Las Urbanistas

Forget the talk about traffic, zoning and even day laborers. At Los Angeles City Hall, the fight over a new Home Depot may boil down to a single question: How many lobbyists will it take to open one hardware store in the San Fernando Valley?

Home Depot’s push to expand into Sunland-Tujunga might seem like the most local of controversies, one pitting a retail chain against angry neighbors worried about blight and congested streets.

But over the course of two years, the issues surrounding the proposed Home Depot on Foothill Boulevard have expanded to include race, the nation’s immigration reform bill and, not surprisingly, Home Depot’s ambitious plans for Southern California.

With a final vote scheduled for today, the fight over the hardware giant has attracted not just vocal residents of the northeast Valley, but a contingent of highly paid lobbyists and lobbying consultants from across the city — so many that the issue now has one lobbying professional for each member of the 15-seat City Council.

Since the controversy reached the council two weeks ago, Councilman Dennis Zine has heard from Rick Taylor, a lobbyist and political consultant who worked on his campaign. Councilman Herb Wesson received a call from his friend, the lobbyist and political consultant Kerman Maddox, who is a partner in Taylor’s firm, Dakota Communications.

Councilwoman Jan Perry spoke with lobbying consultant Richard Alatorre, a former city councilman who represented neighborhoods near downtown Los Angeles.

And Councilman Richard Alarcon received a call from lobbyist Fernando Guerra, who has two clients in Alarcon’s San Fernando Valley district.

“In my five years as a council member, I have never seen or experienced the kind of lobbying that’s occurred,” said Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who hopes to persuade her colleagues that Home Depot performed such extensive repair work to an old Kmart that it must undergo a more thorough environmental review.

Home Depot has changed tactics as the project has moved closer to a final vote, shifting its emphasis from supporters in orange T-shirts to well-connected surrogates in business suits, each with ties to specific council members. Greuel, who made business and transit issues the cornerstone of her tenure, has already received calls from such civic leaders such as David Fleming, board chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce — and a lawyer with Latham & Watkins, which represents Home Depot.

Home Depot hired Alatorre and former Assemblyman Mike Roos in recent days, said company spokesman Damian Jones. With the company planning to open 11 more stores in Los Angeles alone, it needs such firepower to prevent the council from creating a new precedent that could affect other potential sites, Jones said.

“This is a big issue for us,” he added. “We’ve been battling on this for two years.”

Even as the council met Tuesday, Home Depot lobbyists occupied a room behind the chamber normally devoted to closed-session meetings, asking council members to come in and hear their arguments. Perry kicked them out, but only after they had made their case to Councilman Bill Rosendahl.

That kind of access has been eye-opening for Home Depot opponents like Abby Diamond, an organizer with the Sunland-Tujunga Alliance. “We definitely feel like there’s a big machine at work that we can’t possibly compete with in influence and dollars,” she said.

While Home Depot representatives made their case, council members also heard from a key foe of Home Depot: the Do-It Center on Foothill Boulevard.

That company has its own cluster of lobbyists tracking the issue, including Arnie Berghoff, who spoke to council members as Home Depot lobbyists roamed the halls elsewhere.

The involvement of Do-It Center instantly provided fodder for Home Depot, which distributed a 114-page booklet to council members accusing its opponents of being anti-competitive. The booklet also included dozens of survey forms — some solicited by Home Depot, others collected by the Sunland Tujunga Neighborhood Council — in which residents described Home Depot as a magnet for day laborers.

Many of the cards complained about day laborers, while others directly attacked Mexicans and undocumented workers. “Don’t want illegal aliens hanging around,” said one unsigned form turned into the neighborhood council.

Diamond said her group was equally offended by the remarks. “Unfortunately, there are ignorant and intolerant people in every town,” she said. “Race, day laborers or immigration has never been an issue in our campaign.”

The intensity of the Home Depot lobbying effort may backfire with some council members, who accused the company of being a bad neighbor. Councilman Bernard C. Parks said Home Depot resisted requests that it provide better maintenance of a store in his district.

Parks voiced particular dismay that Home Depot inserted language in a recent federal immigration bill — legislation that ultimately didn’t pass — that would have barred cities from requiring large hardware stores to construct day labor centers on their parking lots.

