Residents Wait on the Sidelines

As two high-flying investment groups try to sell the NFL on rival stadium sites for L.A.’s next pro team, working-class neighbors in Carson and around Exposition Park are watching the process from afar with a mixture of disenfranchisement, uncertainty and blind hope.

The shadow of a billion-dollar NFL stadium deal looms over 72-year-old Hubert Wright’s mobile home in Carson like a charging lineman. But Wright couldn’t care less.

“Football stadium? There is no way they will ever build a football stadium in Carson,” he said.

Other retirees of the Vista del Loma Mobile Estates would welcome a new stadium about as much as a prison--even as their City Council is offering $180 million to bring an expansion team to the South Bay suburb.

In Exposition Park, about 16 miles north, football boosters predict that a new NFL team at the Coliseum would stimulate business and civic pride and help buff a worn-down neighborhood.

But don’t tell it to Barry Reeves, who owns apartment buildings and parking lots nearby. “People will come in from Orange County, do their thing and leave,” he said warily. “The people who live here, I don’t know if they really will benefit from an NFL team coming back.”

The neighborhood malaise is in sharp contrast to the intense, high-stakes campaigns being run by stadium boosters. Real estate developer Edward P. Roski Jr. is leading the charge to revamp the aging Coliseum to host a new team, the crowning touch to years of slow revitalization of the Exposition Park area. In Carson, Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz has lined up an all-star group to build a combined stadium and shopping mall on a toxic landfill at the intersection of the San Diego and Harbor freeways.

NFL owners could decide as early as Feb. 16 whether one of the groups will get a franchise. A proposal from Houston is said to be in third place, behind the two L.A. bids, largely because the league is concerned about getting the largest TV audience.

The ventures would certainly bring national attention to both communities. But no one knows the actual costs--or benefits--to the swath of trailer parks bordering the proposed site in Carson, or to the corridor of shops, low-income apartments and old Victorian homes at the fringes of the Coliseum.

With ticket prices estimated to start at $40--and suites going for $100,000 and more--locals have not exactly been clamoring for a new NFL team.

Acknowledged Carson City Manager Jerry Groomes: “It wasn’t like there was a groundswell of [residents] saying, ‘Let’s go get a franchise.’ It kind of came to us”--a city with property that was big, flat and close to major freeways.

In both these communities, residents know well the sting of disappointment.

“We’ve been promised the moon in the past, and people tend to be a little cynical about what the possibilities are until they happen,” said Levi Kingston, an activist with Community Consortium, a group of business and religious organizations in the Exposition Park area.

‘Since Raiders Left, It’s Been Very Quiet’

Dreams are small in the neighborhoods where investors hope to field a Super Bowl winner.

James Lim, owner of Sam’s Market, three blocks from the Coliseum, is keeping his fingers crossed that his neighborhood will be chosen.

“Since the Raiders left, it’s been very quiet,” said Lim, 45, standing in the doorway of his Hoover Street market, watching the empty street.

The football games, said neighbors, provided a source of income. They made money parking cars in their frontyards, hawking T-shirts and selling concessions.

“Whatever happens in that stadium is work for a lot of people,” said Raul Aguilar, 36, a parking attendant working a Vermont Avenue lot next to the Coliseum. “When there are games and events, a lot of people are employed and earn money.”

Lydia Townsend tends bar at the Sports Club Bar on a stretch of Main Street in Carson that links junkyards with auto repair shops and weed-filled lots--just down the street from the proposed stadium.

“I figure football fans would stop in here and have a couple of cool ones before a game,” she said. Her only customer was an elderly woman sipping beer from a can. After the game, Townsend said, maybe those fans would stop in for a few more.

Mario Santos Rabaino, a hairdresser with a shop at Dolores and Carson streets, was sitting alone recently, eating pistachio nuts and watching TV. “Maybe people will stop in and get a haircut on their way to a game,” he said.

Contractor Michael Padilla has fashioned several small signs saying, “Carson Supports NFL Stadium.” Carson doesn’t have an ordinance permitting such banners, so Padilla has been able to put up only one. But he is working on it.

“We need something so when news people come through, they will see this big support for the stadium,” he said.

