Community struggles in Los Angeles

Community struggles in Los Angeles by Gilda Haas and Allan David Heskin

To some, Los Angeles is the ultimate expression of modernity gone awry - an enormous, amorphous mass lined with freeways and clouded with smog. To others it holds the promise of glamorous horizons in an urban Bali Hai called Hollywood. But Los Angeles is not an amorphous mass, it is a city of communities. It is not Bali Hai - it is a place where working people live and struggle with the economic forces that shape all of our lives. In this article we will examine the efforts of three communities located in and around downtown Los Angeles - Pic0 Union, Skid Row, and Route 2 - as examples of community and class struggle in the city. These are only three of the many Los Angeles communities that have organized against corporate development forces which now control the central city and destroy its communities, masked by their public handmaidens of urban renewal and transportation agencies. Operating in a political environment that provides little representation, each of these three communities organized to achieve some degree of autonomy through the state-of-the-art mechanism of the community development corporation. Their strategy has been to try to turn to their advan- tage rather than stop the flow of public and private capital in their communities. Still relatively isolated as individual communities in a large city, their efforts continue today with some progress and many problems.

I The development of downtown Lus Angela

The situation of the three communities can only be understood within the context of the overall development of the city and its downtown. Today’s Los Angeles contains the vestiges of over 120 separate cities, towns and districts which were annexed or consolidated into the city (Bigger and Kitchen, 1952). From the date of Los Angeles’ incorporation as a city in 1850, the city grew from 28.01 square miles to its current status as one of the largest cities in land area in the United States, measured at 463.9 square miles.

Encouraged by the campaigns of boosters and real estate speculators, the Los Angeles population grew rapidly almost entirely by migration from outside the state. The population grew from approximately 11 OOO in 1850 to almost 3 million

Gilda Haas and Allan David Heskin 547

in 1975, as neighbouring cities gave up their political autonomy and their own representative governments to gain access to Los Angeles water supply (Bigger and Kitchen, 1952). With a few minor variations over the years, Los Angeles citizens have been represented by fifteen councilmen since the city was first incorporated in 1850. But while in 1850, each of these councilmen represented about 700 people, today the average councilmanic district contains 200 000. A single councilperson may run a district of many diverse communities, which individually have little political representation.

The political isolation of Los Angeles communities also occurs within the setting of a city tremendously segregated by race and class, intentionally designed as such by private developers in the early 1900s. By regulating the arrangement of streets, size of lots, value of buildings, and using restrictive covenants, developers were assured that they would ‘guide and automatically regulate the class (and race) of citizens’ who lived in their housing tracts (Fogelson, 1967). Today large concentrations of blacks, latinos, and asians are found clustered around the central city, spreading outward except to the areas where large concentrations of middle- class white people live on the north and west portions of the city. Segregation is strong enough in Los Angeles today to support what appears to be three separate markets for rental housing which apply different prices to discrete locations of the city, regardless of a very low city-wide vacancy rate (Clark et at., 1980). Only in the older working-class neighbourhoods in and around downtown is there any substantial integration in Los Angeles.

The segregated and sprawling growth of the city orchestrated by real estate speculators also led to the decline of downtown Los Angeles. Once the hub of the city’s daily business, the downtown could not keep up with the rapid growth and dispersal of the city’s population, or compete with suburban centres which began to emerge in the 1930s. Like other US cities, the central business district in Los Angeles became a secondary and declining commercial and industrial centre. In the 1940s and 1950s, downtown Los Angeles became a predominantly financial and administrative centre for local corporations, reflecting the national trend which separated management from production. But the cluster of skyscrapers that serves as the landmark of downtown in major cities throughout the world was missing from the Los Angeles landscape. This was due to a thirteen storey height limit enforced on buildings in downtown Los Angeles until 1959 as a precaution against earthquake damage. In the early 1960s, downtown Los Angeles was ripe for development and control by new financial influences entering the city.

At this time Los Angeles began to gain increasing numbers of multinational corporations. Between 1960 and 1970, Los Angeles moved from ninth to fifth on the list of corporate headquarter cities. International corporations such as Atlantic Richfield, formerly headquartered in New York, were relocating their corporate headquarters to downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles, with a population of three million, was one of the only cities of its size with such an undeveloped central city. The removal of the height limit ordinance in 1959 allowed the new international corporations to build skyscraper headquarters in the city, and the

548 Community struggles in Los Angeles

corporations began to develop a proprietary interest in the development of their new home in downtown Los Angeles.

The increasing presence of international capital in the central city inflated the character of its boosters. In the late 1940s and early 195Os, merchants and businessmen organized as the Downtown Business Men’s Association in order to deal with ‘downtown revitalization’, but they had very little real success. As Los Angeles grew, however, so did the wealth and power of its ruling leaders. Old families who once controlled the city gradually merged with new industry, as power became institutionalized in the form of the modem corporation (Gottlieb and Wolt, 1977).

Although new faces and old still belong to the same clubs, it is the corporation - and today the international corporation - not the patriarch that is now the most important unit of power in the city. International corporations not only own downtown real estate, but contribute to political campaigns and instruct their executives to ‘get involved’ in civic matters by joining various community boards and commi- ssions (Socialist Media Group, 1975). As the sons of the city’s old capitalists and the unmeasured resources of multinational corporations merged, the redevelopment of downtown as a white and white-collar corporate, professional, and government office centre, with little or no housing and only a few underpaid employment opportunities in the service sector for working-class and minority people, became a logical direction. The redesign of downtown Los Angeles as a centre for international capital gradually superseded plans for revitalization of downtown mer- chant areas. And Los Angeles merchants, many of which had merged into national corporations during the 1960s, were more than willing to join the big leagues.

