Homeowner Groups Say They Are the Scapegoats : Growth: Leaders contend that Mayor Bradley is blaming them for the administration’s failures. They push for a role in selecting a planning director.

More than a dozen homeowner leaders from across Los Angeles gathered Wednesday to publicly lash out at Mayor Tom Bradley for portraying them as obstacles to economic growth and affordable housing.

Barbara Fine, a vice president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., charged at a news conference that Bradley is “using us as scapegoats” for his administration’s own failures.

The homeowners repeated earlier demands that Bradley allow them to participate both in the selection of the city’s next planning director and on a panel that will discuss the findings of a recent audit of the Planning Department, which said that planning staff too often allows its advice to be shaped by the political concerns of elected officials.

In a prepared statement, the homeowners also defended their slow-growth philosophy.

“If we keep growing, we are going to die,” warned Sandy Brown of the Westside Civic Federation, which represents many Westside homeowner organizations.

In two recent speeches, Bradley gave homeowner groups a tongue-lashing.

Bradley complained July 18 that the city’s Planning Department staff and its processes too often favor the slow-growth movement and its main expositors--middle-class homeowner groups.

In the same address, Bradley said the city must either grow or stagnate economically.

Last week, the mayor partly blamed neighborhood organizations for the city’s inability to provide sufficient affordable housing for its residents.

The always uneasy relations between the mayor’s office and the homeowner movement leadership were also made stickier in recent days by reports that the Bradley administration’s plans for building more affordable housing would involve increasing population densities by increasing the number of housing units per acre.

To homeowners, talk of greater densities and crowding is an anathema, summoning up images of more traffic, noise, air pollution and a general decline of suburban lifestyle.

“It’s unfair to say we oppose affordable housing,” said Diana Plotkin, a leader of the Westside Civic Federation.

“Where was the mayor when we tried to stop them from bulldozing existing affordable apartment buildings near 3rd Street” in the Fairfax area, she asked. “He wasn’t with us.”

Gordon Murley, a Woodland Hills resident who heads the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., which represents 54 homeowner organizations, blamed the city’s own policies for insufficient affordable housing.

Murley said the city should not grant high-density bonuses, which allow apartment developers to build more units than allowed under existing zoning, unless all the bonus units--not just a share of them--are affordable. “We support affordable housing,” he said.

Lois Medlock, chairman of a homeowner group based in South-Central Los Angeles, complained that the mayor’s plans for more housing production worry minority homeowners too.

“We’re already overcrowded in South-Central,” Medlock said. “And now they want to put in more boxes of housing.”

Sebie Browne, from the Kinney Heights Homeowners Assn. in South-Central Los Angeles, said, “We’ve paid our dues, and now we are finding there are plans to displace us with high-density projects because the city has no lid on growth--it’s wrong.”

Meanwhile, Michael Bodaken, the mayor’s housing coordinator, said homeowners’ anger at Bradley is misplaced.

“This is a tempest in a teapot,” Bodaken said. “I don’t think there’s that much disparity between our positions.”

The mayor’s criticism of homeowner groups was not meant to apply to all such groups and their members but rather to those that “won’t accept any development of any kind” in their neighborhoods, Bodaken said.