Resident Hahns shift redevelopment focus to San Pedro.

What a difference two years makes. What a difference friends in high places makes.

San Pedro, dominated by one of the busiest deep water ports in the nation, has been victim over the last three decades to stalled redevelopment plans that have compounded, rather than eliminated, its blight.

So unappealing has been the community to developers that a study by the Urban Land Institute found fewer than 350 housing units had been built there in the last 10 years.

Enter the Hahns.

"You have a mayor and his sister riving in San Pedro, so if it's going to happen, it's got to happen now," Janice Hahn, councilwoman for L.A.'s 15th District, said of area redevelopment.

The interest on the part of Mayor James Hahn and his sister on picking up the pace of redevelopment activity was seen most recently in the shift of Hahn's former deputy mayor for economic development, Jonathan Kevles, to a post overseeing the Community Redevelopment Agency's harbor area redevelopment zones.

The move, suggested by the mayor, was championed by his sister, who also lobbied CRA Chief Executive Robert "Bud" Ovrom to take Kevles on.

"(Community revitalization and real estate) is the part of the job I liked the best," Kevles said earlier this month. "Now I get to do it 100 percent of the time."

Pace quickens

Among the projects that will fall to Kevles will be the CRA's Beacon Street Redevelopment Project, established in 1969 to rehabilitate nine city blocks near the waterfront. As part of that early effort, a number of larger industrial buildings were razed to remove blight from the area. They were never replaced, and instead formed a void between downtown and the waterfront.

Another redevelopment zone is the Pacific Corridor Redevelopment Project, which was established in May and overlaps Beacon Street, to cover about a square mile of San Pedro, including all of downtown.

Since the Hahns came into office in 2001, public agencies and private developers appear to be aligning to spur the type of development that has altered other communities like downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Among the recent developments:

* Beverly Hills-based developer Raffi Cohen entered into escrow three months ago to buy San Pedro's tallest building, the 122,000-square-foot building at Fifth and Palos Verdes streets. Cohen, who developed downtown Los Angeles' Figueroa Plaza in the early '80s, will convert the building, which once housed Northrop Grumman Corp. subsidiary Logicon Inc. but has been vacant for more than a decade, into about 130 market rate apartments.

* A block west, CIM Group Inc. is nearing a deal with the CRA to develop a mixed-use project on the Centre Street parking lots between Sixth and Seventh streets. That project could include as many as 100 condominiums as well as 25,000-square-feet of ground floor retail.

* Urban Pacific Builders LLC is planning the redevelopment of the old Bank of San Pedro building at Seventh and Mesa streets, where 87 loft-style condos and 5,500 square feet of retail space could be completed by the end of next year.

In all, nearly as many new residential units are in development in San Pedro as were built in the last decade.

"We think it's an underappreciated community," said Ryan Harter, project manager at CIM. "Hopefully, over the next few years, it'll experience the same growth we've seen in other South Bay communities."

Cohen did not return calls.

By the time the Beacon Street zone expires in 2009, it will have generated about $15 million in tax increment funds (increased property taxes generated by property appreciation within a redevelopment zone), far less than the $130 million projected when it was established.

The area's biggest employer, the Port of Los Angeles, is slated to break ground on its Waterfront Promenade project next spring. The first phase will be a fully landscaped public esplanade, stretching about a mile from the Vincent Thomas Bridge on the north end to Fire Station 112 near Harbor Boulevard and Third Street to the south.

"The pedestrian promenade is part of a larger plan for greater public access to the San Pedro waterfront and better linkages from the downtown area," said Jim Faul, project manager for Long Beach-based Moffatt & Nichol Engineers, the prime consultant on the project's first phase.

Meanwhile, the Port has yet to choose a consultant or finalize plans or completion dates for the second phase of the Waterfront Promenade, which stretches three miles from the foot of Third Street south to the Cabrillo Beach breakwater.

Staff Reporter Howard Fine contributed to this story.