Four Corners Tell South L.A. Tale

A decade after the Los Angeles riots, increasing but still uneven signs of economic rebirth are scattered throughout South-Central Los Angeles.

On a corner once home to a rundown strip mall and a shuttered industrial plant, residents pack a spotless Starbucks coffee shop to socialize over $3 lattes.

Big-name developers are negotiating deals to transform other corner lots into shopping centers, finally convinced there is money to be made serving hundreds of thousands of customers who have paltry shopping options. Local nonprofits have built dozens of new subsidized housing projects.

The parts of South Los Angeles that were most vibrant before the riots have shown clear improvement: To the west of South-Central, the Crenshaw district’s Leimert Park is buzzing with new business, and construction is evident in the northern neighborhoods of West Adams and University Park. Banks have stepped up small-business and mortgage lending.

But to a far greater degree than in other areas touched by three days of burning and looting in 1992--Mid-Wilshire, Pico-Union, Compton and Long Beach among them--poverty and blight persist at the riot’s epicenter in South-Central.

It was here that post-riot talk of recovery focused. City leaders formed a corporate-led organization to take on the task. But Rebuild LA--or RLA, as it came to be known--contended that reversing decades of stagnation would require more than rebuilding. Neglected neighborhoods needed more than 74,000 new jobs and $6 billion in investment, an early analysis found.

What came to pass fell far short of that.

When RLA disbanded five years ago, it reported that $389 million in corporate investments had been made, although millions of dollars were spent outside the riot-torn neighborhoods.

The riots coincided with a deep recession, and few job-creating initiatives were undertaken. But even as the overall economy rebounded--ushering in the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history--South Los Angeles suffered. From 1992 to 1999, the area lost more than 55,000 jobs--more than any other part of the city, according to the Economic Roundtable, a public policy research group. Average wages too dropped in relation to the county average.

Today, of about 600 properties in the city that were destroyed or seriously damaged, more than a fifth still have not been rebuilt--almost all of them in South-Central. Some double as used-car lots, illegal swap meets or recycling yards. Others host carnivals a few times a year. But many sit unused, littered with trash that collects against the chain-link fences that surround them.

More national retailers now view dense but poor neighborhoods as opportunities. That has spurred interest from big developers, which are bringing crucial financing to projects that still overwhelmingly depend on public subsidies. Scattered government and community programs have helped some small businesses and spurred construction of subsidized housing, and political backing has helped push some projects through.

But politicking just as often has held things back. Large-scale commercial development remains costly. Many entrepreneurs and residents survive on the margins of solvency.

“You’ve got more part-time jobs, more lower-wage jobs,” said Marva Smith Battle-Bey of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp. “We got a few more fast-food restaurants, but very little has changed.”

Four major intersections reflect the variety of reasons for the mixed recovery of South-Central.

Western and Slauson: Development Milestone

For five years, Aishia Rogers traveled the three blocks from her house to her job at Pic ‘N’ Save with a growing sense of dread.

With no security guards, shoplifters strolled out the door without hiding their take. Last year, Rogers was robbed at gunpoint twice in two weeks--by the same guy. At $7.50 an hour, her job as an assistant manager hardly seemed worth the risk.

Today she works just across the street. In many ways the neighborhood is unchanged: The Pic ‘N’ Save remains, along with the corner liquor store and the bustling nearby swap meet.

But Rogers feels a world of difference. The 9-month-old Chesterfield Square shopping center, where she earns $9.50 an hour as a Home Depot bookkeeper, stands as South-Central’s brightest development success.

The center rose from the site of a shuttered dairy plant in three years, unusually fast for a project here. It is packed with national retailers that long avoided South-Central. The center brings quality services and about 600 desperately needed jobs to the area, and its success could have a ripple effect on surrounding neighborhoods.

This corner escaped immediate damage in 1992, but there was little to destroy. It had been abandoned by industry, whose legacy remains in contaminated soil and obsolete brick buildings.

The Chesterfield center also offers a Food4Less, a Starbucks and a Subway. A Radio Shack and an International House of Pancakes are on the way. The imposing security gates that surround many South-Central shopping centers are absent, replaced by landscaped hillocks. Undercover security is prevalent, and graffiti are immediately removed.

The project has inspired a gratitude that astonishes even its developers, who have received tearful thanks and standing ovations from residents.

“It’s not really the neighborhood; it’s how you keep the store,” said Rogers, 24, who lives in the nearby 51st Street duplex where she grew up. “If you keep it nice, people aren’t going to tear it up.”

For developers, the project serves as a potential model of what can be done in South-Central. Tenants are paying Westside-level rents for access to customers like Rogers--not because they are wealthy but because they are so plentiful.

