South L.A.’s Sketchy Recovery – Hard-Hit Area Better Off, But Makeover Incomplete
Mixed Messages 10 Years After The Riots
By HOWARD FINE and JEREMIAH MARQUEZ
Staff Reporters
It’s an uneven recovery.
Out of the ashes of L.A.’s riots 10 years ago has come an economic rebirth to some of the areas hardest hit by looting, burning and violence that resulted in nearly $1 billion in damages.
In place of gutted, ransacked stores are shiny new shopping centers that dot major thoroughfares many with national retail chains that weren’t in the area a decade ago.
Home sales are up in many areas and so are prices.
Though crime is edging up, it’s nowhere near the levels of the early 1990s.
“The community has done a tremendous amount on their own, without much outside stimulation or public or private help,” said Joel Rubenstein, a partner in the Contrarian Group, the Newport Beach-based investment group headed by Peter Ueberroth. Rubenstein was director of economic development for Rebuild L.A., the group charged with spearheading recovery efforts after the riots.
But then there are signs that aren’t so positive. In the past 10 years, employment in South Los Angeles has fallen, as have the number of new business establishments. Average pay is only two-thirds that of the county overall, down from 1992. Financing new businesses remains tough, especially in the midst of an economic downturn.
None of these failings negates the widespread view that South Los Angeles is significantly better off today than it was on April 29, 1992, when the acquittals of four white LAPD officers touched off civil unrest that became a national emblem for racial hatred.
It’s the degree of progress that varies.
“People still stigmatize businesses in this neighborhood as being in South Central, and they are reluctant to come here to shop,” said Michael McIntosh, owner of Trendsetters Hair Salon on Vermont Avenue near 53rd Street.
Yet McIntosh acknowledges that most of the places burned down have come back. “I would characterize it as a partial recovery,” he said.
From west to east
A closer examination reveals an uneven revitalization, concentrated most in the western portion near the Baldwin Hills and gradually spreading eastward.
The phenomenon is typified in real estate. Last year, median prices for single-family homes in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw area rose 13-19 percent over 2000 levels, outpacing the 11.5 percent countywide increase. Median housing prices in South Central L.A. rose from $121,000 in 1992 to $130,000 in 2001.
“No question about it, the economic progress is moving from west to east,” said John Bryant, chairman and president of Operation HOPE, a non-profit organization dedicated to inner city revitalization.
In the last 20 years, a sizable middle-class and upper middle-class community largely black has developed in and around Baldwin Hills.
“The new development correlates totally with income,” said Linda Griego, former president and chief executive of RLA, the successor organization to Rebuild L.A. “East of Vermont Ave., median incomes declined slightly between 1990 and 2000, according to the census tract data. In the western part, incomes rose.”
In the last couple of years, though, the revitalization has begun to expand eastward along the major east-west thoroughfares like Adams Blvd., Martin Luther King Blvd., and Slauson Ave. A prime example is the Chesterfield Square project at Western and Slauson avenues, which opened last year with a Home Depot and a Food 4 Less supermarket.
But for every Chesterfield Square, other attempts at retail development have languished or failed completely. Take Santa Barbara Plaza, the 11-acre parcel of old and fading storefronts across the street from the thriving Magic Johnson Theatres and the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza mall. Numerous redevelopment plans have been floated, only to stall out either because of conflicts between the developers and city officials or over the amount of public assistance.
Development stalls out
There have been other obstacles to retail development. The vacant parcels are mostly scattered along long commercial corridors that were built up 50 or 60 years ago. Since then, the trend has been toward shopping malls on large tracts of land, not mom-and-pop storefronts on small lots.
“The vacant properties that are left are difficult to redevelop; they’re small and incongruent, which is why they’ve remained vacant for so long,” said Thomas Pseng, director of marketing for Cultural Access Group, an L.A.-based ethnic marketing research firm.
Pseng spent most of the last 10 years directly involved in inner city rebuilding efforts. “Many of these lots were vacant even before the unrest,” he said.
There remain large swaths of South L.A. that are little-changed from 10 years ago, with vacant parcels and shabby-looking storefronts. For example, the flashpoint of the riots, the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, remains much like it was before, as do large stretches of Vermont Avenue.
And yet, according to Griego, roughly 85 percent of the properties damaged in the riots have been rebuilt. That would leave just 170 properties that remain empty, a fraction of the hundreds of small vacant parcels throughout South L.A.
Most of those, Griego said, were liquor stores that found themselves very unpopular in the local community following the riots. “Most people in the community would rather have a vacant lot than another liquor store,” she said.
Effect of Latinos
Meanwhile, South Central L.A. itself, especially between Western and Central avenues, has undergone a gradual transformation as middle-class blacks move out and are replaced by lower-income Latinos and new immigrants.
At the time of the 1965 Watts riots, blacks comprised 80 percent of the population of South Central; in 2000, they made up just 38 percent, according to U.S. Census figures. Latinos are now an absolute majority, with 54 percent of the population.
But with a highly transitory low-income population, there is less prospect that significant new retail development can be supported, making such projects trickier to finance.
Overall, employment levels in South L.A., which have fluctuated considerably, remain below 1991 levels, as they do countywide. (The state Employment Development Department defines South L.A. as the area bounded by the Santa Monica (10) Freeway on the north, the Artesia (91) Freeway on the south, La Brea Ave. on the west and Alameda St. on the east.)
More significantly, the EDD data show that the number of business establishments in South L.A. has declined from 6,100 in 1991 to 5,500 in 2001. Countywide, the number of business establishments rose 7 percent.
Several reasons are cited. Many went out of business during the last recession and were slow to be replaced as the economy shifted from light manufacturing to service and apparel jobs. Many suffered significant damage in the riots or were immediately adjacent to buildings that were damaged chose to relocate as their business dried up.
Other business owners who survived the riots sought to expand during the recent boom times, but found themselves hemmed in by their small lots and found cheaper land elsewhere. One such company, tortilla manufacturer Casa Herrera, moved to Chino several years ago from its location near the corner of Slauson Ave. and Broadway.
Educating developers
Significantly, much of the recovery has been internally generated not through the early efforts by outside organizations and corporations, including Rebuild L.A.
Much of the impetus for the new development has come from leaders within the community, people like Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Chesterfield Square developer Chris Hammond. But mostly, it was fueled by the economic boom in the mid- to late-1990s.
“The strength of the economy from 1997 through 1999 has done much more for the recovery of South L.A. than public and non-profit initiatives,” said Eugene Grigsby, director of the School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA.
Despite the encouraging signs, considerable roadblocks remain.
“Developers and retailers think of the market in terms of median income, completely disregarding the fact that you’ve got extremely high densities that should make these project pencil out,” said Denise Fairchild, president of the Community Development Technologies Center, the successor organization to Griego’s RLA.
“We’re trying to educate the developers and retailers that they can make a go of it in South-Central,” she said. “I think they’ll see that with projects like Chesterfield Square.”
