Negro success stories, 'It looks bad. It's dangerous.' Vacant lots dotting South L.A. a painful reminder of L.A. riots

[Black Crime]

For almost a quarter of a century, the bare patch of land near
the corner of Western Avenue and West Adams Boulevard has sat
empty.

Neighbors faintly remember it was once a medical office. Years
before that, a historic bank operated on the same site, a
pioneering enterprise founded by a black businessman. And city
records show that still earlier, it was home to a hot dog stand.

But when riots engulfed South Los Angeles, spurred by the
acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of black
motorist Rodney King, the Western Avenue site went up in flames.
Burned beyond repair, the building was torn down. And nothing
has arisen since.

Across the street? Another empty lot. And it too dates back to
the devastation of 1992.

Back then, there were “promises about rebuilding South L.A. in a
different way,” said Kerman Maddox, a public affairs consultant
who lived near those sites during the unrest. “For those lots to
remain vacant 25 years later is pretty disappointing.”

By some measures, South L.A. has seen marked improvements since
the riots, including notably lower crime and, at least in some
areas, more economic development. Churches, schools, markets and
restaurants sit at many sites that were once scorched or
vandalized, a testament to efforts to rebuild.

But there is also a scattering of empty lots that dates back to
the riots, a stubborn reminder that the repeated vows to
“rebuild L.A.” were never fully realized.

City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson lamented that as other
stretches of the city have been transformed by development,
investors have remained skittish and ignorant of many black and
Latino neighborhoods south of the 10 Freeway. Even wealthy parts
of South L.A. have had to fight for shops and restaurants that
flock to other parts of the city, he said.

By now, the councilman said, the financial sector should have
moved past the memories of the violence. “We had wars with
countries that were rebuilt 25 years later,” said Harris-Dawson,
who represents many of the South Los Angeles neighborhoods hit
by the riots. “Germany and Japan were rebuilt 25 years later.”

The most notorious is a vast stretch of empty land at Vermont
and Manchester avenues, which has been a perpetual frustration
to politicians and community leaders. But smaller patches of
vacant land have also persisted along busy corridors such as
Western Avenue, even as real estate development has spurred
bitter battles in other neighborhoods.

In the Broadway-Manchester neighborhood, an empty lot lingers
next to a swap meet, littered with takeout containers and a
discarded toilet. Another sits next to an Exposition Park car
wash, where a passing woman fretted about homeless people
frequenting the vacant lot.

“It looks bad. It’s dangerous,” said Rosaisela Espinoza de
Garcia, 65, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than a
decade and frequently passes the lot on her way to the market.
“It scares us.”

Immediately after the riots, there was a push to rebuild the
area, said County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was
representing some of the hardest hit neighborhoods as a city
councilman at the time. But he said that after the Northridge
earthquake rocked the city two years later, public attention —
and dollars — shifted to the earthquake victims.

Cal State L.A. economics professor Tom Larson found in a survey
that many building owners wanted to rebuild, but were frustrated
by problems getting financing. Few were able to get bank loans.

A year and a half after the riots, more than half of the damaged
properties had no signs of reconstruction, Larson and a
colleague found in a 1996 study. The Times followed up five
years after the unrest, discovering that roughly 200 vacant
properties remained. Today, Larson is trying to calculate
exactly how many are still empty, a task complicated by flawed
and sometimes imprecise government records.

When Linda Griego took over Rebuild LA, the nonprofit that then-
Mayor Tom Bradley had formed immediately after the riots, her
job was to transform the promises made by businesses into brick-
and-mortar progress. It wasn’t until 2000 — three years after
the organization dissolved — that Griego said she began to see
some of the shopping centers they had clamored for.

One of the challenges was finding businesses that would squeeze
into the space available. Larson said that then and now, one of
the biggest barriers to new development is the small size of
many South Los Angeles lots.

“These were often just little mom-and-pop stores. And people
don’t shop there anymore,” the economics professor said. “They
want to go to big-box retail.”

The roughly 3-acre span of land at Vermont and Manchester is an
exception, which makes it all the more maddening to politicians
that it still sits empty. As the sun bore down on a recent
afternoon, John Walker was walking with his 64-year-old neighbor
to the corner store when he quizzed her: What had once been
there?