Home Depot and Food4Less--the only supermarket that agreed to locate to Chesterfield--are exceeding sales projections in their stores by more than 15%, according to developers Chris Hammond and Gerald Katell.

Two other high-powered development companies taking on projects at key South-Central corners say Chesterfield Square is helping smooth the way.

Hammond, a veteran South Los Angeles housing developer, targeted the languishing site for a shopping center in 1997. But he could not have done it without the cash-flush Katell.

The button-down Republican and marathon runner made his name developing suburban office parks--not shopping centers. But the spending power of area residents tipped the scales.

“I looked at it conceptually and said, ‘The demand is there,’ ” Katell said.

The project was plagued by all the ills common to South Los Angeles development: More than half a dozen pieces of land had to be bought and pieced together, tenants relocated, aging buildings demolished and contamination cleared.

But the initial private financing from Katell meant developers could begin without a subsidy. Ultimately they were forced to seek nearly $8 million in loans and grants through the city. But the project already was on its way.

Also key to the deal was a $14-million short-term loan from the federally funded Los Angeles Community Development Bank to buy the land. The development bank--the federal government’s largest response to the riots, created to lend up to $430 million--has been plagued by failures.

But the Chesterfield loan served the bank’s mission well: to make a difference in the lives of people like Rogers.

The Crenshaw High School graduate gets better health benefits for herself and her 9-year-old daughter and discounts on corporate stock. She has been promoted twice since August and is using a computer for the first time. At home, Rogers painted, re-tiled her kitchen and replaced her bathroom sink and cabinets. And last month she was inaugurated into Starbucks culture.

“I had to ask somebody what to get,” Rogers said with a laugh. “I tried the white mocha, and I’ve been getting those every day.”

Western and Vernon: Blight and Poverty

Two men have stood watch over this intersection for more than three decades. The pharmacist from Selma, Ala., and the obstetrician from Atlantic City, N.J., bought land and set up shop next door to one another.

Each brought health services lacking in most black neighborhoods. And together they have watched the intersection’s fortunes wither, along with their own.

Western and Vernon, a mile away from the success of Chesterfield Square, reflects the reality of commerce in many parts of South-Central.

“All I’ve seen is people going out of business,” said the pharmacist, John Fuller.

Fuller recently sold his 31-year-old business because of mounting financial troubles, and he no longer owns the building. But he still shows up some evenings to help out. Fuller, a sturdy figure in dress slacks and a black cardigan, knows many of his down-and-out customers by name. He has helped some get sober and given them odd jobs and a place to live upstairs. And he has seen many spiral back down, mirroring the intersection’s eddy of low expectations.

“There’s no money in the area. People aren’t working,” Fuller said. “It’s gotten worse, and it’s continuing to get worse.”

Just to the north, Dr. Clifton V. Lee can’t offer a much brighter view. He opened his Western Women’s Medical Clinic here in 1963 as one of a handful of black obstetrician-gynecologists in the state. The graying 72-year-old physician vows to be in this area until he dies.

What Lee hoped would be an investment to lift the neighborhood and ensure him steady income has become an albatross. On the northeast corner sits a vacant commercial building that he built just before the riots.

“Across the street you see my dreams and my retirement,” he said from his medical office. “I’ve had small businesses over there that last for three or four months. It’s always been a deficit to me.”

Rioters spared Fuller and Lee a decade ago, but storefronts all along this stretch of Western were gutted, plunging the hard-luck neighborhood into deeper despair.

Drug-related crime is not as bad as it once was, merchants and residents say, but the neighborhood is still unsafe. Other than a Shell gas station, businesses are small independents. Cash-starved, many fail. The nail shop in Lee’s building was robbed repeatedly, then shuttered.

Nearby, a Louisiana Fried Chicken/China Express opened last year, but two other franchises died in quick succession--first a Church’s, which neighbors say was plagued by robberies, then a burger joint.

Next to Lee’s building, a spiritual reader offers help in “business, bad luck, enemies, love, job.” But what passes for commerce here is thin. Ann and John Miller, who live at the business, get one or two customers a day and sell used cars “now and then” on the side, John Miller said.

Partly to blame for the intersection’s ills, Lee said, is a lack of savvy. His empty building stands as evidence.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas leased the building after the riots but moved his district office to new digs at Vermont and Manchester avenues in 1995. Worn out by a parade of failed start-ups, Lee searched for a single tenant that would contribute to the community. He found it in Triumphant Word Community Services, a local church that planned a charter school for black boys.

The nonprofit needed a building before it could receive approval for the school. But after the church signed a long-term lease last year, its school plans were thwarted, and it has fallen behind on payments, Lee said.

