A Profitable Park for Watts

Luring new industry is a problem that confronts old towns as well as new ones--particularly when ghetto areas are involved. In Los Angeles' Watts district, there has been no new industrial construction for 35 years--not even to replace facilities destroyed in the riots of 3 1/2 years ago. Last week the Commerce Department announced a $3.8 million loan for development of a 45-acre industrial park in the overwhelmingly black area, where unemployment is running up to 20% (v. 3.3% for the nation as a whole). On a scarred parcel of land now occupied by a railroad siding, some ramshackle houses and several squalid junk yards, 2,400 people may eventually be at work.

The park was conceived after the Southern Pacific railway company decided to convert much of its Watts right-of-way to industrial usage. The Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration joined the act by forming the nonprofit Economic Resources Corporation to acquire additional land and run the park. Headed by an aggressive Negro entrepreneur named Richard Allen, ERC's board includes eight other Los Angeles businessmen, one of them black.

The group got off to a good start: Lockheed Aircraft Corp. agreed to lease 6.5 acres and build an aircraft-parts manufacturing plant that will employ 300 persons, including as many hard-core unemployed as possible. Allen promised that the park will also be open to local small businessmen. "What we are doing in Watts," he said, "is what should be done in every ghetto in America."

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