Author: Damian Mendieta
Just a few blocks away from campus, Highland Park has been the home of a large Latina/o working-class community for over 50 years. With an abundance of cheap housing, this community welcomed citizens eager to own property without breaking the bank. Soon the two community lifelines, York Blvd. and Figueroa Blvd. were united under a common Spanish language. With scores of shops that catered to the unique needs of Mexican and Central American residents, being Latina/o was not the exception, it was the norm.
Such a community may be on its way out as a sizeable quantity of hipster shops, loud nightlife spots and pricey boutiques have sprouted up in the last five years.“Thirty years ago, there was white flight out of the central city to avoid school busing for integration…What nobody realized was that the process might take place all over again in the other direction,” according to The Los Angeles Weekly article, “Gentrification and Affordability.”
Without question, the arrival of gentrification means the resurgence of a predominantly white population at the cost of displacing people and businesses of color. A recent post by the online real estate site blog, Redfin.com, ranked Highland Park as the hottest neighborhood in the national housing market in 2013. According to the article, prices skyrocketed 31 percent and sales grew 73 percent in 2012. Soon, as seen in nearby Echo Park and Hollywood, a drop in cheap housing has the potential to force an exodus of the not-so-affluent out of Highland Park.
Gentrification has been praised for squashing crime and revitalizing local businesses, but the costs definitely outweigh the gains. In a report on the displacement of over 12,000 Latina/os in Hollywood, several residents told the L.A. Weekly that landlords were keen to evict working-class families and bring in single white tenants. In some cases, apartment buildings were demolished in order to build high-priced condominiums.
A gentrified York has, by default, led to the upper-class colonizing the poor urban communities. The community has struggled with few opportunities for social mobility, underfunded public schools and a terrifying wave of gang warfare. On the online Los Angeles Neighborhoods and Real Estate blog, a writer justified Latina/o displacement by saying, “People who live in Highland Park had decades to do something about the neighborhood and it decayed and decayed… Only in the mid to late 2000s, has it shaken off the crud.”
A crude system based on little else but nickels and dimes has already started to grow in Highland Park. Other neighborhoods like Hollywood and Echo Park, and soon also the Mid-City and Koreatown sections of downtown Los Angeles, have already fallen to the covert might of gentrification. One day the local Latina/o bakery goes out of business, becomes a more affluent coffee-house and soon real estate vultures greedily dream of high-rent housing for upper-class coffee customers. This is not new, its not an isolated issue and its not as if there’s no solution to fixing it.
Though the college may bask in its protective bubble as an elite private institution, Occidental cannot afford to sit on the sidelines here. The main issue that many fail to mention when defending or critiquing gentrification is that community revitalization can happen in more sustainable ways. Based on a lack of journalistic reporting, educating impoverished children of the Highland Parks of Los Angeles has not been explored as a feasible method of long-term prosperity.
In order to enact this revolutionary educational movement for the college’s surroundings, Occidental must focus on local public schools. Currently the Neighborhood Partnership Program has taken great measures to provide tutoring for such middle and high school children; yet, more can be done to empower residents so that the battle against gentrification can be won.
According to current urban educational research, public schooling in Highland Park is plagued by the educational pipeline that forces many Latina/o students into menial, subservient and low-paying working-class jobs. Occidental can breathe life back into the neighborhood by substantially increasing recruitment in local schools and informing students about a liberal arts education.The college must act now, knowing that many children have extraordinary academic potential but lack resources to prepare them.
If things are difficult enough for these students whose parents often cannot even help them fill-out school forms in English, not to mention college applications, gentrification adds to their woes. If one ever gets to know the residents of Highland Park, one will notice that rent and basic necessities are at the top of their priorities, and education tragically does not receive the spotlight.
The residents of Highland Park are criticized for failing to make their community better and safer, but such comments are built on ignorance and thus should be deemed irrelevant. The people who live just minutes away from Occidental rarely ever have a chance to fight back against the decaying value of the neighborhood. No wonder wealthy gentrificators have it so swell in Highland Park; they don’t have to worry about the same things because their privilege allows them to not care about racial and social injustice.
Damian Mendieta is a sophomore Latino/a & Latin American Studies and History double-major. He can be reached at mendieta@oxy.edu.
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