The Dangers of a Desirable Location

The portion of Los Angeles stretching from the edge of Downtown to 84th Street in South-Central L.A. doesn’t look like much.

Well-kept bungalows built in the 1920s recall when this neighborhood was the thriving heart of working-class L.A. The scene, though, is blighted by vacant lots and boarded-up houses that appear on just about every block. Only a few factories remain in the area, the remnant of a once-mighty industrial center. Drugs and gangs make the streets dangerous.

The area, however, has the three qualities sought by real estate people--location, location, location.

Two freeways--the Harbor and the Century--link it to the L.A. and Long Beach harbors and Los Angeles International Airport. Rail freight lines crisscross these flatlands. A high-speed rail freight line project--the Alameda Corridor--is planned between the two harbors and the Downtown L.A. rail yards. The Blue Line and yet-unbuilt Green Line commuter rail lines make the area accessible to distant residential neighborhoods.

Although the 25 older men and women who met in the chilly South Park recreation room at E. 51st St. and Avalon Boulevard last Saturday afternoon aren’t in the real estate business, they also understand the vast social and economic implications of the simple word location . They know that the potential of the land they live on could mean the destruction of their neighborhood.

*

Lois Medlock, a veteran South-Central L.A. activist, had called the meeting of South Park-area residents to fight something most people would applaud, a post-riot Community Redevelopment Agency study into the possibility of reviving industrial and commercial areas throughout the city.

But Medlock and several people in the room opposed the study as a threat to a way of life that is already in jeopardy because of forces outside their control. Like Medlock, they are older African Americans who moved into the area when it was a prosperous working-class neighborhood, supported largely by jobs in nearby manufacturing plants.

The industrial plants and commercial strips began declining in the 1960s, a process sped along by the 1965 Watts riots. Grown children moved from the old neighborhood, west to Baldwin Hills or east to the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire. Home ownership declined as the elderly died. And Latinos, most of them poor immigrants, became dominant in many neighborhoods.

The departure of the young and more affluent African Americans left a resentment that was evident at the meeting. One man talked about “those business people sitting over in Baldwin Hills and doing nothing. They ought to come over here.”

Medlock and others criticized immigrants. One told about how someone shot a street light out, but a police officer said the gunman is “an illegal and they can’t do anything about it.”

One fear was the loss of what remains of the rich African American cultural life that centered on nearby Central Avenue before, during and just after World War II. “If we don’t do something culturally, we will be out of here,” Medlock said. Those at the meeting backed a proposal by artist Mayoro Niang and others to build a replica of an African village in South Park, with shops, performances and artistic exhibits.

They also worried that city officials would expand existing industrial and commercial zones, wiping out residential neighborhoods, to make room for business growth expected to be sparked by the new Century Freeway, the commuter rail lines and the proposed Alameda Corridor. What they fear is that the Community Redevelopment Agency, exercising its powers of eminent domain, will force them out of their homes to create large sites for industrial parks.

*

Absolutely not, said redevelopment agency project manager Herb Marshall. The study “excludes residential neighborhoods” and “we have not indicated there will be (residential) acquisition or eminent domain,” he said.

Moreover, he said, the CRA intends to build up residential neighborhoods and encourage home ownership in an area where almost 75% of the residents are now renters. This would be done by helping finance home purchases and rehabilitation of rundown homes.

The city earned a bad reputation for its bulldozer approach on Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles and in other early redevelopment projects--a reputation it still hasn’t lived down. Faced with powerful pressure to help create jobs, city officials have a real test of whether they can preserve the residential character of L.A.’s older neighborhoods while rebuilding the city’s industrial base. This will be one of the toughest challenges of the decade.

The revitalization of South Park will be an early sign of the direction that Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council will take.