Controversy Over Downtown Tract

* After just turning in a school paper about the Cornfield development, I was excited to read your article (“L.A.’s Cornfield Row: How Activists Prevailed,� April 17). I do have one comment regarding the creation of jobs that I feel is important. The 1,000 manufacturing and warehouse jobs that supposedly would have been created paid $10 an hour--that is a gross income of $20,000 a year. While it is possible to survive on that income, and even to proudly raise a family on that income, it will not lift anyone very far out of poverty.

I doubt the members of the Central City Assn. would consider a $10-an-hour job as appropriate for their own neighbors beyond the age of 19. There are no good reasons why they should disregard the opinions of the community and consider these minimal jobs as the answer for the area for which they are the appointed caretakers.

AMY ELIZABETH CLARK

Los Angeles

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* Neither the Union Pacific Railroad nor Majestic Realty, successive owners of the blighted and abandoned Cornfield rail yard, had to endure the taking of their property via condemnation for public use. My in-laws, who were long-time Angeleno business owners, lost in succession their neighborhood grocery store by condemnation to the railroad so that Union Station could be built, and a second grocery to the Dodgers when the land it sat upon was condemned and taken for the offramp from the Pasadena Freeway to Dodger Stadium. Each time they were paid but a small fraction of their property’s actual worth and their property converted to the benefit and profit of other private (and thence wealthier) individuals.

Their attempts to create the American Dream in downtown Los Angeles appear in hindsight to have been doomed simply because they were too poor (or perhaps too ethical) to grease the appropriate governmental palms. This is a problem not faced by the successive owners of the Cornfield; they have made a considerable profit from the city’s interest in their land.

DOUGLAS CAMPBELL

Culver City