A new look finds wealth in inner city

Sydney Bradford doesn't own a car, so when she needs to shop, she jumps on a bus. Then she gets on another one, and another.

"To get to the nearest pharmacy, I take three buses," she said.

Bradford's odyssey reflects the scarcity of shopping choices in her neighborhood near Watts, where there are plenty of mom-and-pop stores, but not the large retail chains that attract Bradford.

"Everybody in the neighborhood is not destitute, homeless and on drugs," said Bradford, a garrulous woman of 55 who works as a detox technician at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. "People have money, they just have to go out of the neighborhood."

A new study reaches the same conclusion. The report by Social Compact, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, says that annual income in Watts, Boyle Heights and seven other neighborhoods in South and East Los Angeles is about $1.9 billion more than the U.S. census has estimated and that 82,000 more people live there than the census has counted.

Social Compact produced the study, titled "L.A. Drilldown," to gauge the consumer spending potential that retailers have long neglected.

"Retailers have said up to now there isn't a market there," said John Talmage, director of Social Compact. "I'm telling you -- you have a market."

Social Compact culled government and private databases to estimate the spending potential of nine neighborhoods. In addition to Watts and Boyle Heights, the study focused on the Hyde Park, West Adams, Crenshaw/Baldwin Village, Vernon Central, Central City East, Jefferson Park and Leimert Park areas of Los Angeles.

These communities have long gotten by without many big grocery stores or major retail chains. Shoppers such as Bradford complain of having to travel far for basic goods, thus spending their money far from where they live.

Retailers and developers have shied away from the inner city for various reasons, including blight, lack of support from local government and perceptions -- some unfounded -- about crime and urban unrest, said Greg Stoffel, a shopping-center consultant based in Orange County.

Added to that, he said, retailers "have had a plethora of sites with great demographics, great income, presented to them for a lot of years. Any site that has been deemed marginal in terms of its potential has been relegated to the back burner."