Bulldozers vs. Community
Will L.A. Unified live up to its promise to Eco-Village?
By Joanna Lin
The Los Angeles Eco-Village is talking up its shared streets project, a county-funded initiative to promote a more livable, communal neighborhood through widened sidewalks and slowed car traffic.
But whether people attending the dedication ceremony next Thursday, March 20, are in a festive mood depends on an announcement coming down the night before. Word is expected on a proposed public school that threatens to break apart the very neighborhood the Eco-Village has tried to bring together.
The L.A. Unified School District will announce next Wednesday its preferred site for a new elementary school. One of the two sites under consideration includes part of the Eco-Village’s two-block neighborhood, located off of Vermont Avenue.
“A kind of organic cohesiveness, a certain kind of neighborhood integrity, would be lost or impaired,” says Lara Morrison, who has lived at the Eco-Village for about a decade, about the would-be school on White House Place.
Morrison is not alone in her concerns. Over the past two months, hundreds of community members have attended three meetings with L.A. Unified on the issue. Eco-Villagers and their supporters have written letters to city and school board officials. Nearly 800 people, from Los Angeles to New Orleans to Osnabrueck, Germany, have signed an online petition to save the Eco-Village from eminent domain.
For Robyn Morningstar, the past two months have been all too familiar. Her home is among the 32 multifamily and three single-family housing units that L.A. Unified would acquire for Central Region Elementary School No. 20. It is also among the homes L.A. Unified considered 21 years ago.
“I have to admit I am very depressed. It’s really taken its toll to go through this again,” says Morningstar, a law librarian who has lived on South Madison Avenue for 22 years.
Morningstar is her neighborhood watch’s block captain, and worries a school would devastate her community.
“We have a stable community; we’ve been here a long time,” she says. “We actually know each other – that is somewhat rare – and yet they’re targeting us.”
Morningstar recalled that when L.A. Unified came to her neighborhood in 1987 – bringing with it the White House Place Primary Center that now serves 189 preschool and kindergarten students – then-school board representative Jackie Goldberg promised it would be the last time.
Goldberg remembers her promise, too.
“We did make a commitment to them,” she says. “We spent a tremendous amount of time negotiating with them, working it out. And I think people really believed, and I believed, that … it would be counterproductive to take them out. Why would you go after a group that actually connects to the community, provides assistance to the community and gets people involved in environmental issues, particularly children?”
But Tom Calhoun, development manager for the district’s central region, has another take on the matter: “In the school-siting business, you never say never.”
In choosing a preferred site for the school, Calhoun says L.A. Unified is looking to “minimize impacts on the community at all costs.” Right now, he and his development team are weighing their options, considering the Eco-Village neighborhood and another site just one block north.
Both proposed sites would use land the district already owns. Whereas the site on White House Place would absorb the primary center into a 950-seat school, the other site, next to Virgil Middle School, would create 800 seats and maintain the primary center. The Virgil site would take five commercial but no residential properties.
Some community members have questioned the district’s need for additional schools at all, citing declining enrollment and deep budget cuts. Calhoun and district officials project enrollment climbing by 2014, and say they are building for the long-term needs of the community.
Not everyone agrees what is in the community’s best long-term interests.
“Looking at long-term needs, 50 to 100 years, we definitely need another school,” says Caroline Sim, the city’s assistant project manager for the Hollywood and Central Region in the Community Redevelopment Agency. “At the same time, I personally don’t know if another school is needed in the area.”
There are four elementary schools in addition to the primary center in the area. Frank del Olmo Elementary School is one block west of both proposed sites.
Sim says the Beverly-Vermont community has not seen its share of the city’s rampant redevelopment and that another school would hinder such efforts, which she says have so far only come from the Eco-Village.
“That area needs other kinds of redevelopment,” she says. “I don’t know if having a school in an area that’s been kind of stagnant is a good idea for redevelopment as a whole for the neighborhood.”
Sim credits L.A. Unified for listening to the community and looking at a number of site options for the school. She says the Virgil site best appeases the community and the CRA.
City Councilmember Eric Garcetti has endorsed the Virgil site for having a lower impact on the community than the White House Place site.
Published: 03/12/2008
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