Inequality, Gentrification, &Amp; the Right to the City

Summary

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The area known as South Central has recendy been colonized by capital (or those hoping to attract capital), and in die spirit of all good colonizers, they have renamed it as (depending on whom you ask) the Figueroa Corridor, University Park, South Park, or "Soudi Los Angeles" - as diough removing the word "Central" could erase die pain and conflict of the Watts Riots, the 1992 rebellions, and die current struggles over contested terrain.

Change has been rapid - property values have quadrupled in die last five years. And to my enormous frustration, the change has produced a new common sense. Ten years ago, poor folks here were surrounded by people who looked like themselves. Their homes looked like their neighbors' homes. Those people and buildings are still here, but now that they are adjacent to a 7,000-seat live theater, a stadium, and loft dwellings, the pervasive common sense by the new person on the street is diat it's those poor people and their homes that have got to go. They don't belong. They don't fit in.

In order to determine what is fair and what is right in the economy, you need to witness and know and believe that human decisions were made in the face of - or in the service of - injustice. This is important because once you know this, once you know that it wasn't "the market," that it wasn't a "natural cycle," that it wasn't inevitable, then you can believe in change. You can witness and know and believe that other human decisions can make it right, take it back, and produce justice.

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Inequality, Gentrification, &Amp; the Right to the City

For the past ten years SAJE has been working to build urban land reform. We work in a part of Los Angeles that is large by organizer standards, but tiny with respect to the global nature of its problems. Our turf is South Central Los Angeles, or more specifically, the neighborhoods th...

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