RAZING CALIFORNIA : Has Urban Renewal Really Improved Our Cities? The Answer Is Clear-Cut.

Remember, as they now say incessantly on late-night TV commercials, the Fabulous Fifties? Even if you cast aside, as the extremes of the bell curve, “Happy Days” and McCarthyism, the decade brought us so much good stuff: Perry Como, Formica, the inescapable color combination of charcoal black and pink.

And urban renewal. When America was at its we-can-do-anything, look-out-for-our-bomb-buddy peak, urban renewal was the kind of crackpot idea that just had to catch on. Its premise was simple: There are parts of cities so incurably squalid, so devoid of charm and commerce and hope, that only government muscle can prevent their particular cancer from spreading to nearby, healthier, nabes.

The gentlemen who thought up this strategy were city planners. It may have been natural for them to assume that the best people to entrust with the power of busting up and, maybe, re-creating whole little worlds within cities were--surprise!--city planners. Actually, it’s only fair. If somebody asked me who should rule the world, I’d say, “Guys who write columns for The Times and do voices on ‘The Simpsons.’ ”

Urban renewal was never universally popular. For years, it was derided in the black community as “Negro removal,” although everybody who happens to be in the way of the Big Bulldozer becomes a member of an oppressed minority. There was, for example, the white ex-Marine who made headlines years ago by standing in the doorway of his little Hollywood bungalow, refusing to let the county buy him out so that it could build the Hollywood Studio Museum on his property. He’s long gone, and the museum--well, don’t you find the lines there just insufferably long?

When urban renewal was in full swing, you could go into any American city and immediately spot the process in action. There was always a large patch of land in or near downtown, surrounded by life, that was suddenly, starkly empty: a ghost hamlet, a bombed-out district, the victim of the ultimate in friendly fire.

Federal law required that only “blighted” areas could qualify for this tender attention, so local authorities learned not to giggle as they labeled a neighborhood of home-owning elderly Jews, or L.A.’s last remaining stand of virgin Victorian houses, a sink of civic decay. Now, years later, some condo and office seedlings have finally sprouted in the scorched earth. But the stumps of old neighborhoods saved from the official reaper have made themselves into fine neighborhoods that never stopped contributing ever-increasing tax revenues to the public wallet. Across the line, their “renewed” neighbors will take decades to pay off the cost of buying and then giving to developers, at after-Christmas-sale prices, the sites of “blight.”

It’s too bad for the old Jews and the blacks and Filipinos and everybody else who is still being kicked out of their homes because they are in the way of some grandiose scheme. And it’s too bad for the “urban pioneers” who bought condos in the renewal developments that didn’t turn out to be the lively urban centers that the authorities advertised. Hey, if truth-in-advertising laws applied to government, Michael Milken would be holding cellblock reunions for his old City Hall pals every afternoon.

It’s also too bad for the rest of us. When the Big Bulldozer moves, it sometimes knocks down parts of our common treasure. Angel’s Flight was a funicular railway, cuter than 10 Bay Area cable cars, that used to trundle up and down Bunker Hill before the place was improved enough to post “If you lived here, you’d be home now” signs. The cars and the rails and the booths were put in storage about 20 years ago, with the promise that they would all be reinstalled after the hill was sufficiently renewed. They never were. And, at a time when cities’ budgets are so squeezed that they’re cutting down on police beatings just out of fear of expensive legal judgments, can we really afford to keep slicing off large slabs of the property-tax base to feed the renewal machine’s hunger for land, homes and families that don’t fit the computer model of Demographic Heaven?

Parts of cities grow, prosper, wilt, die and revivify themselves. We need the government to protect us against products of the marketplace’s overactive pituitary, the occasional Aaron Spelling who would impose an excessively grotesque projection of himself on his surroundings. But who are we supposed to turn to when the part of Aaron Spelling is played by the government?