Public Interest Briefs

In what a recent Los Angeles Times editorial called a "Cinderella story," CLIPI is helping the Chinatown Yard Alliance stop Majestic Realty's plan to build 32 acres of industrial warehouses on a 47 acre abandoned railyard in Chinatown. The site is known as the "Cornfield" because of its agricultural use in the mid-19th century.

It offers a once-in-a-century opportunity to create a world class park, playground, school and other compatible uses in one of Los Angeles' most diverse and park poor communities. Despite numerous public hearings and community proposals for parks and open space, the Majestic plan skirted requirements for environmental impact assessment and relied on $12 million in federal subsidies for industrial development.

In opposition, one of the most diverse coalitions of civil rights, community and environCornfield of Dreams mental organizations and business interests in Los Angeles history joined forces to create the Chinatown Yard Alliance. Working with the Alliance, which CLIPI played a key role in organizing, CLIPI attorneys Robert Garcia and Hari Osofsly pursued a three pronged approach of impact litigation, legislative advocacy, and coalition building to obtain a more equitable and environmentally favorable result in the Cornfield.

In a recent front page story, the Los Angeles times observed: "On a deserted railyard north of Chinatown, one of Los Angeles' most powerful and tenacious real estate developers, Ed Roski, Jr., of Majestic Realty Co., met his match." The limes' article noted that "Robert Garcia from the Center for Law in the Public Interest organized a civil rights challenge that claimed the project was the result of discriminatory land-use policies that had long deprived minority neighborhoods of parks."

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