Jones, the Home Depot representative, said the issue has no connection with the debate in Sunland-Tujunga. “Different topic, different day,” he said.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

Swept Up in Area’s Demographic Shift, Loudoun Neighborhood Wrestles With Immigrant Presence

By Sandhya Somashekhar; Washington Post Staff Writer; Tuesday, August 14, 2007; A01

 

In some ways, Sterling Park is the same as it was 40 years ago, when it was founded as Loudoun County’s first suburban-style planned community — a place where working-class families could find jobs, affordable homes and a piece of the American dream.

In other ways, though, the community has never been so different. One recent morning, Spanish ballads blared from the open door of Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant. A cadre of Latino children zoomed along the sidewalk on scooters in front of Sterling Elementary School, where a sign urging parents to register their children was printed in English and Spanish.

 

For decades, the conservative, largely white neighborhood of a few thousand families was isolated from the sweeping demographic changes that transformed Northern Virginia into one of the most diverse regions in the nation.

Today, Sterling Park is on the front line of that change. The number of Hispanics has surged since 2000 in Loudoun, the Census Bureau reported last week, with many of them settling in Sterling Park. The community is at the heart of an intensifying debate over illegal immigration that led the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to join Prince William and several other Virginia jurisdictions last month in approving resolutions promising to crack down on illegal immigrants who use county services or commit crimes.

Many Sterling Park residents have praised the board’s action, saying the newcomers have brought with them a flood of illegal immigrants, whom they blame for everything from run-down houses to what they perceive as an increase in crime.

Immigrant advocates agree that the aging neighborhood — where nearly every block has a house with peeling paint or an unkempt yard, and gangs are a persistent problem — has seen better days. But they say the critics, and the politicians who have responded to them, are connecting a jumble of issues that have nothing to do with illegal immigration.

The debate has sharpened largely because of a backlash among longtime residents upset by the changes in the town.

“People I talk to are very concerned about degradation of their neighborhoods, property values, overcrowding, lack of maintenance on homes — that type of thing,” said state Del. Thomas Davis Rust (R), who represents Sterling Park and nearby Herndon and supports the resolutions. “Most people that have talked to me blame illegal immigration and believe there is a direct link. Do I have proof that there’s a link? No. But that is what people believe.”

One such resident is Fran Brocke, 76, of Ashburn, who lived in Sterling Park for 43 years but moved in October because her neighborhood, she said, was being “taken over by illegal aliens.” She is a member of Help Save Loudoun, a group that opposes illegal immigration.

“It really breaks my heart,” said Brocke, recalling the brick split-level house on Church Road where she raised her five kids. “People thought I’d never leave. But it just got to the point where I didn’t feel safe anymore.”

Defenders of the immigrants say many of the criticisms are not supported by statistics.

For instance, although there is a widespread perception that crime has increased in Sterling, sheriff’s office data show that nearly every kind of crime has decreased since 2000. Last year, Sterling Park saw a few high-profile shootings and gang-related incidents. But according to the Loudoun sheriff’s office, only one in 20 gang members in the county is in the country illegally, and most are U.S. citizens.

Brocke and others say Sterling has been plagued by illegal boarding houses that rent rooms in single-family homes to illegal immigrants.

From July 2006 to June 2007, officials received 198 complaints of overcrowded homes, said Keith Fairfax, head of the county’s residential overcrowding enforcement office. Only a few turned out to be boarding houses in which landlords rented homes to more than a dozen people, he said.

The county doesn’t track what percentage of inspections turn up violations, Fairfax said. The most common examples of violations were people sleeping in basement rooms with windows that were too small under Virginia law or three people sleeping in a room considered big enough for only two.

Often, inspectors found Bible study groups, people coming by to assist sick relatives, well-wishers visiting newborn babies and similar get-togethers, Fairfax said.

Laura Valle, executive director of the Hispanic advocacy group La Voz of Loudoun, agreed that Sterling Park has seen better days. But she has a different explanation for the changes. Since the community was founded in the early 1960s, the buildings are beginning to show their age, she said. And in a county where the average single-family home costs $660,000, Sterling Park has less expensive, relatively affordable houses that attract people for whom survival, not household maintenance, is a top priority.

