Revitalization Aid Worth the Fight : While few federal neighborhood help programs are successful, the city’s failure to win empowerment zone designation is a blow to the northeast Valley.

The failure of Los Angeles to win a designation as a federal “empowerment zone” for poor neighborhoods that include part of the northeast San Fernando Valley represents a significant financial loss to the city’s economically distressed areas.

The money was worth fighting for. Those responsible for the city’s poorly done application should be held accountable. The city should pursue designation as a 10th full-scale empowerment zone if possible.

At the same time, we should moderate our expectations in light of the track record of federally sponsored neighborhood revitalization. History provides few success stories of a transformation of urban blight into employment-rich middle class neighborhoods.

The story has been essentially the same with President Harry S. Truman’s Urban Renewal, President John F. Kennedy’s “war on poverty,” the Model Cities Program developed by President Lyndon B. Johnson or President Gerald R. Ford’s Community Development Block Grants. Money was plowed into poor neighborhoods with the misplaced expectation of producing physical revitalization of the targeted communities. The success of these programs should not be measured in terms of the physical condition of a particular neighborhood, but rather in terms of newly created opportunities for social and economic mobility.

Over the last 10 years, three-fourths of the states, including California, have enacted legislation creating enterprise zones (the predecessor to empowerment zones). With certain exceptions, these experiments have not produced impressive results--although, in the view of most experts, that is largely because state governments cannot provide the tax breaks that the federal government can offer.

The ability of such programs to create new jobs is questionable. A report by the Urban League of Chicago found that more than 80% of all employment in several cities’ enterprise zones relocated from elsewhere in the same city. Study after study indicates that Southern California’s job base comes from new and growing small business, suggesting that new business in the proposed Pacoima empowerment zone, for example, would probably come from Granada Hills or the City of Commerce rather than another region or state.

Despite solid justification for skepticism, the empowerment zones do seem to have a greater likelihood of success than that of their predecessors.

This is principally because the new effort seeks to leverage federal dollars against state, local and private contributions. The empowerment-zone applications of Chicago and New York spoke of commitments by banks, local businesses, state and local government to invest in the zones. This element was notably lacking in Los Angeles’ application.

In addition to attracting private capital, empowerment zones promise to streamline government regulation, grant wage tax credits and apply a comprehensive approach with respect to child care, public safety, planning and other elements of community building. Job training and job experience will come primarily from the private sector.

Even if empowerment zones do not transform bleak landscapes into oases of prosperity, they can benefit the residents by empowering the most enterprising individuals and families to move out.

Poor neighborhoods are seldom stable, self-sufficient communities. Usually they are home to people who plan to leave the instant they can afford to. Los Angeles has seen a significant movement of minorities and other marginalized groups from areas of urban blight to areas of more affluence. Many of these individuals were assisted, directly or indirectly, by government revitalization programs. As one report indicated, such efforts are “a means of redistributing investment and employment, not a means of achieving more of each.”

In summary, although skepticism about an empowerment zone, including one in the Pacoima area of the Valley, is justified, so is cautious optimism. Individual lives have been improved even though neighborhoods have remained blighted under such programs. Perhaps this time the empowerment zones will begin to change the targeted communities.