L.A. VISIONS; Labor's pensive warrior; Being one of the union movement's best friends has made Madeline Janis some enemies along the way. Series: Southern California is home to extremes -- poverty, crime, wealth and immigration; shifting politics and emerging arts; ethnic vitality and conflict -- and also to a wealth of imagination. To plumb that creativity, Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton held a series of discussions about our region with some of the area's most engaging intellects. This is the second installment of an occasional series.: [HOME EDITION]

AN INTERVIEW with Madeline Janis is speckled with paradox -- her sunny countenance is shadowed by hints of sadness, her idealism backed by hard, practical politics. She exudes a sort of wistfulness, but with a decidedly steely core.

Janis is a native of the San Fernando Valley who left Los Angeles for college but returned with a zeal for helping immigrants and low- wage workers. A leading architect of the city's "living wage" law, she sees it as her responsibility to help protect their families, to fight for their right to join a union, to integrate them into a sometimes hostile society. She has watched and aided the rise of labor in modern Los Angeles -- a development that is defining the city's contemporary culture and politics -- but she is aggressively mindful that even the ascension of a labor mayor has not ended that struggle.

Janis is a founder of LAANE, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which attempts to bring together religious and union leaders on behalf of working people. She also is a lawyer and holds a seat on the city's Community Redevelopment Agency board, where she uses her influence over planning decisions to lobby for better wages, housing and environmental protection -- and, in the view of critics, to stifle development with extraneous social costs.

Janis is optimistic and positive, but do not be deceived: This is a woman with enemies. As a member of the CRA board, she has lobbied for affordable housing set-asides in return for development rights, fought for restrooms for parking attendants in exchange for permission to run parking businesses downtown, and sought "community- impact statements" that require developers to spell out the effects their projects would have on jobs, the environment and traffic. And she has insisted that developers that receive public support for their projects agree to pay city-set wages and benefits.

In the heated L.A. real estate environment of recent years, many developers and others have swallowed hard and accepted those conditions. But some protest bitterly in private and warn that as the market softens, they may opt to take their building projects elsewhere rather than knuckle under to what they see as extortion from Janis and like-minded colleagues.

Janis knows...