![]() ![]() We want our streets and sidewalks fixed,” says Luna. “We want things like…a new laundromat on the corner of Whittier and Boyle. How do you allow investment without encouraging population change and displacement?”Īngel Luna, a resident and activist, says neighbors support development, but housing must be affordable and displacement avoided. There is a housing shortage in Boyle Heights…and unemployment is at 8.6 percent, above the city median. “The more complicated work,” notes Delgadillo, is “deciding what kinds of businesses should be allowed to make their way into the neighborhood. Building something more inclusive is far more challenging. Pushing an art gallery out, however, is one thing. CityLab’s Natalie Delgadillo says that despite displacement pressures, Boyle Heights “remains a firmly, working-class neighborhood, managing to preserve its identity even as surrounding neighborhoods…rapidly gentrify.” In Boyle Heights, the tactics used have included harassing visitors of a new art gallery owners of that gallery shut their doors last February. “We’ve been asked enough,” he says to Chiland, “it’s just that our voices have not been incorporated into the plan.” Chiland adds:įor Al-Alim, a major frustration is the feeling that local leaders don’t want to listen to members of the community when planning projects like the Crenshaw/LAX Line and future developments in the area. Al-Alim is pushing for local hire policies on construction and support for local small business owners. In Crenshaw, Kahllid Al-Alim, president of the Park Mesa Heights Community Council, tells Elijah Chiland of Curbed Los Angeles that the rail line being built could help the area if residents are given the chance to benefit from it. The CBC ends its story with a shrug that could be summarized as “displacement happens.” But read the local press, and the story grows more complicated. “They didn’t want to be there 10,15, 20 years ago, but now they have no place else to go because the real estate is so high in Los Angeles.”īeatty says he fears that “the diversity that you would expect in this community, with all the black and brown people, will slowly…turn into an essentially a white community.” ![]() “I see non-black people moving into areas that are historically Black,” Hardimon says. We have families who have been here a long time.”ĭeirdre Hardimon, who is from one of those families, says she’s concerned because she’s seen gentrification elsewhere in the city. “Crenshaw is the last bastion of African American concentrated density in population in Los Angeles,” Beatty says. “Now it’s about 75- to 80,000 who are living in downtown Los Angeles. First come the artists, then the art galleries, then come the young urban professionals with money to price others out.”īy signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners. “If we had been talking 15 years ago, there were about 5,000 people living in downtown L.A., most of them homeless,” Pastor says. Pastor says the biggest factor driving these demographic changes has been the redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles. “It kind of has the resonance of Columbus discovering America.… That is, a newcomer sort of not understanding there was actually a thriving population already existing in the area and thinking that this is a barren wasteland on which to build something new.” Now, Brunhuber notes, “with property and rent prices going up across Los Angeles, people with money-most of them white-are being drawn to formerly undesirable neighborhoods where residents fear their culture will be erased.”īrunhuber quotes at length from University of Southern California sociology professor and demographer Manuel Pastor. Boyle Heights, as CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reporter Kim Brunhuber notes, is a traditional “center of culture in Los Angeles” while Crenshaw has a similar stature in Los Angeles’s Black community. ![]()
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