrial “flex space” was added, a residential development slated for 1250 homes broke ground and the long-neglected Downtown began to show new signs of life.

    But change is never painless. To some, new development seems to violate the city’s “unique natural, historic and cultural heritage.” There is considerable concern that new structures might be undermining the cherished small town character.

    This has led to a continuing political struggle. Is the new development creating “a distinct identity and sense of place” or altering the community’s existing character beyond recognition? This reflects a deep ambivalence of local residents about change. So much of current development is simply generic “product” that even the value of new investment (and more permanent benefits of expanded jobs, housing and tax base) may seem like a poor trade-off against the loss of the familiar.

    Ventura

    That question is even more clearly drawn in the coastal town of Ventura. The community is officially known as “San Buenaventura,” the name that Father Serra, the legendary founder of the California missions chose to honor Saint Bonaventure, an Italian, but the name also evokes the spirit of a city of good luck. That good fortune seemed to run out, however, with the end of Ventura’s oil boom in the sixties. The city’s historic core declined, even as farmers and ranchers turned to raising largely undistinguished tract homes on the city’s outskirts. After the 101 interstate sliced through, Ventura began a long, slow fade – especially compared to Santa Barbara, its neighbor just 22 miles up the coast which styles itself “the American Riviera.” .

    Like Azusa, Ventura in the last few years has gotten back on track. The once seedy and largely deserted core came back to life – largely thanks to the grit of individual entrepreneurs. The City did back construction of a theater and parking structure, which helped accelerate an indigenous restaurant and retail revival. Then came the “Seize the Future” visioning effort that thrust forward new leadership determined to make Ventura a “national model” for “smart growth,” “livable communities” and “civic engagement.”

    But the push for new investment and “new urbanist” development has run into the same predictable “not in my backyard” response seen in Azusa and many other communities. (link to Kiefer and Bradford NIMBY pieces). There’s much talk about preserving the “soul” of the community. This includes a shifting and even contradictory mix of protecting the town’s laid-back beach town attitude along with its largely unspoiled hillside and ocean views, its stock of old buildings and its quirky landmarks.

    Nothing is more symbolic of this than the debate over the fate of the “Top Hat Burger Place.” The 450 square foot Downtown hamburger stand stood in the way of an aggressive developer’s plans for three-story condos over boutiques. Sentimentalists and preservationists banded together with anti-elitists to insist the stand stay or be relocated at the developer’s expense. Others welcomed the demise of what they saw as an eyesore reminiscent of Downtown’s hardscrabble past and rolled their eyes about claims that the plywood structure qualified as an historic landmark.

    On a split vote, the City Council approved a compromise that donated a slice of a city-owned parking lot nearby as the relocation site for the Top Hat. Given the current real estate recession, it was no surprise when the development project tanked, leaving the apparently ‘recession-proof’ hamburger stand in its current location.

    Now, American Apparel is opening the first retail chain outlet in Downtown. Could this be the harbinger of Ventura’s transformation into another trendy “lifestyle center” of national chains?
    Such concerns are not new. More than a century before Wal-Mart steamrollered old-fashioned downtowns across America, Woolworth’s, Sears and Penney’s created the foundation for a consumer society dominated by giant chains.

    Can places like Azusa and Ventura maintain a special identity amidst the gale force winds of the global economy? Some extreme advocates favor opting out and resisting every change in the landscape even in dilapidated neighborhoods. The other extreme pushes for undermining local neighborhood and district character to benefit out-of-scale real estate “projects” replicating some generic formula, be it “mixed-use town center” or “townhome village.”

    Towns need to find something better than a tense balance between these two extremes. First of all they need to put a distinctive stamp on new development so that it remains scaled to the local character. This is the struggle many cities – including Azusa and Ventura – must undertake if they want both to preserve “a distinct identity and sense of place” in the era of the global economy while remaining vital and economically diverse. They do not have the option of becoming a hermetically sealed stasis town like Carmel, where tourists come to experience an historic theme park of a town. Instead, like most real places, they must face difficult choices about what to retain and preserve – and what to improve and replace. Perhaps the best standard to follow may be to discern what feels like “home” to residents. Ironically, that premium is likely to also attract visitors and commerce that may ultimately threaten that very distinctiveness. But that is a problem that most struggling communities would look forward to grappling with.

    Rick Cole is the City Manager in Ventura, California, where he has championed smart growth strategies and revitalization of the historic downtown. He previously spent six years as the City Manager of Azusa, where he was credited by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune with helping make it “the most improved city in the San Gabriel Valley.” He earlier served as mayor of Pasadena and has been called “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers by the LA Times.” He was honored by Governing Magazine as one of their “2006 Public Officials of the Year.”

  • Searching for Los Angeles by the Gateway Arch – a Reminiscence

    The obsession started before the earthquake.

    I was driving on Manchester Road, and something about the slant of light off the car dealerships, the particular combination of Mexican-food diner/meat market/bank/shoe store/train-whistle-in-the-distance, and the unending nature of my errand was enough to take me back. I was on San Fernando Road, and for a just a split second, I was happy – happy to be in traffic, happy to have the glare of the sun in my eyes, happy, even, to be hopelessly late — because I thought that I was back in Los Angeles.

