The Struggle For Community

Allan David Heskin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367296407
• eBook ISBN: 9781000306156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a case study of multi-ethnic working-class tenants in Los Angeles, this book describes the group's successful fight against displacement. It examines how community leaders establish their hegemony and addresses the roles of class, ethnicity and gender in community struggles.

1
A Struggle for Community

When a family's home is threatened, the family will fight to save that home. When a group of families' homes are threatened, they will often organize and fight to save their homes together. If the families are composed of poor and working-class people, they usually lose their fight, particularly if the attack is coming from the state. Sometimes their troubles are assuaged by help to move, but they usually move. The incidents in which they win, where they stay, are heroic teles that need to be told and retold. Only a few such tales exist in the modern literature. This book adds another to the short stack.¹

In 1975 a group of tenant families met to fight for their homes in the Echo Park-Silverlake district of Los Angeles. The tenants occupied housing owned by the state of California in a proposed freeway corridor (Route 2) that was to be sold off after the freeway project was abandoned. When the fight was over in the early 1980s, the tenants ended up the owners of this housing either on an individual basis or in collective ownership in five scattered-site cooperatives. To win they had to sustain a five-year fight most people said could not be won. Since winning, the tenants who ended up as cooperators have had to struggle with the task of collectively owning and operating their housing.

In this chapter the main events of the Route 2 corridor story are presented. The material is organized into the three distinct stages of the project. The first stage consists of the tenants' mobilization and social action to win the right to buy the property. The second stage involves the period when the housing was purchased and rehabilitated and the cooperatives were organized. The third stage focuses on the operation of the cooperatives. You will find many up and many down periods in the story. The Route 2 story mixes moments of gaining community and losing community; of empowerment and disempowerment. The struggle against external displacing and disempowering forces is never finally over. Moreover, once a moment of victory is attained, a new set of internal disempowering and potentially displacing forces emerge.

The tenant population of the Route 2 corridor is primarily made up of working-class families representing skilled and unskilled labor with very low to middle range incomes. This unifying characteristic is unique in a population that is both ethnically and ideologically diverse. The population is over two-thirds Latino, including immigrants from at least 14 Latin American nations and Chicanos, about a quarter Anglo, with many ethnicities represented, and the remainder is approximately equally Black and Asian.² Very few of the residents are multi-cultural or multilingual. At least five distinct ideologies have at one time or another been manifested in the leadership of this population. Initially individualist, new populist, and traditional left approaches were represented in the leadership. Beneath the surface lay a clientelist ideology held by much of the resident population. Later, interest-group pluralism was introduced into the project. Each ideological group contributed in its way to the overall project.

The ideological differences have meant that the population has had to work through differences in the meaning of community and empowerment and the significance of class, ethnicity, and gender throughout its collective story. All the groups believed in collective struggle against the state, but there the commonality ends. Each group used different methods and sought different ends. The individualists struggle for individual gain, the new populists seek collective self-empowerment through self-help, and the left seeks to confront the state to hold it accountable for care of its citizens. The pluralists' focus is on expressing collective self-interest through mobilizing power. The clientelists are more accepting of state power but demand reciprocity and seek security in family.

In the first stage of the project a coalition of individualists and new populists dominated. The left activists were isolated not long after the organizing began in earnest. The new populists took over in the second stage when the cooperatives developed. Individualist and clientelist elements were also active in this period. As the development period was ending, an interest-group pluralist approach became dominant. Then as the cooperatives stabilized, the ideology of the project leaders became more mixed. An amalgam of what had preceded can now be found, but it is in this period that clientelism has been given its day.

As will be discussed in detail in a later chapter, women played a major role in the history of the project and continue to be overrepresented in the leadership. There are more adult women than men living in the project either as single heads of household or alone. There are, however, a significant number of men present either as part of family units or alone.³ Well over two-thirds of the units are occupied by families, many of them large families. Nearly 60 percent of the units in the project have more than one bedroom and a quarter have more than two bedrooms. There are three five-bedroom apartments and one six-bedroom apartment in the cooperatives. Typically each bedroom in these large apartments is occupied by two children.

