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Life & Times Transcript

05/24/06

Vicki Curry>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Private property versus the public good. Should the government be able to say your home or business has to go?

Bob Blue>> We have people, out of town developers, coming in wanting to put in a luxury hotel and they want to kick out the people that have struggled through the years and survived.

Vicki Curry>> And then, these dishes don't appear on any menu, but the recipes are there for all the world to see. We go inside the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sam Louie>> Hollywood is in the midst of major renovation and change. Upscale restaurants, shops and hotels are moving in. The latest is a four hundred million dollar project made possible by what is known as eminent domain, but in California, eminent domain can only be used in areas considered blighted. For some property owners, blight is in the eye of the beholder. NewsHour correspondent, Spencer Michels, has this report.

Spencer Michels>> In the heart of Los Angeles at the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine, Bob Blue is fighting to preserve his sixty year old family luggage store from the clutches of redevelopment. The city has given him ninety days to move out.

Bob Blue>> It's wrong to steal land, if you will. It's wrong to steal business. It's wrong to the community.

Spencer Michels>> Bernard's Luggage is in an historic neighborhood that declined in the 1990s and, according to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, needed a major facelift.

Leron Gubler>> When we hit rock bottom, there were numerous boarded-up buildings along Hollywood Boulevard. Panhandlers, homeless everywhere. There were prostitutes as well.

Spencer Michels>> With the Chamber's support, the city's redevelopment agency invoked eminent domain on Blue's store so that it can replace it and thirty other small businesses with a luxury hotel, housing units, upscale shops and restaurants.

Leron Gubler>> The redevelopment agency had the ability to make things happen including the eminent domain tool. You need that because, once an area starts spiraling downward, there's no way to bring it back unless people start investing in the community.

Spencer Michels>> But Blue doesn't want to sell or move. He has posted a huge movie-style billboard over his store to gain public support.

Bob Blue>> I think this fight is about big business versus small business and existing business. We have people, out of town developers, coming in wanting to put in a luxury hotel and they want to kick out the people that have struggled through the years and survived.

Spencer Michels>> What bothers Blue the most is that his private property is being condemned and sold not for a road or a school, but to private developers and at a price authorities set and not what the owner thinks it's worth.

Bob Blue>> I didn't even know that they could use eminent domain for private use, so it got thrust upon me.

Spencer Michels>> Eminent domain is an old practice of taking private property, sometimes blighted, for a public use. The Constitution recognizes it as long as there is just compensation and the Supreme Court has upheld it many times, most recently last June in its ruling in the Kilo case in Connecticut where the Justices ruled that this private home could be seized by the city and sold to a private developer if the transaction would benefit the public.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the five to four decision, "promoting economic development is a traditional and long-accepted function of government." But the Court also said, "nothing precludes any state from placing further restrictions on eminent domain." The decision set off a storm of political activity across the nation, across political lines, mostly among those who believe eminent domain is being abused.

>> "This petition is a petition to limit the government's authority to eminent domain peoples' properties."

Spencer Michels>> These paid workers are trying to gather nearly a million signatures so that voters in California will get a chance to severely restrict the use of eminent domain and make it illegal to transfer private property to a private developer.

This petition drive and similar campaigns in six other states plus a slew of bills before state legislatures are gathering steam. In fact, bills with varying provisions have already passed in thirteen states. Political consultant, Kevin Spillaine, is organizing the California Protect Our Homes campaign whose initial financing, up to two million dollars, comes from a Libertarian group which seeks to limit government.

Kevin Spillaine>> This Kilo decision has basically energized the population. They're upset. It's really an issue about government needing to be restrained.

Spencer Michels>> Tim Sandefur, a staff attorney with the property rights group, Pacific Legal Foundation, is helping shape some of the new proposals.

Tim Sandefur>> People don't have the right to take away your property just because they think it would be better for society. Private property is a right, not a privilege, and they don't have the right to take it away from you just because they think it would be in the public's interest, whatever that might mean. It's not in Mr. Blue's interest.

