Recovery Offers Us Chance to Change Way We Do Business : We must turn the quake into an opportunity to transform bureaucracies. Housing, transit and government services are areas that can use bold changes for the long term.

The destruction brought by the Jan. 17 earthquake was enormous, but I’m beginning to witness hope amidst the despair. As I’ve visited the shelters, parks, damaged businesses and hard-hit residential neighborhoods in my district, I’ve been heartened by the countless ways our city has come together in this crisis, reconnecting the frayed bonds of community.

That heady spirit may ebb as we settle back into our ordinary lives. However, we cannot let the positive energy generated by tens of thousands of Angelenos dissipate without capitalizing on it. As humans, we must learn from tragedy and then do our best to turn it into opportunity.

Let us commit ourselves in the coming months to making Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley a model for new ways of doing business. Let’s get imaginative--even heretical--at all levels of government. If we cannot transform rigid bureaucracies and outmoded habits today, when everything is fluid, we’ll never be able to do so.

The quake is forcing us to experiment. Instead of flinching from change, we should cull lessons from the experiment that we can utilize in the coming years. Several opportunities have been thrust upon us:

* We must use this period to create a better kind of affordable housing for the Valley. The Valley had an affordable-housing crisis before the earthquake. Now we have tens of thousands of people of all ages, backgrounds and income levels in desperate need of housing. The private sector must fill this need for those who can afford market-rate housing.

But the Valley suffers from a disadvantage: Unlike the rest of the city, the Valley does not have an experienced nonprofit housing development community to deliver housing in the coming months. Now is our opportunity to develop this network, and in the process transform the term “affordable housing” from a negative into a positive. We need to create this grass-roots network of nonprofit housing developers so the Valley can have affordable housing that is attractive, compatible with surrounding areas and seismically sound.

If we don’t respond quickly, I fear that informal solutions people will find--sleeping on the streets, living in their cars, renting illegal and unsafe garages--will create deep structural scars in our society that could prove more expensive to fix than the physical earthquake damage itself.

* Commuters have adjusted to riding trains and buses, taking alternate routes, ride-sharing and driving on one-way streets. Innovative transportation strategies cannot be reserved for the Olympics and for emergencies. When all of the freeways return, let’s break gridlock in Los Angeles--permanently.

* Just as I’ve been proud of the cooperation among residents, I’ve also been heartened by the close coordination between city departments during this emergency. But why should it take an earthquake for departments to communicate with one another, for city employees to adopt a can-do attitude, and for the delivery of services to be restructured? The flexible, streamlined, customer-oriented approach we’ve seen in recent days must lay the groundwork for a more efficient city government when the emergency ends.

These opportunities are just the start. The coming months must be a time when we embrace all opportunity--to create a more flexible workplace, new venues for educating our children and a different tone of everyday life.

Los Angeles should err on the side of being too bold, not too timid. It is well known that after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, San Francisco muddled through with half measures that have left the reconstruction unfinished five years later. We should not repeat their mistake.

It may not be fashionable to say anymore, but I still love L.A.--despite all that we’ve been through lately. I’ve heard it suggested that the earthquake served as a noisy exclamation point, putting an end to the all-too-long string of tragedies that have struck our city. As we open a new era, let’s do things right this time.