Ed Avila.

In a city where redevelopment is often a contact sport, where pockets of dizzying wealth and Third World-like conditions clash and coexist, Ed Avila is still learning the language of urban renewal, Los Angeles style.

Seven months after Mayor Tom Bradley asked him to stop the Community Redevelopment Agency from a political freefall, Avila admits he is not the city's top blight busting technocrat. Then again he is clearly more than the CRA's chief administrator: he's its top negotiator, firefighter and cheerleader.

"My management skills are the reason I'm here," the affable but low-key Montecito Heights resident says confidently. "I want to build more than brick-and-mortar skills. I want to restore credibility."

With ample reason.

When Avila took over, morale among agency staff was at bootstrap level, following months of a seemingly endless stream of controversial CRA decisions. So he started simply: He gathered the agency's 350 employees at the Pacific Design Center for a pep talk and began a press-the-flesh campaign with agency clients.

Next he had a door installed between his office and the adjacent hallway, allowing staffers to circumvent secretaries and gatekeepers alike. Avila beams while noting that the entranceway is a symbol of his openness, "not just a neat trick."

Despite the agency's recent controversies, Avila seems ebullient about the CRA's future. His $127,000-a-year task involves taking the reins of the country's biggest redevelopment agency -- with a $279 million annual budget, off $70 million from last year -- during a far-reaching recession that has slowed new CRA commercial projects "to a trickle."

Avila is not even sure he'll have a job come mid-September when his six-month "interim" agency stint ends, though City Hall insiders believe a national search for a permanent administrator will conclude that Avila is the best choice.

One thing is certain: Avila must face the ghost and policies of his predecessor, John Tuite, whose unprecedented, $1.7-million golden handshake agreement nearly prompted a City Council takeover of an agency-turned-political-whipping-boy. Still, having served for years at City Hall, Avila is savvy about its power structure and fiefdoms, more open and comfortable with city officials than was the sometimes nervous and brooding Tuite.

Yet, Avila has his own ground rules. For starters, he doesn't "discuss" Tuite's performance or the rapid turnover on the CRA's mayoral-appointed board, from which agency staff gets their marching orders. What he does articulate is a desire to "demystify" the agency -- a tall order given the often arcane nature of redevelopment and a perception among many activists and homeowners that the CRA remains a gentrification bogeyman.

Nowhere was that more evident than when a CRA proposal last year to expand the 107-acre Watts redevelopment area by tenfold caused a brouhaha among residents and small merchants nervous about bulldozer-driven progress.

"The CRA too often is looked at as cold, indifferent," says Avila, who resembles Bob Hoskins of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" fame. "There is nothing mythical about us."

What many are straining to see is whether the CRA's lip service about a "commitment to affordable housing and social programs" becomes more than a nifty slogan. For two decades the CRA, using its power to acquire valuable land and assembly it for developers, gave Mayor Bradley the office towers he wanted to make L.A.'s skyline equal to its growing financial punch. Meanwhile, homelessness increased, social services fell through the cracks and once proud areas like the Historic Core in downtown became a sea of big city despair.

Avila says the CRA's role as a skyscraper builder is "no longer the agency." Few commercial mega-projects, like the $1-billion-plus California Plaza on Bunker Hill the agency is helping to build, are on the front burner.

"We do a lot of terrific things here that people don't know about," Avila says, ticking off CRA efforts to help babies with AIDS, the mentally disturbed homeless or latch-key children. "There's a lot of energy here."

But, like charismatic and sometimes controversial CRA board Chairman Jim Wood, Avila warns that L.A. needs new commercial projects for more than just modern office space. Without those structures, which generate valuable tax increments used to fund social programs, the agency is a white elephant. "Tax increments allow you to do good things. Without the funds, we are irrelevant."

Avila grows visibly angry about the CRA's poor performance in producing affordable housing, even though the roughly 2,000 units a year is the most of any city agency. Conversely, he also gets mad when critics and the media ignore that for every $1 the agency spends on commercial projects, $5 is earmarked for housing.

On the personal front, Avila is a straightforward proposition, pensive at times, animated and effusive at others. Divorced with no children, he dresses conservatively, shuns golf and tennis for walking, loves to travel and visibly blanches when he talks about his life away from the job. His trademark is a no-lunch regimen, preferring instead to snack from a bowl of peanuts constantly stocked in his office. His management style is to hold short meetings, delegate often and not get bogged down by complex decisions.

"He's a very modest person, that's part of his charm," says CRA Commissioner Carlyle Hall. "He's quiet, thoughtful and certainly no egotist or bully. One of his strengths is that he listens carefully and can cut through stuff quickly."

His six-page resume reads like that of a poster boy for public service, two words Avila repeats like a mantra. After earning a master's degree in political science from California State University-Los Angeles 21 years ago, Avila spent seven years as chief field deputy to Congressman Edward Roybal, 20 months at the United Way and a brief stint as a Jimmy Carter appointee to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. From 1979-82, Avila helped christen the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and spent 18 months at the Vanir Co., a San Bernardino-based commercial and residential developer.

But it was in July 1984 that Avila sharpened his City Hall molars as a full-time member of the city's Board of Public Works, where he later became president. High marks working to upgrade L.A.'s aging infrastructure helped Avila land a job as one of Bradley's deputy mayors in a December 1989 shakeup.

Still, some think Avila, who ran unsuccessfully for Art Snyder's council seat years back, was selected to lead the CRA for more than being a skilled bureaucrat.

"What he has been doing is really saving the mayor's bacon," said one real estate lawyer who works with the agency. "Avila is exercising a subtle degree of control for the mayor, a way to keep Jim Wood from being too independent."

Neither Bradley nor Wood would comment for this story.

While Avila has kept the agency's profile low, he has had a lot on his plate.

In Hollywood, where the CRA's plan to pump $922 million into the faded movie capital has been tied up for years in the courts, hope is mounting that the legal battles over the Tinseltown's anti-CRA mood can be diluted.

Closer to home is the fate of the CRA's Central Business District, the sprawling 1,549-acre redevelopment area in the agency's backyard where marble-and-glass skyscrapers cast shadows over the homeless on nearby Skid Row. However, without an agreement allowing the agency to raise its spending cap in the Business District from $750 million to $5 billion, the CRA's tent may fold for good.

"If it's not lifted, we'll be pretty close to ending our shop in the Historic Core," chimes Avila. "That's a major issue with me."

It should be. As a youngster, Avila used to visit his dad at work at American Music Co. in downtown L.A. "Spring Street was great back then. It was like its name, the Wall Street of the West," Avila says with a grin. "Now walking downtown, like Broadway, is a moving experience, though a lot of the energy isn't very good."

Though slowly, positive change is evident, he says. He points to the agency's help in completing the $185 million Ronald Reagan State Office Building, a return of the historic Angel's Flight funicular and Yellin Co.'s renovation of the historic Grand Central Market and Bradbury Building.

While Avila talks of the little things the agency is doing right now in the community, many changes he's pushed have transpired inside the agency's Spring Street headquarters. While Tuite created insulation between himself and the project managers, they report directly to Avila now. Two key CRA execs associated with Tuite's reign -- Bob Tague and Judy Broverman -- have also been reassigned. Avila reportedly is also working to eliminate many of the agency's internal review boards, where developers complained that unpopular projects were sucked into a "bureaucratic black hole."

"The jury is still out on the job he's done, but he has ushered in a new era of communication between (himself) and the oversight committee," says Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.