Spencer Michels>> The reaction to Kilo has alarmed John Shirey who directs the California Redevelopment Association.

John Shirey>> There's been a backlash to that decision and I think it's going to result in legislation that won't be good. It's a reaction to a lot of emotion.

Spencer Michels>> Shirey contends that the backlash is being used by lawyers and politicians for their own purposes.

John Shirey>> What's in jeopardy is that what we do through redevelopment will be greatly hampered, but we also need to keep in mind that a lot of the legislation and, here in California, the voter initiatives that are out there go far beyond the issues that were in the Kilo case.

Spencer Michels>> Shirey says new laws could drive up the cost of acquiring property for roads and schools, restrict legitimate attempts to regulate land use, to say nothing of stopping needed redevelopment. In San Jose, officials are afraid the Kilo backlash could derail its attempts to turn its aging and blighted neighborhoods around. But San Jose also exemplifies how just the specter of redevelopment often brings fear, especially in residential areas.

Even though no homes have been taken by eminent domain in the prosperous Nagle Park area, concern over what could happen has prompted a rebellion. These residents are furious their aging neighborhood was designated a redevelopment zone. Beth Shafran-Mukai, who calls herself a political progressive, says it's absurd to call this area of million dollar homes blighted.

Beth Shafran-Mukai>> We know we are a beautiful, historic neighborhood of generally single-family homes on the edge of a downtown frame and our city is focused on development and increasing tax revenues. Our concern is that, over the years, we'll see the edges of our neighborhood gobbled away and that people will indeed lose homes.

Spencer Michels>> Association members have become more alarmed since the Kilo decision and are helping gather initiative signatures.

Sue Bernham>> For me, more than even the neighborhood, it is the loss of our rights as citizens and human beings. With each thing that is taken away, it brings us closer to a Soviet state almost and, to me, that is frightening.

Spencer Michels>> In San Francisco's largely African-American community, long before Kilo, there was suspicion and hostility toward redevelopment and eminent domain. Kilo has only added to it. Bayview Hunters Point has a high crime rate. Proposals to redevelop the decaying area which during World War II was home to a major naval shipyard have met serious resistance and much of that stems from an infamous urban renewal project in the 1960's when an another largely black San Francisco district, the Fillmore, was bulldozed and the population evicted in the name of progress. Patricia Wright, now a chef for the San Francisco Giants, grew up in the Fillmore.

Patricia Wright>> I was one of the people that was swept away. I remember losing my friends, my families, my mother and father's Victorian building that we grew up in.

Spencer Michels>> After the Kilo decision, Wright, today a resident of Bayview, began working with neighborhood newspaper publisher, Willie Ratcliff, to circulate anti-eminent domain petitions.

Willie Ratcliff>> Well, the point is, you take away the state law that allows private eminent domain, one private party taking property from another.

Spencer Michels>> But Bayview Hunters Point needs government help to upgrade buildings, remove blight and reduce crime, says Angelo King, who chairs the Citizens Advisory Committee for Redevelopment.

Angelo King>> No. Eminent domain shall not be used on any legal occupied dwelling unit, period, regardless of zoning or anything else. So our intention from the very start was that nobody's home would ever be taken by eminent domain.

Patricia Wright>> I don't believe it.

Spencer Michels>> Why not?

Patricia Wright>> Because I've seen it happen. My greatest fear is that the community will be gone.

Spencer Michels>> The Pacific Legal Foundation's Tim Sandefur doesn't trust the politicians either.

Tim Sandefur>> Under the rationale of cases like Kilo, anything that the politicians believe is good for the public is sufficient grounds for the use of eminent domain.

John Shirey>> Local officials are loathe to use eminent domain. They avoid it whenever possible.