Training and resources for small businesses became a focus of nonprofit recovery efforts after the riots, but many entrepreneurs have no idea where to turn for help.

“I take it month by month,” said Louisiana Fried Chicken’s Mike Pe, 26, who runs the business with his father and siblings.

Pe is fortunate to have a parking lot, something most businesses in the area lack, but advertising and other frills are outside his range. His main investment: a wall of bulletproof glass that protects the service area.

The neighborhood has potential. Four bus stops bring substantial foot traffic to the area. But merchants see little hope while most neighborhood residents struggle to get by.

Said Fuller: “Build a factory here so we can get meaningful employment, not $6-an-hour jobs at McDonald’s. I don’t see any other way.”

Vermont and Manchester: Mixed Bag

The ABC Swap Meet was the first business on its corner to catch fire. When the rioting ended, dozens of entrepreneurs were ruined.

All told, 22 structures in the vicinity of Vermont and Manchester burned, causing $15 million in damage. Few intersections told the story of destruction so starkly--a fact politicians quickly exploited.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) guided Bill Clinton across the rubble when he campaigned for president. Then came the tours with Jack Kemp, then-secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan took a turn.

The blackened ground became a podium for political promises. And politics has largely been responsible for a half-baked recovery--some hard-won successes framed by failures frozen in time.

There are victories: More than $50 million in public and private investment flowed into the area within half a mile of the intersection, said Ridley-Thomas, who championed the projects. On the west side of Vermont stands his constituent service center, townhomes for first-time buyers and apartments for senior citizens. And on the east, a new alternative high school is scheduled to open soon.

Nearby, Waters claims her victory in Community Build, a nonprofit she created that works to transform gang members through job training and other programs.

But a decade later much of the northeast corner remains the same: empty lots stretching north with two lonely rebuilt structures and a cluster of abandoned ones. Above one battered roll-top door, a spray-painted “Black Owned” is still legible, one of many attempts by merchants desperate to save their livelihoods from rioters’ wrath.

A shopping center that promised to revitalize the corridor--known in its heyday for its streetcars and thriving commerce--has not yet materialized.

Politicians “did a lot of talking,” said Rodney Shepard, who developed the 36 owner-occupied townhomes across Vermont Avenue at 81st Street. “When they left, the cameras left, and we didn’t see a whole lot of improvement.”

Shepard’s project itself is a mix of success and failure: It has won architectural awards and brought pride and equity to its residents, many of them first-time buyers. But plans for street-level shops never took off.

Complicating the project was the long-running political battle between Ridley-Thomas and Waters. He backed the project, but she blasted it, pushing instead for commercial development that would bring jobs.

“I can tell you this: Much more would have been done had she been in a more constructive and collaborative mood,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Countered Waters: “It’s been a series of starts and stops over the past 10 years. . . . I think Mark Ridley-Thomas has been the biggest obstacle.”

Further slowing development, a group of anti-redevelopment activists filed suit to block the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency from designating Vermont and Manchester a project area.

Redevelopment enables the city to use eminent domain to piece together small commercial parcels into larger projects. Future increases in property tax revenue are plowed back into the area to foster more development.

But opponents of redevelopment, calling themselves Concerned Citizens Against the Land Grab, argued that the neighborhood failed to meet the legal definition of blight. For four years, litigation wound through the courts.

The group ultimately lost in 2000, but the fight crippled the CRA, preventing it from acquiring property or cutting development deals, said CRA Deputy Administrator Donald Spivack.

Economic recession compounded matters, denying the area the hoped-for increase in property tax revenue.

Caught in the middle were landowners on the northeast corner who had held off developing in the belief that they would benefit from a redevelopment project.

“Why? Why did none of this happen?” said Eli Sassoon, whose family owns much of the three-block property slated to become the shopping center.

Leafing feverishly through file folders in the office of his ornate Beverly Hills estate, he pulls out evidence of his thwarted efforts to develop the site. There’s a commitment letter from supermarket chain Ralphs in 1998 and plans and letters of interest dating back years from Lucky, Hughes and Vons.

Now, many of those retailers have probably given up, Sassoon said, and Food4Less is negotiating a lease with another big developer--Regency Centers--for a shopping center less than a mile away.

But others believe that a shopping center soon will come to this neighborhood, a collection of Spanish stucco homes largely occupied by middle-class blacks in Vermont Knolls to the west and by Latino immigrants in the crowded rentals to the east.

Ed Roski’s Majestic Realty, which built Staples Center, is in exclusive negotiations with the CRA to develop at Vermont and Manchester, in partnership with the neighborhood’s Crenshaw Christian Center. An estimated $16 million in subsidies must be pieced together to make the project work, according to CRA documents. But Majestic broker Vince Evans said agreements are in place with apartment owners whose buildings would be razed for the shopping center.