That includes new immigrants, especially Hispanics, who were attracted to the construction jobs that proliferated in fast-growing Loudoun during the past decade, she said.

Valle believes there could be a connection, though tenuous, between some of the problems the residents complain of and illegal immigration.

“There is a connection to the extent that if you are an undocumented immigrant, your capacity to improve your economic situation and integrate into society is greatly reduced,” she said. “But in the scope of things, that’s really insignificant. Even if you were to miraculously deport every undocumented person, these issues wouldn’t go away.”

A 37-year-old Sterling Park woman, who asked that her name not be used because she came to Virginia illegally from Mexico last year, bristles at the suggestion that her neighborhood is run down and overrun with gangs.

The Sterling Park home she rents from a relative is modestly furnished but tidy. A sprinkler sits idle in her yard. Four cars are lined up in the driveway, and the lamppost is wound with Christmas lights. She said she and her husband, their three children and three other family members live there.

“All of us — my kids, too — we work all the time, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the house,” she said with the aid of a translator. “But I think it looks pretty good.”

Some activists believe the longtime residents’ concerns reflect a desire to return to a time when their community was more homogenous.

The Census figures released last week show Loudoun’s minority population is one of the fastest-growing in the nation. Sterling Park, in particular, has seen a striking increase in the Hispanic population: Last year, one in three students at the neighborhood’s Park View High School was Hispanic, compared with about one in 10 in 2000, according to the state.

“The community has been changing very rapidly, and maybe much to the unhappiness of some residents, many of those new people are not lily-white,” said Mukit Hossain, president of the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee, which is based in the Sterling area and has been organizing opposition to the resolutions. “There has been an influx of a lot of immigrants into this area, which I’m sure makes some people nervous.”

The residents who called for the county’s action say they are not racist; they are simply fed up with those who show up uninvited and then treat the community with disrespect.

“The issue is coming over here illegally, staying illegally and doing things illegally. It’s about the rule of law,” said Larry Wilber, 61, a remodeling contractor who has lived in Sterling Park for 11 years.

Mike Amos, 32, a paralegal who grew up in Sterling Park, said, “I’ve seen my home town completely transformed from what it used to be, and not for the better.”

The strong anti-illegal immigrant stand among longtime Sterling Park residents is not surprising considering its political history. Until 2005, when Democrat David E. Poisson was elected in his place, Richard H. Black (R) represented the Sterling area in the House of Delegates for four terms. He was known as one of the state’s most conservative politicians.

The area’s representative on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors is Eugene A. Delgaudio (R), executive director of an anti-gay organization based in Falls Church. Delgaudio, who is up for reelection in November, was the main sponsor of the Loudoun resolution cracking down on illegal immigrants. In a note to constituents last month, he warned of “invasions of illegal aliens who turn safe neighborhoods into filthy, crowded slums.”

The rhetoric disturbs Jeanne West, his Democratic opponent. She believes illegal immigration is a distraction from the real problems of the neighborhood: its age and the lack of attention paid to it by elected officials.

“I don’t want to be this Pollyanna who says this it is not a problem, but I don’t want to lay all of it at the feet of illegal immigrants,” she said. “This is still a nice family neighborhood. Something needs to be done to make sure we get the amenities and the resources so we can keep the neighborhood desirable.”

Brocke, Wilber and others say that they’re not without compassion and that they welcome those who are in the country legally. It’s those who flout the law that bother them, they said.

“I don’t want someone coming to my country and building another dang country inside of it,” Wilber said. “It’s like if you came home and found someone in your house and you said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And they said: ‘Oh, the door was open; I just came in. By the way, I’m going to change some other things in your home, too.’ “

Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

The ancient Khmer city of Angkor in Cambodia was the largest preindustrial metropolis in the world, with a population near 1 million and an urban sprawl that stretched over an area similar to modern-day Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.

The city’s spread over an area of more than 115 square miles was made possible by a sophisticated technology for managing and harvesting water for use during the dry season — including diverting a major river through the heart of the city.

But that reliance on water led to the city’s collapse in the 1500s as overpopulation and deforestation filled the canals with sediment, overwhelming the city’s ability to maintain the system, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The hydraulic system became “not manageable, no matter how many resources were thrown at it,” said archeologist Damian Evans of the University of Sydney in Australia, the lead author of the paper.

