Posted: November 15th, 2005

Los Angeles Daily Journal

Anne Marie Ruff
Daily Journal Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES - A 20-year legal battle over 14 acres at the corner of Alameda and 41st streets in South Los Angeles points up how legal strategies have evolved, as part of the Urban Park Movement, for securing open space in a city that is ‘park-poor.’

Meanwhile, the latest chapter in the fight for open space is being written a few miles away in East Los Angeles.

Here, 100 acres of undeveloped, rolling hills owned by the Department of Water and Power recently has been designated as Ascot Hills park. The conversion required just a few minutes of discussion with the key players.

The earlier battle over the Alameda space began in the mid-1980s when the city bought the land through eminent domain from its owner, Ralph Horowitz, developer of Home Depot on Figueroa Street and the Los Angeles River Center. The city’s plan was to build a garbage incinerator. But the community successfully fought to stop the incinerator.

What they got instead was a 14-acre vacant lot.

The difference between these two sites is almost 20 years of lessons learned.

Robert Garcia, Executive Director of the Center for Law in the Public Interest said of the Alameda space, “with 20/20 hindsight, it would have been better to come up with an alternative affirmative public good, rather than just stop the development we were opposed to”.

In 1996, Garcia was part of a coalition that included the Busriders Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Environmental Defense that had just won a federal consent decree against the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

He received a call from Mayor Richard Riordan.

Garcia said, “He wanted me to look at Ascot Hills [in East Los Angeles] as a possible park site. He said, ‘You need to bring a lawsuit against the city. Suing that park allocation is discriminatory.’”

Garcia was surprised: “I said, ‘You’re the mayor. You should be able to make Ascot Hills into a park.’ But Riordan said he needed the pressure of a lawsuit to get it through.”

Garcia figured that the same approach he had used against the MTA - arguing for equal access to public resources - could be used to argue for parks as well.

But before he could test this theory with Ascot Hills, Majestic Realty, the huge commercial developer that built the Staples Center, proposed buying and developing the Cornfields, a 32-acre abandoned rail yard east of Chinatown in 1999.

The Cornfields had been owned by Union Pacific for a hundred years but unused for the last 10. Garcia saw this as an opportunity to suggest to the city the development of a park on the parcel.

He said Riordan, who favored the commercial development, “fought us tooth and nail.”

So Garcia developed a strategy that was political and legal. Political pressure came through the formation of the Chinatown Alliance.

His legal theory blended civil rights, environmental law and historic preservation. His legal strategy included filing a California Environmental Quality Act claim in state court and an administrative complaint with the federal Housing and Urban Development authority (Majestic was seeking $12 million, or nearly 75 percent of the project’s cost in HUD subsidies).

The complaints proposed a park as an alternative and argued Majestic had failed to do a comprehensive environmental impact report. In response to the complaint, HUD withheld any funding, pending the completion of an environmental impact report considering both the development and park alternatives.

William Delvak, a partner at Latham & Watkins, represented Majestic. He said legal strategies based on civil rights or environmental protection were irrelevant. “It was a simple land use dispute,” he said. “I don’t think land use litigation is a very efficient way to secure open space. The best way is through zoning and the city’s general planning process.”

But Delvak negotiated with the Center for Law in the Public Interest and came up with an agreement that if the center could find funding to buy the land for a park, Majestic would pull out. If it could not find funding, the center would withdraw its opposition to the development.

The state was willing to spend $36 million worth of the $2.1 billion park bond authorized by Proposition 12 to buy the site. Majestic pulled out.

Although it will take another several years to secure the funding to develop the Cornfields into a full-fledged park, Garcia saw this as a vindication of his strategy.

The Center for Law in the Public Interest has used a similar legal rationale and strategy to secure the Taylor yards (adjacent to the Cornfields) and land in Baldwin Hills for open space.

As for Riordan’s idea to create a park in Ascot Hills - it was opposed by the community, which preferred the undeveloped hills to the leveling Riordan proposed to create soccer fields.

In 2004 Garcia met with Joe Edminston of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. They hatched a plan to propose the land, which had been owned by the Department of Water and Power for the last 80 years, be turned into a passive park (an open area without playgrounds or sports equipment).

They organized community support and took their plan to Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who had a good record on environmental and minority issues. “It was amazing. Within 15 minutes he said we could make it happen. It didn’t require a lawsuit or a legal complaint. Villaraigosa exhibited leadership,” Garcia said.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy now has a $1-a-year 50-year, renewable lease from the Department of Water and Power. It will restore native vegetation and maintain a park ranger at Ascot Hills.

Garcia considers it a success for the Urban Park Movement and the evolution of his legal and political strategy.

Larry Kaplan, the L.A. area director for the Trust for Public Land, commends Garcia and the Center for Law in the Public Interest for their successes but thinks there need to be alternate strategies. “If you are not able to get open space through regulation or litigation, then buy it.” The Trust for Public Land has basically worked as a real estate organization to buy open space with public and private money and transfer it to park districts or private land trusts.

While this has been a long-used strategy in rural areas, it is relatively new in urban settings. The use of urban land trusts has grown as part of the Urban Park Movement.

In the last 10 years the Trust for Public Land has helped secure open space in the Ballona wetlands, in areas along the Los Angeles River northeast of downtown and in the city of Maywood, in Watts near Jordan Downs and in the Cornfields, following Majestic’s dispute with the Center for Law in the Public Interest.

In a similar fashion, the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust has helped raise public funding, known as conservation financing, to buy up open spaces in the last year and a half. Tsilah Burman, executive director of the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust, said, “We work with really small parcels, 5,000-to-12,000 square feet.”

While the trust received seed money from the city, “as an independent nonprofit we have more freedom to be more entrepreneurial and work outside of the bureaucracy,” she said.

But Garcia is optimistic that with the current mayor, the bureaucracy is open to open-space proposals.

Ascot Hills is now the largest open space in east Los Angeles, a claim that previously went to Evergreen Cemetery. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said, “Now the kids of East Los Angeles know they don’t have to die to get open space.”