But when asked by the Weekly, Garcetti's staff could not provide basic figures that might shed light on what their enhancement efforts have produced. Garcetti's team does not know how many "affordable" housing units have been built in Hollywood, or the total amount of housing built or lost, since 2001. Nor could Garcetti's aides, whose salaries and overhead cost L.A. taxpayers about $1.5 million a year, provide the Weekly even a ballpark figure for how much taxpayer money has subsidized Hollywood's makeover since 2001.
Robb says one of Garcetti's top priorities has always been affordable housing. Yet Barbara Schultz, the directing attorney of the housing unit at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which helps working-class and poor people in disputes involving housing rights and landlord-tenant disagreements, says Garcetti hasn't stood out. In fact, Schultz says, "There's not any top council member whose top priority is affordable housing."
Ted Soqui
Ted Soqui
Leon Gubler, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president
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Dennis Frenchman, a well-regarded professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says smart policymakers always know how their planning strategies are playing out in communities. "They should have a sense of demographic changes and what's been happening," says Frenchman, one of the world's leading experts on building and maintaining a sustainable city. "They should know if people have been pushed out."
Father Mandala knows what is happening at the neighborhood level. He has seen his mostly Latino parishioners leave Hollywood, while the Latino population grew in the rest of the city. He has seen parents take their kids out of Blessed Sacrament Elementary School. Between 2000 and 2010, student enrollment at that grade school plummeted from 250 to 100.
Contrary to Yusef Robb's claim, Mandala says these people did not want to leave. "If they could have bought a home in Hollywood," says the priest, "they would have. ... It's bad for Hollywood because if your goal is to have a mixed-income community, you're losing tax-paying citizens. These are the teachers, the contractors, the furniture makers of the community."
Wehbe argues that Garcetti is very connected to what's happening, declaring, "I bet you anything there isn't a single councilmember who walks the neighborhoods every month and knocks on doors like Eric. To me, that's saying something."
But Dowell Myers, a demographer and urban planning professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, who researched Los Angeles County's shrinking youth population, predicts that Hollywood's schools will drop in enrollment and Hollywood will become less family-oriented, with more of an emphasis on nightlife. That means fewer families will be around to keep an eye on the neighborhood. "They help to keep streets safer," Myers says.
Garcetti aide Robb said in a recent L.A. Weekly story reporting on the rise of Koreatown that Garcetti is not necessarily interested in duplicating Hollywood's urban-renewal template in Koreatown. Robb warned, "A robust nightlife is good for the economy, but too many night spots in a neighborhood can create dead spots during the day" and community "balance" is needed.
Myers says L.A. political leaders and planners have already gone too far to draw a high-end crowd to Hollywood. "We don't need more condos," he says. "We need more rentals. Rentals are where you house lower-income and poor people."
Frenchman has a similar message for Los Angeles' leaders: "Diversity is the key to long-term sustainability. ... Density without diversity makes things worse."
Mercedes Cortes sits in a back room of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church on Sunset while trumpets in a mariachi band sound off for a mass celebrating the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like some parishioners, Cortes still drives in from the Valley to Hollywood to worship, and the church is jammed with Latino parents and children.
But not everyone returns to Hollywood. "That's why we lost so many members of the church," Cortes says. "They moved to Palmdale, North Hollywood and Burbank" — but not because they were better off. Instead, many doubled up with relatives as the recession bore down.
Hollywood's business community often says that the catalyst that really set off development in Hollywood was Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg's pet project, the Hollywood & Highland mall, which houses the Kodak Theatre (now Dolby Theater), home to the Academy Awards show.
But Cortes says the glitzy, architecturally unloved mall has had a more complex long-term effect on the bigger neighborhood around it: "Once the Kodak Theatre was built," Cortes says, "we started seeing the rents going higher and higher."
Cortes generally likes Eric Garcetti, but she noticed a difference between him and his predecessor, Goldberg. Goldberg at least got involved in the community without prodding or protest, she recalls.
Garcetti, according to Cortes, did not seek out members of her activist group but waited for them to complain.
As if talking directly to Garcetti, the grandmother and retired house cleaner delivers up one of their complaints, still unanswered after all these years: "When they start to build something, why does the middle class have to suffer for that?"
Reach the writer at pmcdonald@laweekly.com.
[Correction: The original version of this story erroneously stated that Eric Garcetti has no Latino ancestry. His father, Gil Garcetti, is Latino and a number of his father's ancestors were Latino. Further, Garcetti's great-grandfather moved from Italy to Mexico alone, not with family members as originally reported.]