    I was obsessed with Los Angeles. I had lived there for three years. I started my first real job there as a history professor at Cal State Northridge. My son was born there, in Hollywood no less, right across the street from the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology. But my husband worked in St. Louis, and after my son was born, I took leave from my job and we started family life in St. Louis together.

    I told this story to just about anyone who would listen. Random mothers in the park, random co-workers of my husband, random grocery store clerks, random anyone. I wanted the whole world to know I belonged back in LA. And when there was no one there to listen, I stole moments to look at web sites filled with jacaranda trees and the views from Griffith Park. Motherhood proved readily adaptable to the aesthetic of studied dishevelment followed by the young filmmakers, writers, and web designers of my old neighborhood, and I eagerly embraced it (at least the dishevelment part). When winter came and St. Louis’s farmers’ markets ended, I would grill my husband upon his return from the grocery store. “Are you sure this was the best produce they had? Are you sure you even bought this today?”

    I didn’t just miss the sunny days and the fresh vegetables and our hipster neighbors (although I did miss those desperately, even the hipster neighbors). I missed LA’s problems. I’m a historian of the American West; I have a fondness for the twentieth century. And LA just happens to be THE twentieth-century western city. It’s not just the highways or the cars, although I thought about them too, especially when I was on Manchester Road. When I was in LA, I couldn’t drive to work without thinking about managing the water supply or the way Angelenos had covered over the desert in their yards with bougainvilleas. I couldn’t stop by the hardware store or look at a bus stop or pick up some of that fabulous lettuce without thinking about unionization. I would exit the highway early just to drive through a neighborhood and think about immigration. When my cousin asked why I liked Los Angeles so much, I said without even pausing at the irony: “The people there are so real.”

    So at first it seemed like more obsession, and no one was having any of it. When I proposed that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to line St. Louis and Los Angeles up side-by-side and compare them – to look a little harder for that bit of LA that I thought I had seen on Manchester Road, virtually no one heard me out.

    My mother: “You must remove LA’s weather from your browser’s start-up page.”

    My aunt, distastefully: “That sounds like a blog.”

    My husband, who saw just the faintest echo of an earlier obsession with my home state of New Mexico: “Not everyone measures success in terms of proximity to mountains.”

    For those who knew me, this was just one more ploy to get back, if only in my imagination, to the city that had, with its smog and its traffic and its astronomical housing prices and its gross inequalities and its devotion to surface appearances and its unrelentingly bright days, won my heart.

    For those that didn’t know me, it just sounded weird. “This must feel really different,” said the grocery store clerks and the mothers at the park and my husband’s co-workers and the teachers at my son’s day care. “Oh, no,” I would say. When I first fell in love with LA, I had heard the urban historian Greg Hise lecture on how Los Angeles was not the great urban exception, how it actually had great similarities to Pittsburgh and St. Louis. ST. LOUIS!

    “St. Louis,” I would say when anyone gave me the slightest opening, “is a combination of neighborhoods like LA. It has the same public transportation problems, a large Catholic population, a history of racial segregation and a deracinated downtown.” I didn’t actually say deracinated.

    When I started looking, I found more parallels, large and small. Prominent Armenian populations in both cities, a history of fraught public education, both were once part of Spanish territory, both had an elite oddly fascinated with itself (“What high school did you go to?” ask St. Louisans. “Are you in the industry?” say Angelenos), and a similar wackiness in small corners of each city – the drag queen in a wheel chair I once saw in Hollywood; the cigar-smoking elderly man who jogs near Forest Park.

    But there must have been something about the exercise that seemed kind of pathetic. “What’s wrong with St. Louis?” asked my friends from elsewhere. “Nothing,” I’d rush to tell them. “It’s a great town — Forest Park is awesome; there are good restaurants; we can walk to the art museum AND the zoo AND to work AND to day care all from our apartment. It’s a great city for kids. It has a world-class symphony.” “So what’s wrong with St. Louis?” they’d say again. “Nothing,” I’d say, “It’s just…this will seem melodramatic, but it’s just that I don’t feel fully awake here.”

    It seemed best to let the idea drop. Sure, cities are more than climate and topography, and there might just be a few scraps of St. Louis that shared whatever magic I had found in LA, but it did seem kind of silly. I let it go.

    When my husband tried to wake me, I could feel the shaking. “What is it?” I said. “An earthquake,” he said. “hmmm,” I said. “What do we do?” he asked. I wasn’t fully awake, and I didn’t want to be. I thought about getting up. For a St. Louis earthquake? “I don’t know what to do here,” I said and went back to sleep. But the next day, everyone was talking about it — the grocery store clerks and the teachers at my son’s day care, and my husband’s co-workers. “Did you feel it?” “The epicenter was in Illinois.” “It was a 5.2.” “Is this common?”

    It’s not common, but it wasn’t the first time either. There are earthquakes in St. Louis. I had known that already, but this one made me think again. Maybe there are other similarities, things I had come to consider distinctly LA, when really they were things places shared.

    I decided I would go looking for Los Angeles right here in St. Louis. I don’t know what I will find. Maybe something about what it means for people to live together in a city. Maybe something about the homogenization of America. Maybe something about why we’re willing to call some places, but not all places, home. I know it makes little sense to go looking for Los Angeles where it is not. I do, after all, know where it is. I’ve been there before. But I’m fully awake now.