Blogging Social Difference in LA: Week 2

When imagining the core of a city, we all have expectations of what that area should posses. A downtown will have high-rise office buildings, subway stations, art museums, theaters, luxury hotels (and maybe a few business professionals jetting to the closest Starbucks). Downtown should be vibrant. It should attract visitors from the region and elsewhere. It should be the loud clanging heart of the city. As vivacious as this sounds, there is also the coexistence of homelessness and low-income housing in underdeveloped areas. This juxtaposition is especially pronounced in downtown L.A. because the area houses so many vastly different communities.

Ernest W. Burgess, an urban sociologist, created a land use model that describes the expansion of a city starting at the core and moving outward in concentric rings. Although this model is perhaps a product of its time, and not wholly applicable to the city of Los Angeles, I ventured downtown to consider how the physical development of the area has influenced the social organization of its residents.

Entrance to the Chester Williams Building being restored

I began in the financial district, on Fourth and Flower. Arriving mid-day, I navigated the streets with many a suited professional out on their lunch break. There seemed to be your usual mix of large contemporary skyscrapers as well as stately, historic office  buildings. I continued to wend my way through the historic core, trying to get a feel for the area. Walking southeast along Fifth, I stumbled upon the Chester Williams Building on Fifth and Broadway. This is an ornately decorated historic office building that has been repurposed into a mixed-use building with 88 residential units for rent upstairs and a Walgreens that will soon move in on the ground floor. I acquired a form for potential renters with leasing information for the loft-style units, which are starting at about $2,000 per month for a one bedroom apartment.  

After leaving the building I turned to continue down Fifth. Very abruptly the scenery and demographic changed and soon after that I was in an unexpectedly seedy neighborhood. Although I was just one block away from the Chester Williams building I knew this was not the demographic who would be occupying those newly renovated units. I continued walking for a couple blocks when an older black man who had been walking ahead of me turned and in a concerned manner asked just how far I intended to keep walking in this direction. I took this as a gentle hint and turned around to head back to the clean, wide streets of the financial district.

The San Fernando Building - one of the first adaptive reuse
projects to be completed in downtown LA

I then walked over to the Roosevelt Lofts on Seventh and Flower. This large stone structure was built in 1926 and now holds 222 lofts. Upon further research I learned from la.curbed.com that not only do some of these units rent for $9,000 but they have attracted renters like actor David Arquette and LA Laker Lamar Odom. Next I saw the San Fernando Building, which was one of the first historic bank buildings in the area to be converted into residential units. Two more that I did not get to see were the Title Insurance Building with 250 residential units, and the Hellman Building with 212 units. 

Adaptive reuse projects like the ones that I saw today are a ubiquitous facet of downtown Los Angeles. The city passed the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance in 1999 which makes it easier for developers to turn unused commercial or office space into residential units. According to a 2011 study on ladowntownnews.com, “the community now has 29,429 apartments and condominiums and 46,400 residents. In 1999, before the ordinance, there were about 18,000 inhabitants and 11,626 residential units in Downtown.” 

There are many upsides to adaptive reuse projects. Redevelopment preserves historic buildings and cuts down costs and material consumption by using an already existing building. These adaptive reuse buildings are allowing people to inhabit the same area they work in and can create a more sustainable, less car-dependent community. It can also revitalize some not so nice or unsafe neighborhoods. However, this revitalization also brings higher rents, and almost always displacement of the area’s original residents. In Burgess’ discussion of the growth of a city he notes that as a city expands it is not just the physical growth, but “a process of distribution takes place which sifts and sorts and relocates individuals and groups by residence and occupation.” What may have been "sifting and sorting" in Burgess' time is now the hot-button issue of gentrification.

Luckily the downtown area has many community activist groups like The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (FCCEJ) which provides a community voice for local developments. "In the Face of Gentrification" found on urban.org there is a detailed case study of downtown's Figueroa Corridor. The article describes how in 2001 the FCCEJ made an agreement with the LA Arena Land Company (owners of the Staples Center) which required the developers to include "living wage and union jobs, affordable housing, local hiring" and significant improvements to the area before further expansion could take place. The Esparanza Community Housing Corporation, another advocate group, played a large role in the development of the Housing Trust Fund which provides money for affordable housing developments. 

This tension between these advocate groups and developers seem to represent the tension between the vastly different social groups in downtown LA. While recent development projects have brought new residents to the area along with new shops and businesses, they have also forced many residents out of their homes. After being downtown and seeing the great inequalities of the area's inhabitants it feels callous to hear Burgess describe this as merely the natural process of expansion and contraction of a city.