‘Hard to Believe This Is Happening Here’

Carson’s business community is hugely supportive, he said, but a groundswell has been slow to develop because “it’s just that it is hard to believe that this is happening here.” Padilla predicted that Carson could become “another Anaheim.”

At Carson City Hall, there are no signs, posters, banners or fact sheets on the proposed stadium deal. The display case in the lobby, though, has a signed football celebrating Carson High School’s 1982 Los Angeles city championship football team.

“We’re working on a brochure,” City Manager Groomes said.

Regardless, said Councilman Daryl W. Sweeney, Carson has benefited. “Whether we get it or not, it went a long way to telling people who we are and where we are,” he said.

At Realty World, Theron Jackson, who heads the office, leaned back in his chair and said, “Can you imagine a stadium sitting on that hill over there? Do you know what that would do for Carson?”

Carson, a city that is just 30 years old, is taking what city leaders believe is an acceptable risk, pledging about $35 million in cash, with the rest coming from a high-wire-act financing plan using projected tax and other revenues from the stadium to finance long-term debt.

City leaders vow that Carson will not repeat the costly mistake made by the city of Irwindale, which put up $10 million just to negotiate a deal with the Raiders. Even though the deal fell through and the Raiders ended up in Oakland, Irwindale still had to pay the money.

But Carson’s track record of delivering on its promises is suspect. Not too long ago, a deal was supposedly struck to bring a Magic Johnson Theatres complex to the city’s South Bay Pavilion mall, located just across the 405 Freeway from the proposed stadium. But it never happened. And several proposals have been announced for the 157-acre landfill site, only to fall through, with the property changing hands amid concerns about environmental cleanup costs.

In Exposition Park, local boosters are also promoting the arrival of an NFL team as an economic engine that--along with the new California Science Museum, the Jesse A. Brewer Jr. corner park and other new investments in the area--would add to the neighborhood’s recent revival.

Despite a drop in crime and ongoing revitalization efforts, many residents say times are still tough. They cling to hope that a new team would usher back the days when the Raider games drew big crowds and tourist dollars.

At the bars and small mom-and-pop stores within a few blocks of the Coliseum, residents discuss in wishful tones the possibility of getting a team, almost afraid to count on it happening.

Some neighbors are hoping for an NFL team to put a needed spotlight on the area.

Steve Itson can see the Coliseum from his apartment on 40th Place, as well as the trash-strewn sidewalk beneath his balcony.

“If there was going to be a game this weekend, all those would be gone by now,” said Itson, 40, who has lived in the neighborhood 12 years. “The city would make sure the graffiti came down. It’s like if you’ve got a room nobody is going to see, you don’t fix it up.”

On Raider game days, Itson enjoyed standing on his balcony, he said, soaking in the commotion. “It feels like a big party,” he said. “Everybody is walking around happy, all types of nationalities. It’s a festive thing.”

Neighborhood Has Changed Dramatically

Elizabeth Pfromm, executive director of a children’s mental health clinic on Vermont Avenue, said she has seen dramatic changes in the neighborhood since the clinic opened in 1994.

“For us, the coming of a NFL team will simply add to [the existing neighborhood development] initiatives and further establish Exposition Park as a destination point,” Pfromm said.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represents the area and has been a strong advocate for the bid, said he is convinced that an NFL team would create jobs and new business for neighbors.

“I’m not investing all this time and energy only to see the community in which the project is being built not benefit directly from it,” Ridley-Thomas said. “And I think there’s excitement about it. There’s not a place I go, from the supermarket . . . to church, that people don’t ask me, ‘When is it going to happen? We’re ready.’ ”

In Carson, a skeptical Hubert Wright, who predicted that the stadium will never get built, based his view on the history of the 157-acre parcel, once known as Jack Rabbit Hill.

Several years ago, Wright said, he and other locals were invited to the groundbreaking for a mall project on the site. Tents were erected, national retailers set up displays and a feast was set for neighbors. Drinks, he said, were on the house. The next day, workers removed the tents and displays, and the property remained vacant.

As for the stadium proposals, he said, all residents can do is wait and see. Unlike more upscale neighborhoods, there are no powerful homeowner groups to shield them from the massive project.

“All these old people in this [mobile home] park,” he said, “what are they going to do about it? They can do nothing.”