Spencer Michels>> Afraid of the political backlash to Kilo, the redevelopment lobby intends to sponsor its own mildly-restricted legislation hoping to head off more drastic measures that could halt redevelopment in its tracks.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> During this Holy Week, believers are flocking to churches and temples. But what about young people and, in particular, college students? Well, a comprehensive survey shows that less than half of all college students actually practice a religion and yet most of them believe in God and are very interested in life's big questions.

Helen Lena Astin and Alexander "Sandy" Astin of UCLA oversaw a comprehensive survey of college students' spiritual beliefs. College students these days are often characterized as consumed by careers and financial success or just fun. But a multi-year survey of more than a hundred thousand students on two hundred thirty-six campuses revealed a different side of this generation. The survey is called "The Spiritual Life of College Students" and I talked with the Astins about what they found.

Helen Lena Astin>> I was taken by surprise to see the extent which students cared a great deal about these big questions, special questions about the spiritual beings, about their spirituality and religions. So it came as a surprise to us really how involved they are in some of these questions and concerns.

Val Zavala>> Do most of them have a basic belief in God or have they not decided or don't know yet?

Helen Lena Astin>> The majority tell us -- a pretty high majority, close to eighty percent -- that they do believe in God and they do pray and that took us by surprise also. A very high proportion. It was interesting to find out what they pray for. They pray to think, they pray for their families, they pray for wisdom. So they were much more mature and they show a depth of themselves that I hadn't seen before.

Val Zavala>> So clearly, being a college student is a time when many young people are searching, are seeking, are wanting answers to the meaning of life and it's a great time for them to explore it, right?

Helen Lena Astin>> Exactly. It's a perfect time for them to explore. They have high expectations that college would enable them to deal with those questions and help them to grow along these lines. They do have high expectations, but also what they've told us is that their institutions, their colleges and universities, do not address religion. It's not part of the curriculum necessarily. So they're kind of left alone in that search and that quest.

I don't know if I told you that we also did a study of the faculty. We just finished a survey of the large -- well, several of the faculties, forty-five thousand faculties in over four hundred institutions. We also asked them about their own spirituality, but also we asked them if they see a role of spirituality in colleges and universities. They're much more ambivalent there. So it's fine for me to search, but I'm not sure whether this has a place for the academy and that's where the challenge for us now is, to make it okay, because you should be very much in the center of the liberal arts education.

Val Zavala>> The Astins also looked at the influence that spiritual beliefs have on students' politics and personal behavior and, again --

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> We found some big surprises too. The highly religious students don't follow the complete party line when it comes to conservative viewpoints. For example, on the death penalty, they're actually more opposed to the death penalty than students in general.

Val Zavala>> Another surprise might have been about gun control which you normally equate with conservative religious people being anti-gun control.

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> Right, right. Well, again, the pattern's broken there and you have the religious students and the non-religious having the same viewpoint about gun control. Namely three-fourths of both groups say we ought to have more gun control.

Val Zavala>> Oh, really? So college students in general would like to see more gun control?

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. We think for the environments that college students in general are much more committed to environmental cleanup and environmental control than I think the population in general.

Val Zavala>> So maybe the influencing factor is education level more than spiritual or religion.

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> That may be a big one, yes. As you might guess, the liberal students are much more favorable toward, you know, maintaining the environment than the non-liberal. But when it comes to religiousness, that doesn't seem to relate particularly to environmentalism.

Val Zavala>> Now a lot of parents will tell you they're often concerned about the things that go on during college with the drinking and the smoking and the sex and the drugs. Did you see a big difference in behaviors among religious or spiritual students in terms of those behaviors and non-spiritual students?

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> Well, probably the biggest difference in behavior is in consumption of alcohol where there's a huge difference between strongly religious and the non-religious. Now when it comes to their beliefs about these things, again, you find very large differences on the legalization of homosexuality, legalization of same-sex marriage, the keeping abortion legal, what we call casual sex. We have a question that sort of gets the students' attitudes about casual sex with somebody you don't really know that well. With respect to all these issues, there are enormous differences between the strongly religious and the non-religious students.

