Los Angeles Reconstruction

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday with an amendment that could prevent Kaiser Permanente from using at other company facilities federal earthquake disaster funds earmarked for the Kaiser hospital in Panorama City.

The City Council has given property owners along Laurel Canyon Boulevard permission to rebuild and expand their businesses under a program originally established to help with earthquake recovery. The council on Wednesday unanimously approved an amendment to the Laurel Canyon Earthquake Recovery Program to open up the rules of participation to include new and large-scale projects.

Fernando Rodriguez pulled open his oven and the sudden burst of light sent about two dozen cockroaches scattering to the floor. "It's bad here," he said. "Very bad." For four years, Rodriguez, his wife, Maria, and their three children have lived with cracked windows, broken doors, faulty plumbing and a leaky roof. Dealers peddle crack cocaine and marijuana out of nearby apartments and gang members congregate just a few steps away.

In a South-Central Los Angeles church not far from where rioters left a community in tatters five years ago, about 75 lawyers, executives, pastors, bankers, bureaucrats, activists and residents gathered recently to collaborate on what may represent the most significant step in the area's long, painful recovery. Their plans do not include acts of charity.

Standing on the porch with her grandchildren, Helen Johnson watched with despair as her South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood burst into flames April 29, 1992. But within a few months of the riots, she saw a glimmer of hope. Corporations she had never seen in her part of the world came with the thunder of a cavalry, promising to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize riot-stricken and neglected areas of Los Angeles.

You find many of them along South Vermont Avenue, little patches of concrete with weeds punching through the cracks, and stretches of land the size of football fields, where the grass grows tall and wild. There are a few dozen in that nebulous stretch of Los Angeles known as Mid-City, along Olympic and Washington boulevards, and some in the immigrant enclaves of Pico-Union and Koreatown. But mostly, they are in South-Central Los Angeles, undeveloped, raw chunks of property where, at 3 p.m.

A North Hills community organization run by supporters of Councilman Richard Alarcon is again in trouble with city building inspectors for delays in repairing dilapidated buildings and quake-damaged structures. Citing vandalized apartments and raw sewage flowing from an open pipe, inspectors have ordered Neighborhood Empowerment and Economic Development to vacate tenants from a Blythe Street building by April 1 unless repair work is started.

A North Hills community organization run by supporters of Councilman Richard Alarcon is again in trouble with city building inspectors for delays in repairing dilapidated buildings and quake-damaged structures. Citing raw sewage flowing from an open pipe and vandalized apartments, inspectors have ordered Neighborhood Empowerment and Economic Development to vacate tenants from 14643 Blythe St. by April 1 unless repair work is started.

A politically connected developer who has failed to complete repair work in one of the San Fernando Valley areas most severely damaged by the 1994 Northridge earthquake got another break Tuesday. The Los Angeles Building and Safety Commission postponed acting on city inspectors' request that it declare as public nuisances three quake-damaged buildings owned by Neighborhood Empowerment and Economic Development (NEED).

Growing impatient with a politically connected nonprofit organization's failure to repair earthquake-damaged buildings in a North Hills neighborhood, city inspectors have cited three structures as public nuisances and ordered the owners to fix the problems within 30 days.