Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency

Sometimes, what happens in Vegas can stay in Los Angeles. Or, more specifically, in a vacant industrial building in Sylmar. That will be the new home of a 25-year-old Calabasas business named Drapes 4 Show Inc., which has made linens for Air Force One, swanky hotels, exclusive celebrity weddings and Hollywood movie sets. The company had been leaving for Las Vegas, where many of its products are used, because it couldn't find a suitable site for growth.

The check will be in the mail -- and billboard queen Angelyne knows exactly where to find it. Even though her Hollywood office was demolished to make way for a new luxury hotel, the busty blond and mail-order entrepreneur will get to use her old Selma Avenue address anyway.

The behind-the-scenes bureaucrat who has been carrying out Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's environmental agenda is poised to take her work nationwide as the presumptive chair of President-elect Barack Obama's White House Council on Environmental Quality.

City officials and developers are testing the reach of downtown L.A.'s development boom with a massive push to bring the mixed-use concept to Washington Boulevard -- a good two miles south of downtown. The Community Redevelopment Agency sees a 22-block area along the boulevard -- now lined with older storefronts and industrial buildings -- as ripe for conversion into several large projects that mix housing with retail and commercial space. Planners hope the buzz from Staples Center, the huge L.

The Community Redevelopment Agency's board of commissioners voted Thursday to give approval to the $2-billion plan to build housing, a hotel and retail spaces on city and county land on an area of Bunker Hill near Walt Disney Concert Hall. Before the 4-0 vote, with two commissioners absent, more than a dozen public speakers praised the project as a boon to efforts to revitalize downtown Los Angeles. As part of their vote, the commissioners approved spending $24.

The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has been ordered to pay a couple more than $37,000 for charging "unconscionable" penalties for early resale of a South Los Angeles home the agency helped them purchase. The Los Angeles County Superior Court ruling, which was made public last week, comes more than a year after Larry and Melissa Shields sued the CRA on grounds that it unfairly punished them for the appreciation of their Jefferson Park-area home, which they purchased in December 2002.

From every perspective, the Aug. 16 meeting of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency's Board of Commissioners went badly. Tenants of a building in downtown Los Angeles were furious over multiple evictions, and Commissioner Joan Ling wanted to quiz them about it. Commission President William Jackson, who had just been called Osama bin Laden by one angry audience member, did not. Jackson interrupted Ling, saying the commission needed to move on.

As he sought approval for three downtown high-rises last year, developer Sonny Astani promised the city's redevelopment agency that he would hire union workers, install expensive underground parking and donate $1.5 million to a skid row housing fund. None of that was enough for Joan Ling, one of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's appointees to the Community Redevelopment Agency board. Ling also wanted Astani to provide money for affordable housing. "I was about to say, 'How about my children?'

In a contentious hearing Wednesday, the City Council voted 10 to 4 to confirm affordable-housing developer Joan Ling to a new, four-year term on the Community Redevelopment Agency board. Ling's supporters described her as a conscientious "voice for the underprivileged of the city," and critics contended she had overstepped her authority by trying to secure concessions from developers even when their projects received no public subsidies.

Three years ago, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency helped Larry and Melissa Shields buy their first home. Today, the couple claim, the agency is attempting to cash in on that assistance. In a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit filed this week, the Shieldses and their lawyer, Ron Richards, say the CRA is violating California lending laws by penalizing them for reselling their home early.