But during the six centuries that the city thrived, it was unparalleled, particularly because it was one of the very few civilizations that sprang up in a tropical setting, said archeologist Vernon L. Scarborough of the University of Cincinnati, who was not involved in the research.

Just one section of the city, called West Baray, was many times “larger than the entire 9-square-kilometer hillock on which sat Tikal, the largest city in Central America,” he said.

“The scale is truly unparalleled,” added archeologist William A. Saturno of Boston University, who also was not involved.

“Forest environments are not good ones for civilizations . . . because they require intensively manipulating the environment,” he said. “Angkor is the epitome of this, and it is going to be the model for how tropical civilizations are interpreted.”

Old and new technologies

The new data come from an unusual agglomeration of both old and new technologies. The core data came from a synthetic aperture radar unit flown on the space shuttle in 2000 and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

The radar pierced low-lying clouds and vegetation to give an accurate picture of soil density, local structures and moisture in soil, which reflects growing conditions.

The images revealed, for example, the characteristic moat-enclosed local temples and artificial ponds used for water storage and irrigation.

This information was supplemented with photographs taken from ultralight aircraft flown over the city at low speeds and altitudes.

Finally, the researchers used motor scooters to traverse the city and closely examine sites revealed on the radar images. But so many sites have been revealed, Evans said, that the researchers are only partway through this process.

The group, collectively called the Greater Angkor Project, released a partial map three years ago. The new one released Monday contains, among other things, an additional 386 square miles of urban area, at least 74 long-lost temples and more than 1,000 newly recognized artificial ponds.

Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which got its start in AD 802 when the god-king Jayavarman II declared the region’s independence from Java. At its height, the empire covered not only Cambodia but also parts of modern-day Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

It is perhaps best known for Angkor Wat, the magnificent temple built by King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century.

Angkor has been studied for more than a century, but early scholars were so overwhelmed by the artworks and architecture, as well as the political successions, that they ignored the archeology, said coauthor Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney.

In the late 1960s, French archeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier began a more formal study of the ruins, but that work was halted for more than 20 years by the war that broke out in 1970.

After the war, archeologist Christophe Pottier of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient in Siem Reap, another coauthor, renewed the work, beginning what eventually grew into the current project.

Disputes over history

In the process, the researchers have begun solving many of the disputes that have arisen over the city’s history, Evans said.

“The debate has always been . . . was it large enough, was the manipulation of the landscape intensive enough to cause environmental problems?” Evans said. “The answer is definitively yes.”

Other arguments have been based on the assumption that Khmer hydraulic engineering technology was rather rudimentary, he said. “What our research has shown is that it was extremely sophisticated and highly complex,” he said.

Many of the reservoirs and walls of canals were constructed of compacted earth, he said, but junctions and other crucial points in the system were “quite sophisticated stone structures.”

The Khmer built, for example, a massive stone structure to divert the Siem Reap River from its old bed through the center of the city. Other sites have stone structures built into the walls to manage the inflow and outflow of water, he said.

The system was complex enough that the Khmer could have grown rice throughout the year and not just during the rainy season, Evans said. It is not yet clear if they did so, however.

“The intentional movement of earth to create the whole water system is just really mind-boggling,” Saturno said. “It was an enormous undertaking” that required not just administrative skills, but also engineering know-how and massive amounts of physical labor.

But in the end, maintenance became too labor-intensive, Evans said. As trees were removed from the landscape, sediment began accumulating in the canals at a rate more rapid than it could be removed. Many dike walls collapsed, although it is not yet known when that occurred.

“We’re going now and excavating [the sites] on the ground, and trying to get a grip on when they happened — whether they were a precursor of the decline, a symptom or the system gradually falling into ruin after they left,” he said.

AMSTERDAM, Aug. 8 — On a recent Saturday during the confusion of this watery city’s annual Gay Pride Parade along the majestic Princes Canal, a beach umbrella was knocked into the water from the foredeck of Jackie Wijnakker’s houseboat, so she dove into the water to fetch it, unsuccessfully. It was only the second time in 17 years that she had jumped into the canal, and she cannot recall what she was trying to retrieve the first time. At any rate, she said with a laugh, “I’m too old to be diving into canals.”