In the early 196Os, leaders of international capital began to flex their muscle in the public arena, in order to get substantial tax dollars to subsidize their plans for downtown Los Angeles. Bunker Hill, a densely populated low-income residential area located on the northwest comer of downtown became the first target of the corporations’ attempts to rebuild Los Angeles through the Community Redevelop- ment Agency (CRA). CRA, governed by a board of corporate allies since its inception in 1948, was a cooperative and convenient tool, with its powers of eminent domain, land write-downs, and autonomous planning.

In 1950, the city was faced with a serious postwar housing shortage, and Bunker Hill was slated to be developed into 10 000 low rent units by the city’s housing authority and probably would have been the largest slum clearance and public housing project in the United States. These plans were destroyed politically by powerful real estate and business interests who distributed leaflets throughout the city under such names as the ‘Committee Against Socialist Housing’ which claimed that ‘government owned housing . . . would accomplish the major step to Communism’ (Gottlieb and Wolt, 1977). These forces paved the way for the new corporate downtown.

In the early 196Os, new plans ‘for Bunker Hill were implemented by CRA. This time 6000 working-class people were evicted from their homes which were replaced, not by low-rent housing, but by an upper-class culture centre and several skyscrapers which stand out as landmarks to corporate California. Security Pacific


Bank and the World Trade Center are typical representatives. High rent apartments for the new affluent downtown tenant were also included in the project.

An alliance of CRA bureaucrats, corporate leaders, and downtown merchants proceeded to plan the central business district, whch later gained legal distinction as a redevelopment area in its entirety. A convention center was planned to the southwest of downtown, opposite Bunker Hill, to benefit merchants and hotel owners. On the northeast corner of downtown lies Little Tokyo, once a tradi- tional Japanese working-class neighbourhood, now replaced by international capital forces from Japan, working hand in hand with US based multinationals and the CRA bulldozers. An earlier community protest against the demolition of housing and small businesses and the formation of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Or- ganization did not stop the development of the new Otani Hotel, Sumitomo Bank, Mitsubishi and other corporate monuments whch stand out on the Little Tokyo landscape. Thus began the push of downtown’s poor ethnic communities to the peripheries of the central city - to neighbourhoods like Pic0 Union, Skid Row and Route 2 .

Even with this progress, the Downtown Business Men’s Association, now re- named as the Central City Association to reflect its new corporate membership, was disappointed with the speed and effectiveness of downtown renewal, and sought to further their influence over the built environment of downtown Los Angeles. In 1969, the Central City Association formed the Committee for Central City Planning, made up of 22 executives from the largest downtown businesses (and property owners). This committee approached the city council with the proposal that the sensitive and overworked issue of planning downtown Los Ange- les required a fresh outlook - the kind that only an outside consulting firm could offer. In one of its less subtle moves, the committee presented the city with S250 000 with a request for an additional $250 000 in matching funds to proceed with needed ‘objective’ planning studies. The city council agreed to match funds with the committee (Meyers, 1975), despite the glaring conflict of interest involved in the arrangement. Finally published in 1972, and popularly known as the Silverbook because of its metallic-coloured cover, the plan emphasized downtown growth in the form of new office space and sharply increased numbers of hotel rooms and luxury housing units.

The financing component of the plan was perhaps the most self-serving aspect of the new corporate establishment’s concern for its recent downtown real estate acquisitions (Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 1972). The plan would be financed through the redevelopment agency’s power of ‘tax increment financing’, whereby a portion of the city’s tax revenues would be diverted to the CRA for use within the downtown redevelopment area. This method essentially freezes the city’s share of the tax base in the redevelopment area - in this case, downtown Los Angeles - so that the city only receives the tax revenues based on the assessed value of the property as of the date the project was created. Any taxes generated by increases in property values go directly to the CRA to further redevelop the area. Thus, Central City Association members were well assured that their corpora-


tion’s tax dollars would be used to provide improvement in the vicinity of their property, and consequently, substantial increases in the value of their property.

Despite many protests and complaints about this ‘tax rip-off and minor modi- fications to the Silverbook concept, the result has been that multinational business interests in modern Los Angeles have been able to employ the CRA as their bulldozer, financier, and scapegoat, in exchange for the silver-coloured planning bible of the city. In this manner, the corporations concretized their control over the flow of capital and resources that would serve to develop the downtown and their landholdings. Low income minority communities such as F’ico Union, Skid Row and Route 2 have served as unwitting land banks for future corporate development schemes, and are strugghg to stay afloat in the wake of their irrelevance to present corporate needs.

I1 Pic0 Union: community organization and cooptation

The Pic0 Union community is located just outside the southwest border of downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to the LA Convention Center. Developed as a suburb of the city at the turn of the century, the neighbourhood was once populated by middle and upper income Norwegians, Swedes, and Welsh (Cooper, 1980a). Today it is a deteriorating, inner-city, low-income residential area. Seventy-three per cent of the population is Latino, and the neighbourhood is a major ‘port of entry’ for hispanic immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America. About 3% of the population have incomes below the US poverty level. While unemployment in the area is officially recorded at 15.5%, numerous store-front sweatshops pay uncounted local workers far below the minimum wage (Parson, 1980), providing the burgeoning Los Angeles garment industry with its own third world labour force. Typically overcrowded and substandard housing conditions are exacerbated by an 80% rate of absentee ownership in the community.

