Tour Offers Reassurance for 180 Banking Officials

About 180 senior Southland banking officials were loaded onto gleaming white buses Thursday for a grand tour of a part of town that was unfamiliar to many of them: South-Central Los Angeles.

The purpose was to show officials of mid-size lending institutions the potential for investment in inner-city neighborhoods by taking them there.

The bus tour was the fourth annual trip organized by Operation Hope, a nonprofit banking consortium founded by John Bryant, a self-described broker for South-Central Los Angeles.

Bryant was aided by the Small Business Administration, which has a program that guarantees loans for minority-owned businesses. Operation Hope staged the first tour just months after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Bryant believes that by showing potential lenders that South-Central is not the war zone that it is perceived to be, bankers and investors will be more likely to give loans to businesses located south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

“Lending is a comfort game,” Bryant said. “We have to convince them that this is a viable market and also make them feel comfortable.”

The tour started at Operation Hope’s new banking center in the Crenshaw district, the site of a bank that was destroyed in the riots. The procession of five buses wound through the historic Adams neighborhood, south to Inglewood, then over to Florence and Normandie avenues--one of the flash points of the riots--and back through the southwest region of Los Angeles.

Along the way, the entourage stopped at the Crenshaw Christian Center, where two small businesses--House of Winston mortuary and Amigo’s Steakhouse--were presented with SBA-backed loans for $198,000 and $350,000, respectively.

An SBA loan check for $850,000 was presented to the owners of La Louisanne restaurant. The loan will help the operators buy the property.

Alberto Alvarez, the district director for the SBA who helped moderate the tours, said he overheard several bankers remark that the neighborhoods they saw Thursday morning looked like those in the Fairfax district and in West Los Angeles.

“We want them to see that this is a center of good, thriving businesses,” said Alvarez, who organized a similar tour about a year ago in East Los Angeles. Subsequently, the number of approved loans doubled, he said.

Kathleen Kellog, president and CEO of Frontier Bank, said the tour made her realize the role churches play in redeveloping neighborhoods and was struck by the lack of medical services.

William Hanna, president of Cedars Bank, who has been providing loans to inner-city entrepreneurs since meeting Bryant on a previous tour, said he was surprised by the number of franchise restaurants in South-Central L.A. and expressed interest in making loans for franchise projects.