Who's allowed to dream in Los Angeles?
The future is coming either way
La Loma. Bishop. Palo Verde. These names come to my mind every time I drive by Dodger Stadium. These were the three neighborhoods comprising 1,100 homes, built primarily by Mexican Americans who were redlined out of living elsewhere in this city. So they created a community in a canyon just north of Downtown and worked together to build their own future and then one day in 1959 they were dragged out of their dream to make way for someone else’s.
The city decided the land should be used for a revolutionary public housing project, even though researchers for the project admitted that, while sparse and underserved, La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde “already had many traits that successful urban planning was seeking to provide: a rich pedestrian culture, an engaged populace, a sense of community,” as Eric Nusbaum put it in Stealing Home.
While the last resident was being pulled from their home under eminent domain in May, the future housing project collapsed, so for a while what these homes were destroyed for was a dusty, vacant lot. And now it’s mostly the parking lot for the Los Angeles Dodgers™. Palo Verde Elementary School was buried whole under the lot near Gate C. I read that detail three years ago and it’s still my first thought anytime I’m attending a game. The team has a lot of heritage nights honoring Latin American cultures and I went to one last year that had a drone show where the lit-up drones danced around and formed the Salvadoran flag and everyone loved it until the drones formed the Spectrum™ logo and everyone started booing and that felt very Community to me but the knowledge of the bones of the dreams I was standing on never really left me.
Who is allowed to dream in this city, one famous for being a place where so many people are from somewhere else? It’s maddening to have a conversation about who belongs in a city whose name is in Spanish.
One thing I found so compelling about reading Stealing Home was how tangible the potential futures for the city seemed at one point, how many diverging paths were visible to the people charged with charting the vision, how possible it seemed to them to dream up a city that was more equitable for housing and employment and community, and the conversation was just about how we’d get there.
And then instead of any of that, Bishop and Palo Verde and La Loma were taken out of the hands of its residents and flattened and graded and turned into a parking lot that you can walk across if you pay the Los Angeles Dodgers™ enough for the privilege and then you can buy a $30 Dodger Dog™ and watch a drone show sponsored by Spectrum™. Anyone who knows me knows I love my Dodgers but it’s incredibly hard not to see the entire thing as a metaphor for the city, especially these days.
Mike Davis was right about everything.
It is maybe intuitive to find out that everything you’ve ever encountered in LA that makes you mad is because of some rich fuck but it’s slightly more impressive that Mike Davis was able to write down every one of those instances in one place, plus give you said rich person’s full legal name.
It’s even crazier that he wrote this book in 1990 and every page has only gotten truer: the portent in the Cybertruckification of public libraries (he didn’t use this word obviously but he called Goldwyn Regional Library in Hollywood, with its “vandalproof” architecture, “the most menacing library ever built” so I bet he would have), the threat lurking in privatization of and increasing surveillance in public spaces, the perpetual distinction between The Honorable Homeowner and the Renter Scourge in the eyes of the city when it comes to services allocation, housing development, and who is viewed as a valuable resident.
I know Davis would have had thoughts on the pink chairricades used downtown this weekend.
I feel very strongly that, in order for anything to get better, we have to know how we got here. I wish that both the looking back and the looking forward weren’t so completely overwhelming at this moment in time, but I have to believe that we can make a better world than this, even when the road looks so exhausting to even contemplate, a truly good and equitable future so hard to see through the haze. I have to believe it’s possible because otherwise I will lie down and never get up. You have to believe this too. The future is coming either way; please believe that every step you take forward has real power to shape it.
With love,
TM