Val Zavala>> And when it comes to students' religious preferences, the largest percentage, twenty-eight percent, say Roman Catholic. The second largest portion, seventeen percent, say none. And nearly half of the college students surveyed, forty-eight percent, described themselves as doubting, seeking or conflicted.

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> Less than half of them say that they're secure in their faith. So you've got the majority of them who are searching or doubtful or who say they're not interested. That's a small group of about one in five who say they're not interested in religion. So there's a lot of searching and it will be interesting to see, if we follow these students through college, how they change and develop and hopefully we can help to identify some of the things the colleges do that facilitates this part of the students' lives.

Val Zavala>> Sandy Astin, thank you so much for your work and your time.

Alexander "Sandy" Astin>> My pleasure.

Val Zavala>> For details on the survey of college freshmen and spirituality, you can go to this website: spirituality.ucla.edu.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Val Zavala>> It's a dream kitchen that would make Wolfgang Puck drool and the food that comes out of is some of the best in southern California, but don't try making a reservation at this place. It's not open to the public, although its recipes are very public. Toni Guinyard explains.

Toni Guinyard>> Mary Ellen Rae and Donna Deane are used to people watching what they're doing while they're on the job, but they're no ordinary cooks and this is no ordinary kitchen. Consider it a culinary research center. This is the test kitchen for the Los Angeles Times.

Donna Deane>> Whenever people come in the kitchen, they always say, "What a great kitchen. I wish I had one like this." I always say that I wish I did too. I don't (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> The test kitchen is just that, a kitchen where every recipe printed in the Times is tested before it's published in the paper. The kitchen is huge, approximately nine hundred eighty-six square feet, but it's equipped with the same appliances many serious cooks have in their own homes.

Donna Deane>> We want to duplicate the recipe in the same manner as you would at home, so we don't have professional stovetops, for instance.

Mary Ellen Rae>> When you go into the culinary world, you're expecting to work in a restaurant and you're expecting to have a little bit of space to work with and that's how it is in most restaurant kitchens. You've got a little bit of space. Well, I come in here and I have all of this to myself. I have refrigerator drawers. I mean, look at these. I mean, I have everything to work with. I have every ingredient, every flavor of whatever.

Donna Deane>> Everyone is amazed, first of all, that we do have a test kitchen at this paper. Especially the people on tours have no idea that all the recipes in the food section are tested.

>> "Recipes of all kinds, domestic, foreign, ethnic, could be anything."

Toni Guinyard>> A recipe for anything from any number of sources. The recipes are submitted by chefs, taken from cookbooks.

Mary Ellen Rae>> I mean, you can see all of our notes. And you can see all the grease spots. I mean, we literally have cooked our way through this book.

Toni Guinyard>> And suggested by food section writers.

Mary Ellen Rae>> "Now this will be just to practice to see what Russ is talking about and then we'll do another one and test it for timing and all of that."

Toni Guinyard>> The day of our visit, food section writer, Russ Parsons, is doing an article about grilled mackerel. His recipe is being followed, but the mackerel being tested on a stovetop grill isn't exactly turning out as expected, so Russ is asked to troubleshoot.

Russ Parsons>> "Right before you put the fish on, get a paper towel with oil and hit the grill really good. Put the fish on it and let it sit on the grill. Don't mess with it. This is a big mackerel. I couldn't find these mackerel fresh. It's pretty big."

Mary Ellen Rae>> "Well, we have three more to work with (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> And so it goes, try again, then on to something new.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Each recipe is prepared, painstakingly put into place and photographed and then the photographs are reviewed.

>> "Donna separated the parsley around the frame so that we have it beautiful."

Toni Guinyard>> It's a complicated process. In this case, all this attention over an appetizer. But before it goes from test kitchen to photography studio, it must first pass the taste test. So who has the final say?