In the early 196Os, operating in the shadow of impending redevelopment acti- vity in the area, a group of community residents concerned about delapidated housing and other community problems began to meet at a local Methodist church. Around 1965, the group first named the area ‘Pic0 Union’ (Cooper, 1980b) - at the time it had no formal or informal designation as a community in the city - and then organized themselves as the Pic0 Union Neighbourhood Council with the primary goal of improving housing conditions in the neighbourhood. As a grassroots organization, the small council expanded to 30 members who could mobilize from 300 to 500 neighbours in mass meetings around any particular issue. Over the next two years, the council, known by its acronym PUNC, successfully completed some highly visible community improvement projects related to street lighting, safety, and child care. PUNC became a credible force in the community but made little headway in the area of housing.

In 1968, PUNC was approached with two different proposals from sources outside the community. The first proposal, extended by the new director of the

Gilda Ham and Allan David Heskin 5 5 1

CFU, was to include Pic0 Union in its new Neighborhood Development Program. This programme was part of the 1968 Federal Housing and Urban Development Act whch discouraged wholesale clearance of neighbourhoods and promoted extensive citizen participation, rehabilitation of existing structures, and incre- mental planning and development (Cooper, 1980a). Many community members were sceptical of becoming involved with the CFU - some were former residents of Bunker Hill, and had strong opinions about any form or urban renewal. The second proposal came from Bechtel, a major private development firm, which wanted PUNC’s support to acquire four square blocks in the community with the assistance of redevelopment mechanisms.

Rightfully suspicious of the two proposals, PUNC sought expert assistance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and began to establish a formal working relationship with university staff and students who had become involved in the ‘War on Poverty’ and professional advocacy movement of the 1960s. UCLA was able to locate SO00 from the Norman Foundation almost immediately so that PUNC could hire consultants to analyse the two proposals. The consultants concurred with the intuition of PUNC members that the private developer’s proposal would result in large-scale displacement of Pic0 Union residents and large profits for the developer.

In reviewing the CRA‘s offer, the consultants suggested that since the proximity of the new convention center had already doomed the community as an attractive area for public or private redevelopment, the community might benefit by taking the upper hand of the situation and developing its own plan. In this way, it was hoped that Pic0 Union might use the financial resources of CRA programmes to benefit the housing needs of the community, rather than using precious community resources simply to react to CRA plans. Feeling somewhat protected by the committed support of UCLA professionals and prospects for future funding from the same foundation, PUNC decided to engage in the risky business of public intervention and invited the CRA programme into the community.

By the end of 1968, Pic0 Union had been officially approved as a redevelopment area by the city. PUNC also received commitments of three years’ funding from the Norman Foundation as well as matching technical assistance from UCLA. PUNC incorporated as a non-profit corporation to handle its new administrative responsibilities and held a community meeting to elect a new board, adopt bylaws, and hire a director, a planner, and two community organizers. Throunh a series of intensive training sessions and community meetings, PUNC began to develop a three-year project plan for the portion of the Pico-Union community designated as redevelopment area ‘Pic0 Union 1’. The process allowed community members to develop and understand a plan which they found acceptable.

At the same time, the redevelopment agency organized the ‘official‘ citizen participation group - the Mayor’s Advisory Council (MAC) - the form of which was dictated by federal programme regulations and the past experience of CRA staff that these groups are generally a complacent rubber stamp of 20-25 ‘community’ representatives who support anything proposed by CRA staff. Pic0 Union


with its residents already informed and organized around planning issues and equipped with a plan, surprised and confused CRA with its competence and inde- pendence.

When forty PUNC members appeared at the first MAC meeting, it appeared that members of the organized Pic0 Union community would actually control the MAC committee. In a desperate move to maintain control over the planning process, CRA staff surreptitiously obtained a copy of PUNC’s plan and developed an almost identical plan to be presented as CRA’s own effort (Cooper, 1980a). In the confusion which resulted from the two similar plans presented at the final MAC meeting, the CRA plan was supported by a small margin of votes, thus undermining the community’s efforts and pride of autonomy. To reinforce its participation in the planning effort, 200 to 300 PUNC memben testified on behalf of what they described as PUNC’s plan at the city council meeting where the plan was finally approved. After much pressure, the CRA Director was forced to acknowledge publicly PUNC’s leadership role in the community planning process and in the community as a whole.

After the planning process was completed, PUNC went on to develop low- income housing in the community. A separate non-profit development corporation was established to construct and build the housing and further foundation funds were secured. As of 1980, PUNC has developed and wil l own three housing com- plexes providing 260 new units in the community. In addition to these units, substandard housing is being rehabilitated by CRA through lowinterest loans and in some cases full grants (Cooper, 1980a).

Over the past fifteen years, PUNC has developed a much smoother working relationship with CRA as it became an increasingly professional community development corporation. As implementation of development projects became a primary interest of PUNC staff, the organization moved away from its community constituency and neglected the cultivation of its original grassroots base. Commu- nity participation in PUNC diminished (Cooper, 1980b). Greater rapport with CRA has brought rehabilitation loan programmes to the dilapidated housing stock in the community, but absentee landlords receiving the loans tend to improve the units for higher paying tenants - something the old grassroots PUNC would no doubt have strongly protested.

