Don't feed the white elephant

Nevertheless, there have been numerous publicly backed attempts to reestablish downtown's primacy as a business center. The largest of these was the transformation of the declining residential neighborhood of Bunker Hill into a sea of high-rise structures in the 1980s, under the direction of the Community Redevelopment Agency. The agency also helped finance the first rush of residential and retail development downtown.

For a while, downtown appeared to be a thriving financial and business center, with a proud array of Fortune 500 companies headquartered here, among them Arco, Occidental Petroleum, First Interstate Bancorp, Security Pacific and Union Oil. Japanese investors financed much of the development.

Then came the 1990s. The Japanese economy fell into a decade-long recession, and the city suffered riots, earthquakes, fires and floods. The central business district today is a relative also-ran among U.S. downtowns, largely a domicile for lawyers, accountants and the branch offices of companies headquartered elsewhere.

What has kept downtown economically distinct are industries least dependent on public largesse -- the garment industry, the jewelry makers, the toy distributors, the operators of immigrant-oriented shops along Broadway. "What worked in downtown was not the self-imposed ideas of the planners," said Jerry Sullivan, editor and publisher of Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly paper based downtown. "It was the stuff that happened organically like Santee Alley. Downtown was remade not by the suits or the planners, but by the immigrants."

Still, the suits and the planners haven't given up, as witnessed by the proposed Convention Center hotel complex and L.A. Live, as well as the Grand Avenue Project. Before new development subsidies are approved, however, there should be a discussion of the public's interest, especially because residents already face escalating trash-collection fees to pay for more police officers. At the same time, the city's finances are already fragile, and should the real estate bubble rapidly deflate, the economic consequences could be severe.

Unfortunately, there are no Ernani Bernardis or Joel Wachses on the City Council to stand up for the average taxpayer, neighborhood resident or small-business owner. Perhaps too eager to be team players under a popular mayor, the city's political elites appear willing to go on subsidizing the speculations of the well-connected and the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.