The Route 2 story actually has its beginning in the late 1940s when the Division of Highways, the most isolated, insulated, and powerful arm of government in the state of California began its 25-year spree of highway building. The Division of Highways controlled one of the largest collections of gas tax revenues in the nation that, augmented by federal money, approached one billion dollars per year. This budget and an autonomous structure allowing it to operate virtually free of legislative control led former governor Edmund G. Brown to say that if the Division of Highways wanted to build a road through the state capital, no one would know how to stop it (Haas & Heskin 1980).

In the mid-1970s the completion of the transcontinental highway system, increasing environmental concern, and community protest led to a reappraisal of state priorities and put an end to the highway boom. In this period the Division of Highways was replaced by a smaller and less autonomous California Department of Transportation, called Caltrans. When Edmund Brown's son Jerry Brown, a decidedly anti-freeway governor, was elected, freeway plans were postponed, and many were later cancelled.

The reversal in policy, however, left Caltrans in the middle of a number of projects. Many of these projects were to be constructed through populated areas. It is Caltrans' practice to rent dwellings they purchase in scheduled freeway corridors until they are demolished to make way for the construction of the freeway. The highway "bust" left Caltrans as one of the biggest landlords in the state. In 1978 it owned some 5,000 units of housing in California, with 3,000 located in Los Angeles.

Among the Caltrans units was property purchased between 1960 and 1975 to extend the Route 2 freeway through the Echo Park-Silverlake district of Los Angeles as the beginning of the Beverly Hills freeway planned to parallel the Santa Monica freeway that runs from downtown Los Angeles to the coast at Santa Monica. Caltrans' Route 2 property consisted of a collection of some 544 units of housing in single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes and apartment buildings on more than 200 parcels of property stretched over a two and a quarter mile long and a block wide strip about two miles west of downtown Los Angeles.

The Beverly Hills freeway, after passing through Los Angeles, would have disrupted parts of the wealthy town of Beverly Hills. This meant significant, powerful opposition to its construction. With the shift in popular attitudes against freeway construction as an aid, this opposition was able to obtain cancellation of the first leg of the building plan many miles away from Beverly Hills in the more working-class Echo Park-Silverlake district of Los Angeles. No organized opposition to the freeway is remembered by long-term residents of tike Echo Park-Silverlake area. They do recall, however, that the threat of the impending freeway and the purchase of property by Caltrans had a destabilizing, deleterious impact on the neighborhood.

During Caltrans' ownership of the Route 2 housing, it was occupied by approximately 1,500 tenants. Caltrans used the excuse of the scheduled demolition of the structures to forego adequate maintenance of the property, half of which was over fifty years old. When the freeway plan was cancelled in 1975, housing conditions in the corridor had deteriorated to the point that Caltrans had become known as one of the largest slumlords in the region.

Stage One: Mobilization and Social Action

Organizing in the Route 2 area began immediately after the freeway project was officially cancelled. A group of first-wave, anti-Castro Cuban residents who lived in single family-homes in the corridor circulated a petition among the residents of the corridor (103 signed) and presented it to Governor Jerry Brown. They requested that they be permitted to purchase the homes they occupied before they were offered to the general public, what they called a right of first refusal. The petition found its way to both Caltrans and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to the office of state Senator David Roberti, and the offices of the local council members Peggie Stevenson and John Ferraro (the corridor crosses two council districts). All the recipients of the petition began in one form or another to work on the Route 2 problem.

Caltrans balked at the idea of giving the residents a right of first refusal. As one HCD staff person put it, Caltrans' position was "those people don't have a right to anything; it's not their property." Besides such a practice was against established procedures, and, Caltrans argued, illegal. HCD, a quite liberal organization under the Brown administration, and the politicians, including state Senator Roberti, a liberal who represented the area and who later became Speaker Pro Tern of the state senate, were more supportive. Caltrans had kept the rents low on the housing in the corridor and many low-income families lived in the units. There was a fear that sale on the open market would result in the displacement of many of the lower-income residents.