Meanwhile, CRA with its large bureaucratic staff and firm financial and political base in the downtown corporate community continued to plan for the rest of Pic0 Union - the area the agency calls ‘Pic0 Union 11’. While PUNC was heavily involved in development activities with CRA in Pic0 Union I, this second plan was developed with a diluted citizens’ committee and adopted by the Los Angeles City Council in 1976. The basic thrust of this plan was to rezone much of Pic0 Union’s residential areas to commercial, commercial manufacturing, and light industrial land uses to establish Pic0 Union as a service area for the central business district, the convention center and downtown commuters (Parson, 1980). Accord- ing to proposed zoning changes, Pic0 Union’s current residential population of 15 559 will be reduced to 9987. 320 units have already been destroyed in con-


junction with the plan - 60 more than PUNC has developed over their fifteen year struggle for housing. Future CRA plans for commercial expansion, shopping centres, and manufacturing in the area will involve the destruction of hundreds of homes and many small businesses (Parson, 1980).

The most recent protest in Pic0 Union developed around the proposed expansion of Pep Boys Auto Parts which will involve demolition of 29 homes and 11 small businesses - a typical example of what the redevelopment agency envisions for Pic0 Union 11. As Pep Boys moves its corporate headquarters from an economically depressed black neighbourhood in Philadelphia to an economically depressed latino neighbourhood in Los Angeles, it will receive a total of 31 746 185 from CRA and S33.5 000 from a federal Urban Development Action Grant. The basis for this funding is Pep Boys’ projection that 83 permanent jobs will be created by the expansion (Parson, 1980).

With PUNC now acting as the professionalized ‘community’ developer with a strong economic dependency on CRA and diminished community participation, a new organization was needed to recreate the community energy that once organized to save Pic0 Union from becoming the backyard to the Los Angeles Conven- tion Center. A group of tenants, home owners, and small business people organized PUSOC - People United to Save Our Community - to develop an alternative plan to Pic0 Union I1 as well as other strategies, such as organizing a boycott of Pep Boys. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this new organization is that it was organized as a local chapter of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a citywide association of community organizers that has been highly successful in a variety of urban s t rudes in Los Angeles, including such issues as rent control and utility rate reductions.

PUSOC members are given some protection from cooptation by CRA as long as they continue their current affdiation and identification with similar struggles in other communities in Los Angeles. To date, PUSOC members have given their time when their support is needed in other neighbourhoods. It is hoped that PUSOC will locate sufficient resources to develop its own community base and identification with basic problems of the ethnic and working-class communities of Los Angeles, and that it will continue to organize, maintain, and build Pic0 Union without forgetting the reasons for organizing.

In Skid Row: a containment strategy

The Los Angeles ‘Skid Row’ area covers fifty square blocks on the opposite side of downtown from Pic0 Union within the eastern border of the Central Business District Redevelopment Area. Housing in the area consists of rundown residential hotels and mission flophouses. Its population of 10 000 people is certainly more vaned than its housing stock. About 30% of the population is elderly and about 30% is dependent on alcohol and increasingly on drugs (SRDC, 1979). The re- mainder is made up of growing numbers of undocumented Mexican families who


Figure 1 Downtown Los Angeles

work as labourers or in the nearby garment industry, young black excons, recent releases from state-run mental institutions, single indigent women, and other city dwellers with very limited resources.

Skid Row is bordered on three sides by hostile forces. To the north of Skid Row is the ‘revitalized’ Little Tokyo. To the south lies the Los Angeles Produce and Flower markets which plan to build new facilities with large public subsidies, and the garment industry - second largest in the nation. To the west are the merchants and property owners of the declining old commercial and financial core of the downtown who have fought their losing battle for ‘downtown commercial

Cilda Haas and Allan David Heskin 555

revitahation’ for over thirty years, and now anxiously hope that the millions of dollars of Bunker Hill improvements will spread in their direction. On the remaining boundary is the dry Los Angeles River.

For over a generation, Skid Row has been singled out by downtown boosters as the number one drawback to the creation of an improved and viable downtown (Los Angeles Mirror-News 20 June 1955). The visibility of the poverty of its inhabitants and its physical disrepair have repeatedly offended politicians, police, and merchants, and it is viewed as a contagious colony of human and physical blight that can and should be controlled. In 1955, a drive to ‘clean up’ the area, sponsored by the Downtown Business Men’s Association resulted in the shutdown of several bars and increased arrests. At the same time, increased building code citations led to the demolition of about 1000 buildings (Los Angeles Mirror- News 21 April 1960) and a 20% reduction in the housing stock (LA Department of City Planning, 1972). Nevertheless, the area continued to remain the Los Angeles ‘Skid ROW’, and as other low-cost areas of housing were demolished to make way for the new Los Angeles financial centre, ‘Skid Row’ became a community of last resort for a broad range of people.

Approximately four years ago, a member of the Catholic Worker community which runs a soup kitchen in Skid Row became concerned when he reviewed the Silverbook plan for downtown Los Angeles and found that if everything proceeded as planned both his services and constituents would be displaced by large public works projects within a few years. The plan for the area included development of a huge garage, a university centre, a metropolitan police centre, and a new central library. More realistic than earlier approaches, the Silverbook did establish that the medical and social problems of Skid Row would have to be addressed before any bulldozing took place and proposed a detoxification and rehabilitation centre to solve these problems (Los AngeZes Times 4 June 1972). However, the fact that this centre would not house the homeless, employ the jobless, or care for the everyday health and safety of poor Skid Row people who are not alcoholics, was not addressed by the plan.

