Long Beach Greens Redevelopment Agency (RDA) Page

LONG BEACH, CA -- The Long Beach Redevelopment Agency (RDA) has its fair share of critics. Some believe that the Agency has strayed from its mission, subsidizing major corporations at the expense of local businesses and ruining neighborhoods in a quest to raise tax revenue for the City that has sometimes gone astray. For the Long Beach Greens, the Agency has definitely gone too far, and they are pledging to make the RDA's latest move a case study for the "redevelopment" of the Redevelopment Agency.

In November, the RDA filed a Mitigated Negative Declaration with the intent to purchase two multi-family properties at Pacific Avenue and 3rd Street. Although the two historic buildings are in good repair and almost fully occupied, the RDA has labeled them "blighted," and can use eminent domain to demolish them both. The use of eminent domain by the RDA has become more commonplace, the rationale being that newer developments generate more tax revenue for the City, remove blight, and are a higher and better use. In the case of 328 and 338 Pacific Ave, the alleged "higher and better use" is a fallow, unpaved, fenced-in vacant lot.

"This is 'Redevelopment' at its worst" says Coby Skye, an Environmental Engineer for Los Angeles County and co-coordinator of the Long Beach Greens. "Redevelopment is supposed to be about removing blight, improving neighborhoods, creating good jobs and in general investing in the community. Tearing down 38 affordable housing units in order to create another vacant lot downtown doesn't seem like a good way to spend our City's stretched tax dollars."

Indeed a number of Green Party activists are vexed about the planned demolition, and will bring the issue to the Mayor and City Council in the hope that the operations of the RDA will be reexamined. They feel that the City has colluded with the RDA by allowing some areas to degenerate while others get the lions share of services and police protection. A resident of one of the buildings planned for demolition plans to leave town, claiming that Long Beach has turned it's back on downtown by choosing to build new apartments over a KB Toy store instead of helping local apartment owners maintain charming old buildings, a block off of the Pine's historic buildings. "The damn City Place logo is art deco style - some twisted homage to the historic treasures they are destroying."

In a neighboring building a woman said she was frightened that the loss of these two apartment buildings would make her more vulnerable to crime. That whole block will be unoccupied and flat, with no people.

Skye cites previous Redevelopment projects in Long Beach as 'boondoggles' that have cost millions in redevelopment funds and at best, given only a veneer of improvement. Although redevelopment funds come from taxes, redevelopment agencies are special districts with little direct oversight and sweeping powers. Skye points out that the new hotels that sprouted up along Ocean Blvd. did not bring in the tax revenue originally projected. Instead of providing affordable housing or good paying jobs, they provide hotel rooms to visitors and created low-wage, no benefit jobs. "The development of our oceanfront has therefore cost the city money, cost the community in the loss of open space, jobs and desperately needed housing, and cost the taxpayers in lost revenue. The only beneficiaries are the corporations that run the hotels, and the out-of-town guests that stay here."

Similarly, the development of "City Place" in downtown Long Beach has subsidized Wal-Mart, the wealthiest corporation in the world, in an effort to make up for the failed Long Beach Mall. And the new Pike development was built on an area that should have been open space or development related to the coast, as the City holds the coastline in trust for the State of California and needed a special waiver from the State Coastal Commission before going forward with the project. Both developments have seen construction delays and neither is fully occupied.

Whether these new developments are a success or a failure, Skye believes there needs to be much better planning of redevelopment projects and more accountability for how our public funds are spent. On January 1st the Long Beach Greens formally announced the launch of a new campaign to "Redevelop the RDA" at the Long Beach Greenbelt celebration. They are calling on social justice, environmental and neighborhood organizations of all types to join them in this campaign.

Coby Skye is the co-coordinator of the Long Beach Greens and a Civil & Environmental Engineer for the County of Los Angeles. He can be reached at coby@greens.org.