A Veteran Planner Voices Concerns for the Community
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
On March 20, the Port of Los Angeles will hold a public meeting at the Warner Grand Theater, where it and the developers will unveil plans for redeveloping the Ports O’ Call Village site. Contrary to popular belief, Ports O’ Call restaurant will remain open for the foreseeable future, but no formal agreement has been announced. However, many deep community concerns remain about the plan — a plan which seem starkly at odds with what the community had been led to expect dating back almost two decades.
However, sources close to the port indicate that the Ratkovich and Jerico development team are still in negotiations with Ports O’ Call restaurant but the port has not received a Letter of Intent to lease.
“This idea of coming in and making a clean sweep — take everything out — this is 1970s urban renewal. It was a total failure,” said Rafique Khan, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s deputy director of planning, who worked on projects in San Pedro and Wilmington from 1997 to 2008. “You’ve got to bring in all the assets, on the waterfront, who have survived all this time — the Ports O’ Call, the restaurants—they need to be nurtured. Coming in and telling them for two years you’re going to get a holiday — you’re going to create a desert there.”
That’s precisely what happened to Beacon Street in the 1970s.
While Khan professed respect for both the Johnsons’ community investments and Wayne Ratkovich’s development record, he was both puzzled and skeptical of the preliminary plans Random Lengths News obtained through a public records act request from the port.
For a successful development, Khan said, “You have to understand what people are looking for, and translate that into a program. After the program is done, then you know what your marketing plan is, who your client is, what your needs are, then you come and do the physical structure around it.
Unfortunately, in most cases, it’s the other way around. We come in and do the physical things first, and then we look around for how were going to market it.”
So the plans he saw puzzled him.
“I’m not sure these guys really understand the underlying issue: What is the vision of San Pedro of the future 21st century? In my opinion, the core is you have to get new jobs in the area, and you have to understand how do we connect the community to the waterfront. The present plan is in the middle they build a shopping center, and with the promenade it really is further separating the community from the waterfront.”
That’s a glaring problem, given that connecting the community with the waterfront — functionally as well as visually — has been a central guiding theme of waterfront development planning since the end of the Richard Riordan mayoral administration.
“I’m not sure what the thinking behind these plans is,” Khan said. “To give a very gross example, cities are like human beings. Here you have a human being with broken bones, and has not been nourished for generations. You suddenly put a nice suit on the person, and give them a facial and say then, ‘Here we are. Go.”
Khan had “a classic example” in mind, pointing to “the other side of Harbor Boulevard where the port spent considerable dollars on landscaping the area where cruise ships are berthed,” one of the first waterfront development project, over a decade ago.
“There is an elaborate water feature and expensive hardscape. It all looks good, but in terms of the economics of San Pedro, has it made any difference?” he asked. “Unless you have a lot of underpinning, unless people have a desire and reason to go to these places, pretty pictures and pretty buildings don’t matter. People don’t go for buildings,” Khan observed. Rather, “You have to understand what are the underlying issues,” and address them first.
Most significantly, “San Pedro is a waterfront community, and it has lost its connection with the waterfront … losing a connection is difficult. It doesn’t exist anymore,” Khan said. Most of the wide range of jobs residents once had — fishing and processing, shipbuilding and repair — have vanished. “The port is there,” he acknowledged, “But it’s a very big enterprise, and it’s not connected with San Pedro because it’s become too big and the social fabric of the town is torn apart. It was a very small community, a vibrant, small community.”
But for a long time now that fabric has frayed into competing interests.
“They all seem to be pulling in different directions and San Pedro does not have a vision,” he said.
“Unless you craft the vision and know where you’re going, you can’t just start walking. You have to know what your destination is.”
This is more or less what the community managed to do over the course of a decade of planning, from 1999 to 2009, when the Waterfront Development’s Final environmental impact report was approved in a marathon seven-hour meeting in the wee hours of Sept. 30, with approximately 500 people in attendance overall. Despite recurrent clashes with the port, different community factions came together well enough at that time to get a plan they could live with, even though it fell short of the Community Sustainability Plan, whose supporters were drawn from diverse parts of the community from the Sierra Club to the Chamber of Commerce. But things have deteriorated significantly since then, with vastly diminished public input.
“My take on San Pedro is that it really needs a remedy on all three fronts, and that’s physical, economic and vision. Unless these are restored, there’s not going to be much improvement in the community,” Khan explained.
The first one would make a physical connection with the old street grid. That needs to be restored. All the north-south and east-west street must physically connect to the waterfront.
He qualified slightly, in view of the cliffs south of Seventh Street. “Every street does not have to be motor able,” he said. “Having said that, there are streets in LA with very steep gradient; one in my neighborhood — Silverlake — has a very steep grade. The street has become a tourist attraction.” A lesson worth considering. “The point is to create visual corridors that connect the community with its Waterfront,” he continued.
“The street pattern on the two sides of Harbor Boulevard should be of the same character. That is the first step for creating the seamless interface,” another concept that dates back to the Riordan administration.
As for economics, “The land uses in that grid must relate to the community, and must have some bearing which will bring jobs to the community which will bring in new economic base to the community,” Khan said. “Unless these things happen, these new buildings are not going to do anything. Because unless you have the economics in the community, it’s not going to go anywhere.”
Finally, “The last point is the vision, San Pedro was a thriving mid-20th century small community. That is gone. What is the vision for the 21st century?” Khan asked. “Is it going to be a bedroom community? Is it going to be a repository for social service users? Or is it going to be a community that relates to all these people and creates community in which there’s a place for all people?”
The last option is clearly preferable, but as Khan observed that, “We’re so truncated and so bifurcated in our thinking that the interest groups only look at their interests … they don’t look at other interests. I spent 10 years in the community. [It is] my sense is there are certain things that could be done which will really make it into the vibrant, best in all of Southern California.”
The keys are a combination of existing, under-utilized strengths. “Say we’re going to have an art and culture, historic community that will encompass a commercial area, a residential area and the waterfront,” Khan said. “It’s not going to be a typical historical district of LA, but a new district…. We’re not going to just simply live in history, but these are the roots and on the basis of these roots we’re going to plant some new trees, and the new trees could be some new uses, new housing, new commercial activity, which will bring economic activity into the area.”
The existing restaurant scene could be raised to whole new level with a marketing plan including a unified system of free valet parking, for example. A number of older ideas could be synergized — brining in a law college, creating a Wi-Fi district and expanding the arts district — and combined with an idea he’s had since leaving the area — a land swap between the city and the port that would involve giving the parkland around the Korean Bell to the port to establish a university based on maritime uses and security against terrorism, and give San Pedro’s waterfront property to the city for parkland, possibly an arboretum. It could also accommodate museum concepts, which Random Lengths has suggested in the past—a labor museum, a museum of maritime cultures, joint satellites from Los Angeles’s major museums.
Sure, it might seem wildly outlandish. But today’s port is wildly outlandish by 1920s standards. The waterfront planning process was always recognized as a multi-decade affair. Perhaps in our hurry to finish things, we’ve lost sight of where we want to go.