At around the same time, City Hall was gearing up new energy around the ‘revitalization’ of downtown Los Angeles, and the Mayor had appointed a Blue Ribbon Citizens’ Advisory Committee to deal with downtown redevelopment. Consistent with the history of such committees, the existence of a ‘Skid ROW’ was again perceived as a major impediment to downtown improvement, and Skid Row was rated the ‘number one’ problem and priority of the committee. How- ever, the committee also provided the political opening for the acceptance of an alternative to the Silverbook plan for the area.

The committee decided to develop its own Skid Row Task Force and, with some prodding, incorporated the interests and participation of the Catholic Workers, and Skid Row service providers, as well as the police, downtown businessmen and the redevelopment agency. With the assistance of the Los Angeles Commu- nity Design Center, an advocacy planning agency, representatives of Skid Row community interests on the taskforce were able to develop an alternative plan

556 Community smt&ples in Los Angeles

that contained several important political strategies which were acceptable to business interests, city hall, and the redevelopment agency - strategies that were intended to buy time to empower the community to protect itself.

The basic concept of the Slud Row plan was the ‘containment strategy’ that characterized the Produce Market, Little Tokyo, and the river as physical walls around the area combined with a human wall of ‘selective police enforcement’ to discourage indigent people from entering the commercial portion of downtown. The push of the police would be aided by the pull of new amenities such as parks, public restrooms and improved services in the area. The police and the planner - the cops and the ‘soft’ cops - would assure that the Skid Row population and creeping blight would be contained in one specific area of downtown. The pluralistic committee adopted the approach and the city council mandated CRA to set aside funds for the development of two parks, an elderly housing project and a social service centre to assist the implementation of the containment strategy.

The Skid Row advocates used more than logic in selling their idea. The Catholic Workers were able to organize protests by Skid Row residents at city hall. Also, as politically useful as the ‘containment strategy’ was the fearful concept of a trans- ferable Skid Row. This argument put the old debate about whether Skid Rows could really be eliminated or whether the problem would just move to another part of the city into a useful political context. They observed that if Skid Row services were displaced - such as the Catholic Worker soup kitchen - their constituents would follow to their new location. Therefore, the service providers had the power of deciding in which council district the new Skid Row would appear. Needless to say, this political strategy was always sure to get vocal support from city councilpersons who did not want their district to become the new Skid Row.

The Skid Row Development Corporation (SRDC) was also formed as part of the strategy to reorient plans for Skid Row. This non-profit corporation is governed by a diverse board of directors made up of many of the same people who were on the Skid Row Task Force, and the Catholic Worker protester is now its president. Established as an alternative to bulldozer redevelopment practices, the corporation received a commitment of three years’ funding for staff from the CRA to develop what was originally conceived as a ‘coordinative’ and ‘participatory’ mechanism by the CRA and service providers. The corporation worked quickly to establish its current dual image as a development force for the underprivileged people who live in Skid Row and upholder of the ‘containment strategy’ on behalf of downtown merchants.

In its first year, with almost unprecedented speed, SRDC successfully obtained over three million dollars in local and federal grants for construction projects that would provide housing and job opportunities for Skid Row residents, as well as some economic base for the corporation which would act as developer and owner of the projects. Following an eighteen month struggle between the corporation and the redevelopment agency, it was at least partially conceded that SRDC would act as the official developer-protector of the Skid Row area, as well as the CR4’s


implementation arm for area plans. But when the short-term success of SRDC is seen in the context of the larger political and economic forces of downtown development, the long-term potential of the corporation to do anythmg more than slow down redevelopment becomes a serious question.

Although the redevelopment bulldozers and city hall ‘clean-up’ policies have been stopped by general acceptance of the ‘containment strategy’ there is no reality to the image of the Skid Row area as an island to be protected and developed by the aggressive new SRDC corporation. Skid Row’s anxious neighbours and millions of dollars of public and private investment in the downtown put severe economic and political pressures on the community. Increased speculative interests in Skid Row real estate have been generated by downtown improvements and a recent shift from residential to industrial speculation in the city. Rapidly rising real estate values and the rapid construction of industrial buildings througn- out Skid Row have begun to transform the use of the area.

A recent argument over the location of one of the Skid Row parks to be developed by CRA highllghts SRDC’s political problems. The long promised park was to be situated a few blocks from the Little Tokyo redevelopment area. Just as the planned park was about to become a reality, the influential community of Little Tokyo businessmen and corporations objected strongly to the location of the site. They pressured CRA with demands that the park be relocated, and preferably eliminated, because the visible concentration of ‘Skid Row’ types in the area would have an adverse impact on Little Tokyo enterprise. Fearful of losing a fight with their stronger neighbour and endangering their CRA support, the corporation agreed to ‘give up’ the park - even after a sympathetic press exposed the struggle between the poor of Skid Row and the businessmen of Little Tokyo. Such an easy victory by one of the community’s enemies would seem to encourage future attacks, even though this was purportedly a ‘first and last con- cession’.

At the present time it seems unlikely that the corporation will be able to with- stand the fact that it is located in the middle of prime land for redevelopment. The ‘containment strategy’ did serve to buy time for liberal community advocates who were able to divert the attention of business people to support protection of Skid Row. However, the resolution of the park issue indicates that the same containment strategy has similarly coopted the advocates into a cooperative relationship with the hostile forces that generated the development of SRDC in the first place. To this extent, the SRDC situation is comparable to the ultimate cooptation of PUNC in pic0 Union. But, unlike PUNC, SRDC has never had and has never tried to cultivate a local community base. In theory, the organization has this base through community service representatives on its board of directors. However, there has been no evidence of a community base in practice, as SRDC behaves increasingly like an adjunct of the CRA and Central City Association. Also unlike PUNC, SRDC has not developed immediate and visible contributions to Skid Row that would engender community support. Most of the energy of the small development corporation’s staff has been invested in long-term development projects, which generally take three to five years to implement.