She told the tale as a testament to how clean the water is, despite its murky, khaki color. “The canals are flushed regularly,” said Ron Van Heukelom, a neighbor who lives on dry land and has never ventured into the canal.

The flushing is necessary because, while most of Amsterdam’s 2,800 houseboats have running water, electricity and gas heat, few are connected to sewerage systems and continue to spill their waste into the canals.

The houseboats’ lack of toilet training is their dirty little secret, one that sits uncomfortably with a new generation of wealthier, more demanding owners who are leading a gentrification of the houseboat scene. In the process, they are displacing the less affluent boat people, many of whom are relics of the 1960s and 1970s era of flower power now struggling to pay the upkeep on their boats.

“The water is cleaner than it looks,” said Monique J. M. Jacobs, an official of the city agency responsible for water and the boats. The canals, she explained, are flushed by opening and closing locks about twice a week, and in summer more often. “Small fish are coming back, and also birds that feed off the fish,” she said. “In the old days it was awful. It stank in summer.”

The city wants to go further. It plans to install sewage pipes along the canals for the boats to hook into. This poses a threat to boat people like Ms. Wijnakker, who will have to pay about $28,000 to link up to the new system. The threat is not imminent; boat owners will have until 2017 to hook up.

Houseboats were traditionally the refuge of people without the means to live on dry land. After World War II, working-class families took to the water when housing on land was unavailable, and old canal barges were cheap, as the Dutch renewed their fleet.

“It’s difficult to find a good house on land,” said Pom Dupré, who has lived for 20 years on a 65-foot boat, the Nova Cura, along the canal. “And of course, this is a fine neighborhood,” she added, glancing at the stately 17th-century homes along the canal, many of them law offices or professional services.

There are drawbacks, she admits. Every four years the boat has to be hauled to a dry dock to have its hull checked for canal-worthiness. The family must find a place to stay, or live on the boat in the wharf; water pipes, which are exposed to the air between boat and canal wall, often freeze in the winter.

To make ends meet, or simply to enjoy onboard company, some boat owners have transformed their boats into bed-and-breakfasts. Ms. Wijnakker began taking in guests three years ago and now does a busy trade in summer.

Two years ago, Luc Couvée, 51, a graphic artist, and his wife, Laura Tollenaar, bought a canal freighter on the canal, then added two showers and two bedrooms to take in paying guests. “I’m a very boat-minded person,” Mr. Couvée said. “And it’s cheaper than an apartment, though not by much.”

The couple paid about $420,000 for the boat, which they renamed Vreiheid, or freedom. An apartment in the neighborhood would have cost about $700,000. They have solved the sewage problem, installing the necessary plumbing and a cesspool that can be emptied regularly. When the city’s plumbing is in place, they will be ready.

The popularity of houseboats reflects a general awakening in Amsterdam to the beauty of water. “Up to the 1970s and ’80s, Amsterdam’s water was forgotten,” said Maarten Kloos, an architect who runs Arcam, an independent foundation that promotes architecture. “Now, not only houseboats, floating has gained currency.”

Indeed, the architecture of some new apartment buildings near the center of Amsterdam suggests huge houseboats. “Talking about water is now the topic,” Mr. Kloos said. “People used to say, ‘With the beauty of our 17th-century canals, why can’t we get rid of those boats?’ ” he said. “Now, like all of Amsterdam, the boats are more and more bourgeois.”

Mr. Kloos might have been thinking of a squat, sleek houseboat on the River Amstel that suggests Mies van der Rohe more than Peter Stuyvesant. Five years ago, Steven Westerop, a personnel executive, left his home in Leiden, a short train ride from Amsterdam, to buy a dilapidated boat on the Amstel from an elderly German who came to Holland during the flower power days. With an architect’s help, Mr. Westerop, 46, designed and built a split-level home on a hull that was essentially a reinforced concrete shoebox.

“There are many kinds of boats I didn’t like,” he said. “I wanted people to say, ‘O.K.!’ Maybe even a little over the top.”

“It’s now a yuppie market,” he said. “You need a good job, otherwise you can’t afford it.” The old boat people, like his German, are selling, he said, and all of the houseboats on both sides of his have changed owners in the past five years.

“Sometimes, though, I still feel like a Gypsy,” he went on. “But I have a big mortgage.”