Central and Vernon: Immigrants Moving In

Ana Luz Cisneros greets a burst of customers at her brother’s shoe store a few blocks north of Vernon, using broken English and a strained smile to ply $10 tennis shoes to a black customer who loudly calls her “Mama.”

All along this stretch of Central Avenue, little businesses like this one are popping up, in some cases breathing life into storefronts closed for years.

Outside, blue motorized cleaning machines scrub the gum and grime from the sidewalks. Pedestrians are plentiful. And artful banners celebrate both the corridor’s historic significance as a black jazz hub and its will for a healthy future: Moving Forward, Looking Back.

This stretch of Central Avenue doesn’t lack for life. Signs of commerce abound, in clusters of discount stores, bargain clothing shops and street vendors. What was destroyed when rioters burned the intersection and scarred this stretch of Central largely has been rebuilt. Growing numbers of Central American and Mexican immigrants--many with young children--have made this neighborhood their first stop.

“It feels and smells like economic activity, and a lot of it has to do with the demographics,” said Ruth Teague, director of urban development for Dunbar Economic Development Corp., which works to revitalize the area.

Here too government and nonprofit efforts to raise the fortunes of the once-historic strip are plentiful. But beneath it all lie hard economic realities. Residents are poor, and many live below the radar of the formal economy. Competition for their sparse resources means there is little prosperity for anyone.

“The only way I survive is I’m the owner of the land and I don’t pay rent,” said Amir Khani, who bought and rebuilt Emilio’s Discount Store--which he had previously leased--after rioters burned it to the ground. Customers are “really, really low-income,” he said, noting: “If you sell something for $1.99 and the other guy sells it for $1.98, they’ll go and buy it there.”

Still, change is unmistakable, pushed in part by a gaggle of redevelopment practitioners. The Dunbar group has built low-income and senior housing and spearheaded efforts to fix the sidewalks and install decorative trash bins and lighting.

It removes graffiti, keeps the sidewalks clean and is launching a program with two other nonprofits to channel needed loans to small businesses such as Cisneros’.

The CRA plans a massive tree-planting program and is working with newly elected Councilwoman Jan Perry to build a constituent service center. To the north, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation transformed one burned and blighted property into a park that plays host to jazz musicians and skateboarders.

South of Vernon, the nonprofit group Concerned Citizens of South Central has purchased five small vacant lots and plans townhouses for first-time buyers. The group also is working with Regency Partners to develop the neighborhood’s first shopping center, at Central and Slauson avenues.

Where fires gutted Central and Vernon, one corner remains undeveloped, its three tiny lots separately owned. A mere 25 feet wide each, they aren’t suitable for much more than small mom-and-pop stores, said Herbert Marshall, the CRA’s project manager for the area. He hopes to transform the vacant lots into a park.

But the rest of the intersection rebounded in its way: A Jack in the Box was rebuilt, along with a neighboring discount store. A mini-mall was promptly replaced, filled now with a check-cashing operation, a Chinese fast-food restaurant, a nail salon and a doughnut shop, among other businesses.

Driving the commerce is a demographic shift that is transforming all South Los Angeles but is most pronounced on its eastern edge. In the one-mile radius that surrounds this intersection, the Latino population grew to 83% in 2000, from 70% in 1990, and the number of children under 9 grew by 14%. The African American population fell to 15% from 29%.

The elderly black owners of a dry cleaners (who used to show off a suit they say Cab Calloway never reclaimed) died a few years ago. In their business’ place is Diego’s Thrift Shop, filled with a mishmash of old furniture, used clothing and knickknacks.

But with those changes come tensions.

Many of the small stores here employ only family members or other Spanish speakers, leaving job-seeking black residents with fewer options.

And for merchants, who compete with unlicensed street vendors, profit margins are paper-thin.

“There’s a lot of traffic here, but in this business you have to sell a lot to make money,” said Daniel Cohen, manager of D&D;, a bargain clothing store that opened last year at the site of a shuttered black-owned herbal shop. “People don’t have work, and when they get to the first of the month they have to pay the rent.”

Cisneros’ brother, who owns the store, holds on to his low-wage day job at a garment factory, helping here only on off hours. The Cisneroses are so strapped for cash they can’t afford garbage pickup. Instead, they take trash home or dump it in the sidewalk’s already-overflowing bins.

Still, Khani is optimistic. He recently bought and revamped another building down the street and soon will open a 99-cent store.

“If there’s no competition, there’s no improvement,” he said. “If we make this a nice-looking neighborhood, things will get better.”

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Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.