558 Community stru&es in Los Angeles

From its inception, SRDC’s dual purpose as a community advocate and humane mechanism for blight clearance has created a tension which would be resolved only by following one of these two directions. Unless the corporation reevaluates its position and develops new strategies to protect the community rather than to pacify developers, SRDC can look forward to barely slowing down inevitable capitalist controlled development of the community.

IV Route 2: five years of struggle

Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing for a period of 25 years, the Division of Highways was the most isolated and powerful arm of government in the State of California, controlling one of the largest collections of gas tax revenues in the nation, which, when agumented by federal money, approached one billion dollars per year. This budget, combined with a structure which allowed it to operate virtually free of legislative control, gave the agency a level of autonomy which led former governor Edmund G. Brown to say that if the Division of Highways wanted to build a road through the state capitol, no one would know how to stop it. (Los Angeles Times 24 September 1972).

However, the completion of the transcontinental highway system, increasing environmental concern, and community protests led to a reappraisal of state priorities which put an end to the unprecendented highway boom. The Division of Highways was replaced by a smaller and less autonomous California Department of Transportation, called Caltrans. Following this transition, freeway plans were postponed, and many were later cancelled. In some cases real estate acquisition had already been completed for anticipated freeway development, and the highway ‘bust’ left Caltrans as one of the biggest landlords in the state. In 1978, Cal- trans owned 5000 units of housing in California, with 3000 located in Los Angeles (Route 2 Tenants’ Association pamphlet, 1978). A good portion of these units comprise the Route 2 Community, the site of a rescinded freeway corridor known as Route 2.

The unusually shaped two and a half mile long, one block wide Route 2 Commu- nity is located three miles from downtown Los Angeles and received its name when the area was planned to be developed as an extension of the Glendale Freeway, known as Route 2 (Route 2 Community Housing Corporation, 1980). Between 1960 and 1975, the Division of Highways, and later Caltrans, acquired the 544 single and multifamily housing units in the proposed freeway corridor. While Caltrans kept the units occupied by 1500 tenants and collected rent, it used the excuse of the scheduled demolition of the structures to forego adequate mainten- ance of the property, half of which is over forty years old. When the freeway plan was cancelled in 1975, housing conditions in the Corridor had deteriorated to the point that Caltrans had become the largest slumlord in the region.

The tenant population of Route 2 is diverse. The largest ethnic group consists of Mexican immigrants, and the area includes a significant integration of white,


Cuban, Asian, and black people. The tenants are primarily working-class people with a wide range of very low to middle incomes representing skilled and unskilled labour. Organization of the Route 2 community began immediately after the freeway was cancelled when a group of tenants sent a petition to Governor Jerry Brown requesting that they be permitted to purchase the homes they occupied before they were offered to the general public. After considerable resistance from Caltrans bureaucrats, it was ascertained in 1976 that Caltrans was legally able to offer its tenants the option to buy their homes before they were placed on the market.

In 1975, Caltrans began to establish the market value of the properties. How- ever, because of bureaucratic delays, the property assessments were not completed until August 1977. Between 1975 and 1977, since the tenants’ original request to purchase their homes, Los Angeles experienced an unprecedented rise in real estate prices. The Route 2 homes had escalated up to 50% in value, placing them well outside the buying power of all but a handful of tenants. Even those residents who would ordinarily qualify for financing to purchase a home in the Caltrans price range would not be able to afford the terms available for a house that had not been maintained by Caltrans for the last ten years. Tenants did not want to lose their homes due to Caltrans delays in completing the assessments and insisted that the homes be sold to them at 1975 prices. Caltrans staff maintained that it was illegal for them to sell homes at below the ‘fair market value’ at the point of sale, because this would be considered a ‘gift of public funds’, in violation of the State Constitution.

In March 1977, the organizing group held its first formal community meeting with the Route Two tenants in a neighbourhood school. At t h i s meeting, it was learned that the City of Los Angeles had commissioned the Mead Development Corporation to conduct a ‘feasibility study’ to determine the ability of tenants to buy their homes (Route 2 Tenants Association pamphlet, 1978). The tenants soon learned that the corporation had a financial interest in the project and could not be relied on to act in the tenants’ best interest. Mead planned on purchasing the entire corridor, removing tenants in order to perform rehabilitation, selling the single family units to qualified buyers, and keeping the multiunits as rentals. The tenants became fully aware at this time that both Caltrans’ and the developer’s plans would cause displacement of the majority of the current tenants. This reali- zation and increasing anger at the obstacles placed before them by their state slumlord raised the level of the struggle in the Route 2 community. At this point, the tenants’ campaign to acquire their homes became a struggle to preserve their community.

Following this first meeting, the Route 2 Tenants’ Association was officially formed and charged with protecting the interests of all tenants in the area. It became increasingly obvious that the only way to prevent displacement would be through a collective purchase of the entire corridor by all of the tenants. A plan evolved for the future of the corridor that centred on the creation of six housing cooperatives made up of groups of existing dwelling units and new units to be constructed on vacant land in the corridor for tenants of uninhabitable or overcrowded structures.


