Twenty-five years after South Los Angeles erupted in flames through four days and nights of rioting after the April 29, 1992, verdicts acquitting four police officers in the Rodney King beating case, some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods are well on the path to recovery.
But more than a generation later others struggle and stagnate.
Around the periphery of the rioting, neighborhoods from Koreatown to USC to the Crenshaw Boulevard corridor are experiencing unprecedented levels of development, with new mixed-use centers and housing developments almost completely wiping away vacant lots and any other traces of the rioting.
“Koreatown is completely rebuilt, Pico-Union is completely rebuilt, and so are some other neighborhoods,” said Linda Griego, former head of Rebuild L.A., a nonprofit set up to guide redevelopment after the riots, and chairwoman of MLK Health and Wellness Community Development Corp. “For the most part, they’ve all rebuilt better.”
But the closer one moves to the flashpoint of the riots at Florence and Normandie avenues, the more spotty the recovery has been. Scores of lots remain vacant, some buildings are still boarded up, and many stores retain a rundown feel. While some new projects and shopping centers have finally opened after decades of delays and failed plans, overall economic investment in this central core continues to fall far short of the promises and commitments made in the weeks and months following the riots.
“The closer you are to the epicenter, the less change there has been in economic opportunity and economic development,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester.
Economic toll
The rioting, which ran from April 29 to May 2, damaged or destroyed 1,100 buildings in the city of Los Angeles at a cost of nearly $1 billion, according to RLA’s final report from January 1997. Among the affected buildings were 700 retail shops, including 225 liquor and convenience stores. In all, more than 10,000 small businesses were adversely impacted.
Griego said that when RLA sunsetted in early 1997 after its five-year term, nearly 500 properties still remained vacant.
The damage was not limited to Los Angeles. An additional 300 buildings were damaged or destroyed by fire in north Long Beach. Several other communities around Southern California and as far away as Las Vegas experienced smaller-scale riots that damaged or destroyed buildings.
In the days and weeks after the unrest, RLA, under the leadership of former L.A. 1984 Olympics czar Peter Ueberroth, obtained commitments from 43 companies totaling $497 million to be directed to various rebuilding efforts, according to the organization’s final report. The list was an impressive who’s who of corporate Los Angeles at the time, including Arco, First Interstate Bank, Ford Motor Co., and Ralphs Grocery Co. About $390 million of those commitments were actually delivered upon by the end of 1996, the report says.
But Guerra said those numbers turned out to be less impressive than first thought. Many of the commitments were already planned by the companies prior to the riots, while much of the remaining $100 million in commitments was never delivered.
In any case, there’s widespread agreement that the promised money was not enough to revitalize large swaths of South Los Angeles, even when supplemented by some redevelopment dollars and other government grants.
“What those commitments did was stabilize things so that the area would not deteriorate further,” Griego said. “We ran the serious risk of having a completely and permanently hollowed-out community, where 25 years later, burned-out buildings would still be standing. While the area has still seen some struggles, at least that didn’t happen.”
RLA’s mandate expired in early 1997, so it disbanded and handed the baton to an entity with two partners: Los Angeles Trade Tech Community College and another nonprofit, Community Development Technologies, now called CD Tech. But by that time, attention of civic leaders had been focused elsewhere, including on the recovery efforts following the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.
The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency was another tool for supporting the neighborhood. It was the only entity that had the eminent-domain power to force property owners to sell so that land could be repurposed for major redevelopment projects.
The CRA made sporadic attempts to revitalize tracts in South Los Angeles, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its attention was more focused on Hollywood.
South Los Angeles remained a tough nut to crack, mainly because it is dominated by smaller properties along long corridors with little parking.
“South Los Angeles is filled with small lots with absentee property owners,” Griego said. “What few large parcels were available were often old industrial sites with significant contamination issues. So, land for major redevelopment projects has been very hard to come by.”
Any hope that the redevelopment agency could still spur revitalization was dashed five years ago when Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature dissolved redevelopment agencies.
Despite such difficulties, many of the hundreds of vacant lots left by the riots have been filled over time, though there’s been no systematic accounting to yield precise numbers.
According to Azusena Favela, a community economic development consultant and board member of the South Central Neighborhood Council, at least a third of the formerly vacant lots have been converted to other uses. Some have become pocket parks or community gardens, others have been converted to housing, and some have been taken over by street vendors. A few have even been bought by local entrepreneurs in search of cheap land to open up brick-and-mortar stores.
But, “the recovery has been very, very slow,” said Veronica Flores, chief executive of Community Health Councils, a social justice nonprofit in South Los Angeles set up just after the riots.
Loyola Marymount’s Guerra noted that income levels in the affected communities have declined or stagnated while rents and land prices have gone up across the board.
Contributing to this financial squeeze, investors have been snapping up parcels that are quite cheap compared with other parts of the city and Los Angeles County, Benjamin Torres, chief executive of CD Tech, said. These developers anticipate that better access to mass transit along the newly opened Expo Line and the Crenshaw light-rail line now under construction will allow them to build major mixed-use projects or to flip the land at much higher prices to developers who plan such projects.
“This is pushing rents up for everyone, residential and business tenants alike,” Torres said.
For now, though, he said most of these absentee landlords are pocketing the higher rents and not investing in their buildings, leaving the business tenants to struggle. Since the business owners’ revenues are not able to keep pace with the rent, eventually many of them will be forced out.
Adding to this problem is a lack of capital for small businesses in the area. While some community banks have been able to extend small lines of credit, what the businesses really need is access to equity capital, according to Gene Hale, chairman of the Greater African American Chamber of Commerce who is also president of G&C Equipment Corp., a Gardena company that sells construction equipment.
“Most of these companies have low creditworthiness scores, so they need investors to come in and help them out,” Hale said. “Without that help, I’m seeing more and more small-business owners in South L.A. either shutting down or very close to it.”
Retail recovery
On the retail side, big supermarket chains such as Kroger Co.’s Ralphs and Food 4 Less, and Albertsons Cos. and its Vons stores did rebuild some of their damaged businesses, but they did not significantly expand their presence in the region, said Tom Larson, an economics professor at Cal State Los Angeles who has looked extensively at the retail and grocery store environment in South Los Angeles.
He said the pressures brought about by consolidation and low margins means they focus more on stores with better margins in higher-income neighborhoods such as West Los Angeles.
Instead, Larson said, independent grocery stores moved in to fill the gap, most notably Northgate Markets, Superior Grocers, and El Super.
“It’s these smaller independent chains that now make up the majority of grocery stores in South Los Angeles,” he said. “That has been a major shift.”
Northgate, based in Anaheim, has specifically targeted areas with few major grocery stores – known as “food deserts” – as ripe grounds for expansion. In 2014, the chain opened a store as the anchor tenant of a new shopping center on a riot-damaged and vacant parcel at the corner of Central and Slauson avenues. That store now employs 170 people.
“A lot of our grocery stores are opened in food deserts, and South Los Angeles is one such area,” said Alicia Valadez-Gonzalez, government affairs manager for Northgate and a member of the family that owns the chain that has 41 stores across California. “Our strategy is trying to offer better service and quality than the stores currently serving these areas.”
The grocery company also opened a store in 2000 in a north Long Beach neighborhood that saw rioting 25 years ago.
Northgate’s decision to anchor the Central-Slauson shopping center was a key catalyst for that neighborhood, said Favela, the community development consultant.
“That shopping center, which came after a 20-year effort, is now transforming the neighborhood,” Favela said. “It’s beginning to tell a different narrative for this neighborhood.”
