But Faye Washington, executive director of the YWCA of Greater Los Angeles, said she was impressed with the wages the company would pay. Her YWCA's Job Corps program is negotiating with Forever 21 to try to make sure it would hire local residents.
And City Councilwoman Jan Perry, a longtime supporter of Horowitz's project, argued that Villaraigosa's clean truck program would significantly limit the emissions created by the distribution center, making it less harmful to air quality than it would have been earlier.
Perry said most of the trucks driving to the Forever 21 facility would come from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where trucks will be required to have cleaner-burning engines -- the kind built in 2007 or later -- over the next 3 1/2 years.
The fight over the 14-acre site dates back to 1986, when city officials used the power of eminent domain to force Horowitz to sell his land so a city incinerator could be built there. That plan was abandoned amid community protests, and in the wake of the 1992 riots, the land was converted into a community garden overseen by the Los Angeles Food Bank across the street.
Nearby low-income residents, many of them Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America, carved the site into tiny plots filled with vegetables, herbs and flowers. But with the incinerator plan scrapped, Horowitz sued the city, buying back the land in a settlement.
By then, the farm had become one of the largest community gardens in the region -- and a symbol of the city's need for more urban farming, said Occidental College professor Robert Gottlieb, who heads the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, a research and advocacy group dealing with food and social justice.
"What made [the farm] so interesting was it was becoming a community space," he added. "It wasn't just a series of plots of individual gardeners. It hosted events; it had festivals. It was a place where families came."
Despite last-minute efforts by Villaraigosa to have a nonprofit group acquire the land, Horowitz had the garden demolished and its gardeners removed in 2006. It was a media spectacle: Protesters and police squared off as helicopters hovered overhead.
After two years of relative calm, Horowitz and the farmers are battling again. Horowitz took his development plan for the site to a public hearing last month. Activists, some carrying baskets filled with fresh fruit, testified against it.
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david.zahniser@latimes.com
