‘One Person Who Has a Real Interest Can Make a Difference’

MARVA SMITH BATTLE-BEY heads the Vermont-Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit organization based in South-Central Los Angeles. The corporation’s achievements include putting together the deal that built the Vermont-Slauson shopping center, which opened in 1981. Battle-Bey took over the organization 16 years ago after working in the city’s office of economic development under Mayor Tom Bradley. Under Battle-Bey’s leadership, the nonprofit corporation has built low-cost housing for working-class families, renovated the homes of financially strapped senior citizens and created programs to support fledgling businesses. Battle-Bey has fought doggedly in many ways to improve the economic lives of residents in the community.

On Wednesday, at its annual dinner honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference presented Battle-Bey with its “Economic Justice” award for her years of service in an underserved community. Battle-Bey spoke with LUCILLE RENWICK about her work to help redevelop the Vermont corridor and the struggle to attain economic justice for inner-city residents.

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We have a 10-acre community shopping center here. It has your typical drug store and grocery store. But we also have a Kmart that is one of the first Kmarts to be developed in an inner city on the West Coast. The really important thing about the shopping center is that it brought back major retail into this neighborhood in a way that gave people an opportunity to get the basic needs and services we didn’t have here. When it opened in 1981, this shopping center was the first major retail investment here since the 1965 [Watts] riots.

Since the riots in 1992, we’ve had smaller centers that have been rebuilt, such as a furniture store on 54th and Vermont that went down and was rebuilt into a small center. And there were pockets where people reinvested to rebuild what had been burned down and damaged. I do see a resurgence happening slowly. But I think it’s going to take 10 years before we see the kinds of businesses and building that was once here on Vermont.

The fact that we have people who are homeless, have the kind of joblessness and unemployment we have in such a prosperous nation is not an acceptable predicament for people who live here. People have the right to an opportunity to work, have the right to contribute back to society, have the right to a safe home. But you can’t have these things if people aren’t gainfully employed. And I think this reality is going to hit home to many people as we make this transition from welfare to work. This is what economic justice is basically about. Economic justice says that everyone has a basic right to a job, to a livable wage, to a decent, safe place to live, to be part of a community where people feel they’re stakeholders and where they have a vested interest to work together.

But I feel a lot more apathy in Los Angeles in terms of participating in initiatives or community projects than other cities. When we were going through the empowerment zone process . I saw that there was a lot more citizen participation in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Kansas City, Oakland, Houston. It seemed to be that there were more community driven initiatives and quicker responses to government initiatives in these cities. When they talked about the kinds of entities they had put together to represent the constituents and the people doing business in the empowerment zones, they were much broader based than what we were doing in our city.

In Los Angeles, it’s hard to get support. I don’t know if it’s because people say that we don’t have a general sense of community. But there are only a few things that will touch the hearts of a lot of people and typically that’s something that’s really outrageous or angering. But when you’re really talking about an initiative or a political issue you don’t see a lot of excitement from people in Los Angeles. As a result we’re very fragmented. People work on a district by district or community by community basis and it’s hard to rally the troops.

Perhaps while some people are concentrating on one thing there are other people who may be looking at CRA issues or MTA issues. And we all can’t be everywhere. So instead we need to get more people active. We need to get more individuals involved. People are always relying on organizations and groups, but one person who has a real interest can make a difference.

Every year [the Vermont-Slauson Economic Development Corp.] renovates between 30 and 60 homes belonging to to senior citizens who wouldn’t be able to get their property up to code. We have an entrepreneurial training program for fledgling businesses. And we’ll be opening a microbusiness incubator in April to house 30 small businesses to give people an office in which to operate their small businesses. We’ve done new housing construction with two 20-unit buildings on Florence and one on Central, as part of our affordable housing program.

We’re doing some transit amenities right now through the MTA and the Federal Transportation Authority that has to do with bus shelters and lighting. And we have a youth program that involves entrepreneurial training and conflict resolution and some basic training in terms of community and economic development.

When you can actually see a tangible difference like these things provide, it kind of gives you a little bit more momentum to continue. You realize the times you go before committees or all the letters you have to send out are worth it. It doesn’t mean your community is the direct beneficiary of everything you do, but it can mean that other communities benefit, and that’s part of what we do.