From this point on, the battle between the community organization and Cal- trans became increasingly leg4 and technical, and the Route 2 Tenants’ Association became increasingly involved with advocate planners, lawyers, and architects, as well as local and state politicians. The first professional advocates of protecting the Route 2 tenants from displacement worked for the State Department of Hous- ing and Community Development (HCD), which happens to fall under the same jurisdiction as Caltrans as part of the very large and powerful State Department of Business and Transportation. Committed by policy to protecting and preserving housing, as well as sharing professional interests in alternative approaches to solving the more general need for low cost housing in the state, HCD staff worked con- tinuously for several years as an advocate for the Route 2 tenants. HCD obtained funds to hire the Community Design Center and Lawyers for Housing to develop alternative plans for the disposal of Route 2 housing to the tenants. Governed by leaders of the Tenants’ Association, the Route 2 Community Housing Corpora- tion (R2CHC) was established as a non-profit community development corporation to carry out the tenants’ plan to purchase their community.

In 1978, the tenants celebrated when the State’s Attorney General issued an opinion that Caltrans had the authority to sell the houses at below market value if it was necessary to mitigate the negative environmental effects of its actions. They celebrated when an environmental study found such negative effects would be caused by market value sales of Route 2 property. When State legislation was adopted authorizing the sale of the properties at ‘affordable’ prices, the Route 2 tenants celebrated again. But as time went on each victory proved to be only another round in the tenants’ fight against Caltrans bureaucrats who continued to resist despite the legislation.

Continuing legal battles and other technical problems related to acquiring the corridor for the tenants led to the involvement of more and more professionals in the community struggle, most of whom regarded Route 2 as a fascinating cooperative housing experiment. Tenant meetings were often attended by the entire local staff of HCD, as well as planners, lawyers and students in overwhelming proportions. As the professionals tried to direct the efforts of the R2CHC board towards the technical problems of acquiring the corridor, less attention was given to the everyday problems of Route 2 tenants who were living in increasingly deplorable housing conditions. This trend came to an end in 1979 when HCD funded R2CHC to hire a ‘community education specialist’ to visit tenants throughout the corridor and organize the cooperatives.

When the organizer began to contact the tenants, she found the problem of poor housing conditions had to be dealt with before it would be possible to arouse mass community interest in collective ownership of their homes. Shortly after the organizer began working in the community, Caltrans demanded a 10% ‘annual’ rent increase. The organizer became the voice of tenant outrage of the R2CHC board who called a community meeting to address housing conditions and the rent rise. The tenants voted to refuse to pay the increase until housing conditions were improved by Caltrans and further steps were taken to assure future tenant


acquisition of the property. 80% of all tenants residing in Route 2 participated in the rent strike. HCD reacted to the tenants’ activism by criticizing the organizer for organizing rent strikes instead of coops and withdrew the funds they had provided for her salary.

The tenants, the R2CHC board and the organizer somewhat redeemed themselves in the eyes of the professionals by conducting a series of guided tours of housing in the corridor that impressed even the most hardened opponents of the rent strike. The corporation was refunded by HCD and the organizer was able to continue her work in the community. But the strained relationship between the tenants and HCD never recovered. In fact, previously enthusiastic and sympathetic professionals of all sorts, unable to cope with the community’s self-direction, began to withdraw in disappointment from their participation in what they had once thought to be an interesting housing laboratory.

Since that time, more attention has been paid to living conditions in the community, and fewer professionals attend community meetings. Work has continued towards creating the cooperatives, and R2CHC has submitted its first application for funding new construction in the corridor. However, many obstacles remain, and new ones are realistically anticipated by the exhausted community leaders. A law suite has been fded by local real estate interests with the support of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a well financed conservative public interest law firm, staffed in part by former Caltrans lawyers, to prevent the sale of the property at below market value. Also, the faltering city housing bureaucracy has been unable to process release of approved funding support for the salary of an executive director of R2CHC, that would allow the community to rely less on outside professionals.

To date, the Route 2 Housing Development Corporation has been in existence for two years almost entirely through the efforts of a volunteer board of directors and part-time community organizer. The organization has continued to fend off cooptive efforts by professionals to use the community as a ‘housing laboratory’, and by continuing real estate interests attracted by the low density of the area and its proximity to Bunker Hill and the improved downtown. The Route 2 organization’s five year battle with Caltrans has unified the community against a common enemy, but now they are faced with the different and difficult task of organizing around the more positive goal of community building. In this effort, differences that were glossed over in the fight against Caltrans have begun to show their face. Route 2 is confronted with the problem of unifying a racially diverse community that includes a white, black, and Asian working-class element and an hispanic community that is divided between low-income Mexicans and middle-income Cubans. Although the board is racially integrated, there is still no Mexican representative on the board of directors of the development corporation.

The struggle against poor housing conditions and to obtain ownership of the Route 2 properties continues at a frustrating pace. In comparison to the Skid Row Development Corporation, the integrity of Route 2 leaders has had its cost in constantly deferred progress and a continuing lack of resources as the develop-


ment corporation upholds its commitment to serve and organize the mass base of tenants in the community. Today, the rent strike is still on, and the tenants have won the first round against the real estate lawsuit. But if R2CHC persist in its goals to protect, acquire, and improve its community - a community created by shared grievances, circumstances and organization - it may turn out to be an example of the potential for communities to acheve some level of solidarity and autonomy in Los Angeles.