Donna Deane>> Well, the food editor, Leslie Brenner.

[Film Clip]

Donna Deane>> She tastes every single thing that goes in the paper and approves everything that goes in the paper.

Leslie Brenner>> It's both fun and serious. The reason it's serious is that I feel that, with any recipe that goes in the paper, somebody is going to spend their hard-earned cash to buy the ingredients and they're going to take the time to cook this. It had better work, not only just work okay, but it had better be terrific. Otherwise, I don't want to put it out there.

[Film Clip]

Leslie Brenner>> You have a huge audience and an incredibly diverse audience both in terms of taste and sophistication about food and cooking skill and all of that. In a very few pages each week, the trick is trying to find something to appeal to, you know, a wide spectrum of that audience.

Toni Guinyard>> With such diverse readership, it's impossible to find recipes, food and drink-related topics to appeal to everyone.

Leslie Brenner>> You'll find more elaborate recipes than you used to find, you know, seven or eight years ago in the Los Angeles Times. At the same time, I do really like to have enough very simple recipes.

Toni Guinyard>> What readers like, they really like. What they don't like, Brenner hears about that too from emails, letters and an occasional phone call.

Leslie Brenner>> "I hated that story", "I loved that story." "Your section used to be so great and now it's terrible." "Your section used to be terrible and now it's great."

Toni Guinyard>> Just about everyone who has anything to do with the paper's food section approaches their work as if charting new territory, searching for some new discovery.

Leslie Brenner>> That's what newspaper food-writing is all about. It's finding what's new, finding what's exciting. Sometimes it's just a story that has never been told.

Toni Guinyard>> The story behind this story involved the process of how the kitchen operates.

Donna Deane>> Well, Monday is our -- I call it like our startup day and that's when we get our recipes in, we begin to look them over and see what ingredients we need.

Mary Ellen Rae>> So I shop Monday morning and then I come in and start testing the recipes Monday and Tuesday.

Donna Deane>> Every recipe has been tested at least twice and sometimes up to seven, eight, even nine times.

Leslie Brenner>> We all taste. It's not just me. We all taste and we talk about it and, you know, we do pow-wows in the kitchen or in here, wherever we happen to be.

Donna Deane>> And then, of course, after we scrutinize and carefully look at the recipes, we send out an email and everyone in the food section comes in and tries. We get everyone's opinions.

Leslie Brenner>> We'll taste and everybody sticks a fork in.

Donna Deane>> Once we know what recipes we have and we look at them, we decide how we want to photograph them.

Mary Ellen Rae>> Sometimes, if everything works perfectly, I don't need to make it again until the day of it being photographed. But then a lot of recipes need to be tweaked a little bit. You know, too much of that spice or too much of that herb or, you know, not enough wine or something.

Toni Guinyard>> The final product is then taken from the kitchen where it's been prepared into the studio to be photographed for the food section of the Los Angeles Times. Now eight hours a day, five days a week, the test kitchen staff is either cooking or shopping or tasting and then the process begins all over again on Fridays.

Mary Ellen Rae>> Usually on Friday afternoons, I'm given a list of recipes that we're going to test the next week. So then I sit down and make out my shopping list and figure out where I'm going to have to go.

Toni Guinyard>> And so the process continues. Before Times readers can even try the recipes tested on this day, the test kitchen and food section staff is already moving on, searching for something new, something readers just might be willing to try.

Donna Deane>> I want them to feel confident that they can open up that Wednesday food section and they can look at it and they can look at any recipe in the food section and say I would like to make that.

Leslie Brenner>> I think, if people can make food discoveries and get excited about them, then we've done our job.

Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> Next time on Life and Times --

Their families and their homeland were divided by war. Is there any hope for reuniting the families?

>> For ninety-nine percent of Korean-American families, they would just be happy to find out that these people are still alive. To send a letter or to make a phone call is beyond their wildest dreams right now.

Val Zavala>> That's next time on Life and Times.

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