Development And Redevelopment

Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday ordered the county's lobbyists to oppose any legislation in Sacramento that would ease environmental and planning regulations in order to clear the way for a proposed 75,000-seat professional football stadium to be built in the city of Industry. Gloria Molina asked her fellow supervisors to take that stand after recent reports indicated that backers of the stadium were aggressively lobbying state legislators. The Times reported last week that aides to top lawmakers appeared receptive to issuing California Environmental Quality Act waivers for the stadium, in light of the tough economy.

About 40 tenants at the Jordan Downs public housing project gathered Saturday to hear about city plans that could dramatically change their lives -- a proposal to tear down the tarnished Watts complex and replace it with a modern "urban village" with apartments, stores and restaurants. Residents met at the Jordan Downs recreation center to hear about the ambitious, $1-billion proposal that could include as many as 2,100 units, with both low-income and market-rate housing.

The painter was the first artist to move to the downtown corner. His neighbors included a strip club, the Little White Wedding Chapel, a Thai barbecue joint and red neon heralding the Tod Motor Motel. Others might have shunned the gritty storefront near Las Vegas' embryonic arts district, but here, Ezequiel Lee Orona could grasp a decades-old dream for $900 a month.

A long-standing proposal to build a high-speed maglev train from Las Vegas to Anaheim will finally receive $45 million in federal funds that were approved several years ago to pay for the project's final planning and environmental analysis, the Nevada governor's office announced Wednesday. Gov. Jim Gibbons said the Federal Railroad Administration will administer the money that was earmarked by Congress for the first phase of the system, which would extend from Las Vegas to Primm on the Nevada-California state line.

Deep inside the nation's busiest seaport lurks the old Southwest Marine shipyard, a collection of rusting corrugated-metal buildings, broken windows and dark interiors that has appeared in more than a dozen films and television shows, including "Die Hard," "24" and "CSI: Miami." But these days, the 38-acre site at the Port of Los Angeles is the setting for another kind of high-stakes drama, this time involving competing visions of the port's future.

Adecade ago, Lindsay was the Central Valley town that the middle class had abandoned. Its farm economy was in tatters and its downtown looked tired and deserted. An influx of immigrant farm laborers, combined with white flight, made it one of the poorest cities in Tulare County. But the forgotten city of 10,500, located off state Highway 65 southeast of Visalia, is undergoing something of a rebirth. A large downtown plaza has been redesigned and lushly landscaped, drawing 5,000 people for a Friday night farmers market.

Ending a bitter feud in the rush to develop solar farms, BrightSource Energy Inc. on Thursday said it had scrapped a controversial plan to build a renewable energy facility in the eastern Mojave Desert wilderness that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wants to transform into a national monument. The proposal pitted companies queuing up to replace imported oil and facilitate a national clean-energy economy against environmentalists strongly opposed to the idea of creating an industrial zone within 600,000 acres of former railroad lands that had been donated to the Department of Interior for conservation.

The Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday approved the construction of a tower at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and rezoned a vacant Westwood lot so that it can become a city park. Cedars-Sinai received approval for a 200,000-square-foot expansion that will include 100 new patient beds and 700 parking spaces.

When the writer's strike left him idle last year, Jeremy Kromberg decided to give up on the film industry, where he had worked in postproduction, and slide in on the ground floor of the next big thing. That is how the 37-year-old from Hollywood found himself at an adult school on the Eastside on Monday, practicing his technique for fastening solar panels onto rooftops. "We just do it over and over," he said. "We build them up and tear them down just as fast as we can." Not that he minds.

A long-planned subdivision on Elephant Hill above El Sereno may face another delay after the City Council voted Wednesday to require the developer do another environment impact report. A report for the project was completed in 1992. The office of City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo argued that the report still stood, but Councilman Jose Huizar pushed for a new report, citing potential landslide problems. The project is one of several controversial developments planned in the northeast hills of the city.