V Conclusion

Pic0 Union, Skid Row, and Route 2 are only three of the communities in Los Angeles that have organized to gain political autonomy. As we have seen in these examples, the road to community autonomy is complicated by a lack of resources and constant, unrelenting pressures to coopt the community’s struggle. We have also seen that one of the primary dangers of this approach is that the difficult struggle for economic support and technical competence often undermines the interest, energy or ability of these organizations to establish, maintain and cultivate a mass base. Even if these difficulties are overcome, the probability of any one Los Angeles community succeeding alone against the economic and political forces that control the city and which have already destroyed communities such as Bunker Hill and Little Tokyo, one by one, is unlikely.

The lack of political accountability to working-class communities in Los Angeles had bred the need for creating mass based solidarity within communities with the long-term goal of forming coalitions of working-class neighbourhoods. Of the three case studies, only PUSOC in Pic0 Union as a chapter of the Coalition for Economic Survival is part of such a coalition. Another example of a community coalition in Los Angeles is the Alinsky style United Neighborhood Organization which gives the unrepresented low-income neighbourhoods in the predominantly Mexican east Los Angeles area a political face and voice.

Single issues have also brought organized Los Angeles communities together in effective coalitions. Recent issues include rent control, housing demolitions, utility rates, bus fares, and the use of community development block grant funds. Most recently, workers have been organizing to protect their jobs against the flight of capital from the city as plant shutdowns threaten to turn Los Angeles into an industrial ghost town.

As long as social conditions in the city threaten the power of the people to control their lives - Los Angeles will continue to be the site of local community struggles. Our examples and experience have demonstrated that the struggles for local community autonomy cannot sufficiently empower communities in Los Angeles. It is our belief that they are of limited use unless they create mass based organizations with positive as well as defensive orientations as units of larger working-class community coalitions.

Urban Planning Program, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Gilda HMS and Allan David Heskin 563

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La ville de Los Angeles, avec ses trois millions d’habitants ripartis SUI plus de 1 200 km2, est un foyer de la lutte des dasses ouvrikres. Ce fait est souvent nkgligk. Dans cette ville, ob rkgne la skgrigation des races et des classes, et dont la structure politique n’est pas dimocra- tique, certaines communautis se sont organisies pour riagir contre leur isolement politique et contre les effets du contr6le de la ville par les capitaux internationaux.

Dans cet article, une ktude du dkveloppement du centre-ville est suivie par la presentation et l’analyse de la lutte de trois communautis urbaines, Pic0 Union, Skid Row et Route 2. Ces communautis sont situkes dans le centre-ville ou aux alentours; elles ont kt i touchies par les programmes de reconstruction urbaine et de construction des autoroutes. Elles ont dipass6 le stade des strategies dkfensives et des repksentations et se sont organiskes en corporations de d6veloppement communautaire dans le but d’acckder i une certaine autonomie. Elles poursuivent actuellement la lutte avec plus ou moins de succes. La conclusion prksente d’autres tentatives similaires dans la ville, ainsi qu’un appel i la construction communautaire.

Los Angeles, mit einer Bevolkerung von drei Millionen im Raum von iiber 460 Quadratmeilen, wird n u allzuoft iibersehen, wenn vom Kampf der Arbeiterklasse gesprochen wird. In dieser Stadt, wo verschiedene Rassen und Klassen streng getrennt voneinander leben und die politische Struktur hochst undemokratisch ist, organisieren sich nun verschiedene Gemeinschaften gegen ihre politische Isolation und die Folgen der Tatsache, d& die Stadt unter der Kontrolle des internationalen Kapitals steht. Nach einer ifbersicht uber die Entwicklung der Innenstadt Los Angeles bietet der Artikel eine Beschreibung und Analyse der Bemiihungen von drei Gemeinschaften - Pic0 Union, Skid Row und Route 2 - als Beispiele fk das fortgesetzte Gemeinschaftsstreben in der Stadt. Ale drei Gemeinschaften befinden sich in oder in der Niihe der Stadtmitte und wurden durch die Auswirkungen der stadtischen Erneuerung und des StraDenbauprogrammes betroffen. Alle drei sind iiber Defensivstrategie und Protest hinausge- gangen und haben in h e m Bestreben um Autonomie gemeinschaftliche Entwicklungskorper- schaften organisiert. In allen drei Fillen werden diese Bemiihungen heute noch mit unterschied- lichem Erfolg fortgesetzt. Der Artikel endet mit einer kurzen Zusammenfassung anderer Or- ganisationsbemiihungen auf breiter Basis und einem Aufruf zum Zusammenschld.

La ciudad de Los Angeles con una poblacidn de tres millones esparcida por 460 millas cua- dradas, es un lugar que con frecuencia no se menciona a l hablar de la lucha entre las clases. En esta ciudad, con gran segregacidn de razas y clases, y con una estructura polftica poco demo- crdtica, las comunidades han organizado una reaccidn a su aislamiento politico y a las con- secuencias del control de la ciudad por parte del capital internacional. Despuds de examinar el desarrollo del centro de Los Angeles, este articulo presenta y analiza 10s esfuerzos de tres comunidades de Los Angeles - pic0 Union, Skid Row y Route 2 - como ejemplos de luchas continuas en la ciudad. Las tres comunidades estdn ubicadas en y alrededor del centro de Los Angeles, habiendo sido afectadas por 10s programas de renovacidn urbana o de carreteras. Todas han ido mds alld de la protesta y las estrategias protectoras, habiendo organizado cor- poraciones de desarrollo de la comunidad para tratar de conseguir autonomh en la comunidad. Estas tres luchas siguen, con mds o menos dxito. El artfculo termina con un resumen breve de otras tentivas de organizacidn basadas en las masas en la ciudad, y con un llamamiento para la construccidn de una coalicidn.

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Community struggles in Los Angeles