Low Income Neighborhoods

In the closing weeks of his final term, Mayor Richard Riordan is mounting a campaign to draw attention to the plight of the city's poor neighborhoods. At the same time, he is accusing elected officials of neglecting the poor, and he's doing it in blunt, provocative language that has astonished and angered some of them.

The Environmental Protection Agency is focusing on the effect of hazardous waste recycling plants on minorities and low-income communities. The move hearkens back to a Clinton-era executive order that required federal agencies to consider the effect of their policies on disadvantaged communities. Although the Bush administration largely ignored the mandate, Obama-appointed EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson has promised to analyze those effects.

CHARO Community Development Corp. provides career and business assistance to help generate economic development in low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Founded in 1967, the organization offers entrepreneur training, computer classes, child care and loan-processing assistance, among other programs. The group is now converting its temporary "incubator without walls" into a permanent business-nurturing program housed in a 36,000-square-foot facility on the Eastside.

In a gritty Brooklyn community where Latino and black business owners have trouble getting bank loans and at a glitzy Manhattan ballroom packed with corporate leaders, President Clinton on Thursday unveiled proposals intended to tap entrepreneurial energy to narrow America's income divide.

The board of the California Public Employees' Retirement System has approved a pioneering $475-million initiative to channel investments into underserved urban and rural markets statewide. Called the California Initiative, the effort places the nation's largest public pension fund at the forefront of a movement to seek market returns from investments in low-income communities that have long been overlooked by institutional capital.

A local neighborhood with few banks has been identified as the first to get a nationally chartered bank under a new federal law designed to bring financial services to inner cities. A dozen or more communities nationwide, including Oakland, are expected to be sites of newly chartered inner-city banks this year, banking officials said. Nothing is yet in the works for Los Angeles.

Palm trees on Bristol Street, smack in the middle of Santa Ana? What is this, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills? What's next, a Gucci store to replace the Bristol Swap Mall? All right, not to get too carried away with my own metaphor, but there's the whiff of change in the air and right now it's coming from the asphalting on Bristol, where the city of Santa Ana is widening the street, putting in a permanent median and planting trees. That's done every day in America, but not that often in low-income neighborhoods where many residents speak limited English and don't have lots of money to spend.

Obesity rates for children in low-income communities with few parks are up to nine times higher than for children in affluent areas with abundant recreational access, according to a new report that analyzes childhood obesity in the cities and communities of Los Angeles County. The rates ranged from a low of 4% in Manhattan Beach, which has a median income of $100,750 and 5.7 acres of green space per 1,000 people, to 37% in Maywood, where the median income is $30,480 and 0.

The largest commercial development to be built in South-Central Los Angeles in more than a decade will soon test a premise long held dear by urban planning theorists--that large companies can turn a tall profit in the inner city. Most national and regional retailers, however, have been notoriously reluctant to test that theory, opting instead for neighborhoods that are more prosperous, if less densely occupied.