Can L.A. Renew Its Love Affair With Itself? : Public relations: Out-of-towners say city can right its image with positive thinking and a little advertising.

A national newspaper published a report a while back ranking Miami, Los Angeles and Houston as the worst places to live in the United States. The rest of the article was taken up by people defending Miami and Houston. A sentence at the end was devoted to Los Angeles: “The mayor’s office refused comment.”

Ah, Los Angeles, the town that takes it lying down. This city’s image lately has been pulverized by reports of riots, graffiti, gang war, carjackings. Japanese executives have been known to refuse to do business with Los Angeles companies for fear they’ll go belly up or be burned down. And hardly anybody bothers to correct them. Is this a city or an oil painting?

“If they said these things about a person, they would be sued for slander,” David Friedman, lawyer and urban economist, said of this poor, bruised place. Too bad he lives in Culver City.

Things have sunk so low that two business groups held separate downtown lunches Thursday to find ways to make the world love La-La Land again. It had come to this: They listened to the advice of a public relations guy from Pittsburgh, whose other clients include a brewery, a cosmetics manufacturer and Roto Rooter.

“L.A. can no longer automatically conjure up the image of Lotus Land. People will think bad thoughts unless they are encouraged to think good ones,” said Paul Alvarez of Pittsburgh-based Ketchum Communications Inc., offering to design a free nationwide ad campaign to improve an image that he said hit bottom last April when Time magazine ran a cover story entitled, “Is the City of Angels Going to Hell?”

“Think of how much good ‘I New York’ did for New York,” Alvarez said.

Right. So much good that the Yankees are talking about moving to New Jersey. Nevertheless, no one was disputing that Los Angeles has taken a public relations beating. We own the beaches, but the bullies keep kicking sand in our faces. The time has come to do something about it.

From the amber-lighted elegance of the Los Angeles Athletic Club dining room, where members of the Central City Assn. were eating salads with goat cheese croutons, L.A. didn’t look like such a bad place. They wondered why the rest of the world can’t see it that way.

“If you were locked in a room and the only view you had of Los Angeles was what you saw on the evening news, you would not want to come out,” KCET reporter Huell Howser told them.

The media are always bashing the place; even our own political leaders have discovered they can take swipes at L.A. with impunity. During his campaign, our new mayor called the city “dysfunctional.”

After a while, it gets to you. Locals start bypassing perfectly fine neighborhoods, where the ethnic food is spectacular and the ambience is richly diverse. When was the last time you packed up the kids on a Sunday morning to take a drive to East L.A?, Howser asked.

These ugly images of danger and dirt are so convincing that people seem to be abandoning their glorious lives and heading for the Midwest. Friedman described a couple who had high-paying jobs, a remodeled house and kids in good schools. One morning, they threw it all away and moved to St. Louis, where they were hit by a flood. “Today,” he said, “they can fish off their living room floor.”

But what lies beneath L.A.’s pervasively bad reputation may be more insidious than a gang of cynical reporters. According to Alvarez, several cities and states have set up offices with significant budgets in Los Angeles. Their mission is to woo business away, and even Phoenix has one.

Still, these image-makers say, Los Angeles’ worst enemy is Los Angeles. The media capital of the world hasn’t yet bothered to market itself. It’s time for laid-back L.A. to get off its beach towel and fight like a man.

“Every adjective used to scorn L.A. has an opposite term of praise,” Alvarez said. “Instead of chaos, think diversity. Instead of ferment, think energy. Instead of recession, think transition.”

Now, that’s a little more like it.

“Los Angeles has to see the virtue of its vices,” Alvarez said. “From ancient Byzantium to modern America, the richest and most dynamic societies have always been the ones most open to a broad range of cultures, languages and religious beliefs. And if America is rich and diverse, it is largely due to L.A.’s influence.”

Good advertisers know that perception has little to do with reality, and there were indications Thursday that the business community is waking up to the fact that it is losing millions in tourism and trade because L.A. looks bad.

The Central City Assn. is drawing up a plan that would invite businesses to spend a considerable sum on a marketing campaign to remake L.A. in the eyes of the world, and Mayor Richard Riordan’s office is said to be enthusiastic about Alvarez’s offer to design an advertising blitz for free.

This isn’t to say that all that’s bad about Los Angeles should be ignored, just put in perspective.

“Regardless of all the gloom and doom,” Howser said, “the best days of our city are yet ahead of us, instead of behind us.” Too bad he’s from Tennessee.

Then they all adjourned to venture back into the city, like suitors glowing from a love affair rekindled. Riled up and full of hope, they paid $11 for parking and sat in traffic. But who cared? The weather was just fine.