VENTURA — Of the dozens of government agencies engaged in rebuilding Los Angeles, one would seem ideally positioned to provide help. The city's Community Redevelopment Agency has power, lots of money--an annual budget of some $350 million--and even a legal charge to help revitalize poor neighborhoods.
Yet, like other redevelopment agencies in California, the CRA lacks one essential ingredient: credibility. A 30-year history of abuse--real and perceived--has left the agency without enough community support, especially in South-Central Los Angeles, to play an important role in rebuilding the city. To be effective, the CRA must be broken into three or four smaller entities, including, most critically, a separate redevelopment agency for South-Central. And the South-Central Redevelopment Agency must be given enough power and money by the rest of the city--and the state--to make a difference in the rebuilding effort.
Redevelopment is California's successor to urban renewal. Its intent is to identify "blighted," largely ignored inner-city areas and provide financial incentives to entice developers and other private investors to revitalize them. Growing property-tax funds reaped from the redevelopment flow to the agency for reinvestment; they need not be shared with county government, school districts and other agencies. Also, eminent domain is available to assemble large blocks of land. In other words, redevelopment is designed precisely for the kind of reconstruction and reinvestment effort that South-Central needs today.
Unfortunately, redevelopment in Los Angeles--and, indeed, throughout California--carries a lot of baggage with it. In the 1960s and early '70s, it was used to bulldoze poor neighborhoods such as downtown's Bunker Hill, displacing thousands of poor people and turning the property over to office and hotel developers. In the Pico-Union neighborhood, one of L.A.'s poorest, activists still recall the way redevelopment was used to tear down the homes of poorer people so that Pep Boys' corporate offices could expand.
More recently, redevelopment throughout California has been transformed from a tool of social change into a financial weapon used by local governments to generate and keep tax revenues within their borders. Recognizing redevelopment's power as an "economic development" program, cities have used and abused its powers to create high-visibility, tax-rich business parks such as Cerritos Auto Square and Irwindale's Miller Brewery. Indeed, the most visible redevelopment-created business park of all is downtown Los Angeles, where the construction and sales of high-rise office buildings has made the CRA rich.