The 22-year-old had seen a homeless camp pop up on the expanse.
He had seen clothing hangers arrayed on the wire fence that
surrounds it, an informal market for people hawking clothing. He
had seen it strewn with litter, a community eyesore. That land
had sat empty since before he was born.

Mae Cole rattled off the long history: a department store where
she shopped as a kid, burned down in an earlier round of riots.
A swap meet that sprung up to replace it. And then another round
of violence and flames — and the emptiness that followed.

“It was really nice up in here,” Cole said, shielding herself
from the sun with a black umbrella. “It’s a shame they haven’t
done anything with this.”

Two years ago, longtime property owner Eli Sasson trumpeted
plans to build a massive entertainment district there, one that
he said would rival the Staples Center. But nothing has happened
since.

Sasson blames a legal battle with an obscure government agency —
the successor to the Community Redevelopment Agency — over the
price of a parking lot that he wants to fold into the project.

“We are ready to build. Who’s holding the key? It’s the CRA,” he
said.

Harris-Dawson rejected the idea that Sasson couldn’t move
forward without the parking lot and complained that Sasson had
dragged down the entire neighborhood. He argued that the city
needed tools to prod owners of blighted property to either
develop it — or give it up.

“What’s the price for doing nothing?” the councilman asked.

Experts cite a long list of systemic and historic forces that
have quashed development in the area, including surging economic
inequality and the elimination of redevelopment agencies. But
other barriers are more mundane. Several people pointed out that
the Department of Building and Safety does not keep a readily
accessible list of empty lots, which makes it harder to steer
developers toward possible properties.

“It’s a matter of what is a priority,” said Paul Ong, director
of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA. “It’s a matter
of will. And it’s a matter of putting in the resources to do it.”

Despite the obstacles, South L.A. has a growing crop of success
stories: The Chesterfield Square shopping center, which includes
a grocery store and a Starbucks, arose in a neighborhood that
was once battered by the unrest. Housing for the homeless is
being discussed at the corner of 88th Street and Vermont, where
stores once burned to the ground.

Beyond the specific sites that were damaged in the riots, Griego
also pointed to the opening of the Juanita Tate Marketplace on
Slauson and Central avenues, which boasts a Northgate market, a
drugstore and a Yogurtland. That center took almost two decades
to build, she said.

"Here was neglect for like four decades, and a five-year
nonprofit was not supposed to solve that," Griego said. "It
takes decades to fix it back. And that's what it has taken. We
were the seed."

Today, land scarcity and the housing crisis could prod
developers to give South Los Angeles a second look, said Brenda
Shockley, the former president of the nonprofit community
development corporation Community Build, which was created to
revitalize areas that were destroyed in the riots. New rail
lines and the nearby football stadium in Inglewood could
accelerate those forces, Shockley said.

Along Western Avenue, a Southern California company is now
floating the idea of building a Best Western hotel at the empty
lot near Adams Boulevard, the one that had been empty since the
riots. Christopher Slattery, the CEO of Hospitality Resource
Group, said a new owner is interested in erecting a three-story
hotel with a pool at the site.

The nearby neighborhoods of West Adams and Jefferson Park boast
historic districts with Craftsman bungalows that cost $700,000
or more. The area has become one of the hottest real estate
markets across the city, spurring buzz and fear about
gentrification by the white and wealthy. Yet Slattery said some
“name brand” hotel chains looked askance at the Western Avenue
location.

“It takes someone to put the stake in the ground,” he said.

The hotel idea is welcome news to nearby resident Hunter Ochs,
who says he phones the city every few weeks to report illegal
dumping and other nuisances at the empty lot down the street. At
one point, someone got into the basement of the demolished
building, Ochs remembers. Bringing a major brand into the
neighborhood is important, he said.

“It sends a meaningful signal to people that drive by that this
neighborhood is not going down, but coming up in value and
viability and marketability,” Ochs said.

But some neighbors have eyed the idea of a hotel with suspicion,
fearing it could become a magnet for prostitution.

“They’re afraid to have this thing built,” said Leslie Evans,
president of the Van Buren Place Block Club. “But I don’t see
anyone else who’s going to have something built there.”

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