In 1976 the senator, to overcome Caltrans' objection to the legality of the tenants' request, obtained a state attorney general's opinion stating that the tenants could be given the right of first refusal to the property.⁴ The opinion shifted the issue from the question of whether the tenants may buy the property to the question of how they could buy it. Caltrans and HCD were part of the same super agency, the Business and Transportation Agency, and an internal struggle ensued within the agency over who would handle this question. The struggle repeated other such turf fights Caltrans and HCD had in the past in other parts of the state. In the end HCD was assigned the lead in coming up with a solution for the Route 2 problem.⁵ The resolution of this question was not easy. As one HCD staff person put it, Caltrans "died hard."

Having won the internal fight to take the lead in the Route 2 project, HCD set about to do what was to be the first in a series of feasibility studies on various approaches to Caltrans selling the property without causing displacement. In October, 1976 HCD enlisted the help of the City of Los Angeles Community Development Department (CDD) to work on the problem. CDD working with HCD hired a consultant with experience developing properties such as those in the Route 2 corridor to formulate alternative solutions to the problem.⁶ Caltrans, for its part, set about the process of establishing the market value of the homes. Whatever happened, Caltrans wanted to make sure it realized a maximum return on its investment in the Route 2 corridor.

Caltrans' position and the issue of price became increasingly important during the feasibility investigation. Between 1975 and 1977, between the tenants' original request and serious consideration of how the request might be met, an inflationary real estate spiral had increased the value of the Route 2 corridor homes by some 50 percent.⁷ Even the price of homes once affordable to the more moderate-income residents of the corridor began to move out of their reach. This problem was exacerbated by the deteriorating condition of the homes. The homes would have to be repaired to obtain financing.⁸ If the residents had to pay for these repairs, the homes would become even less affordable.

Real estate prices continued to rise as Caltrans took its time determining the market value of the homes. The residents could see the problem building and became angry. They believed they should not be punished for the delay by having to pay more for their homes, and they demanded that they be allowed to buy their homes at 1975 prices, the year they submitted their petition. Caltrans staff was seriously troubled by this new demand and again maintained that it would be illegal to comply with the residents' request To sell the homes at below the current 'fair market value' would be a 'gift of public funds' in violation of the state constitution.

With the growing roadblock of increasing prices and deteriorating conditions in their path, it was clear to the original activists that they would have to take action beyond their petition if they were to buy their homes. They decided to mobilize the people who lived in the corridor. In March 1977 the first corridor-wide meeting was held in a neighborhood school with the ostensible purpose of introducing the city's feasibility consultant All the residents were invited to attend. The senator's office cooperated by sending out the invitations.

Some of the traditional left residents who were active in the alternative print and electronic media learned who the consultant would be in advance of the meeting and used their sources to research the consultant's background. Their discovery that the consultant was a developer who dealt with buying, rehabilitating and selling homes like those in the Route 2 corridor led them to worry that the consultant might have entrepreneurial interests in the property. The media group came to the meeting to present the information to the other residents.

The school auditorium was packed for the meeting by more than 300 people. The left activists passed out copies of the information on the consultant as the people entered the hall. When the consultant was introduced, he was asked to confirm the truth of what had been learned. A heated exchange followed. The assembled group with the support of the council members decided to insist that the consultant work under an advisory committee of Route 2 residents. They won the argument, and a second meeting was scheduled to be held at the council field office a week later to elect a steering committee for what became the Route 2 Tenants Association (R2TA). About 100 people filled the council office to overflowing at this follow up meeting.

Weekly meetings of the elected committee began from that point on. The early discussions about what should happen in the corridor produced a "no displacement," one-for-all-and-all-for-one position. Whatever plan produced by HCD and the CDD consultant had to provide housing within the corridor for all the residents, high and low income, those in single-family homes and those in multifamily buildings. With this position established, the committee, dominated by the single-family residents, moved to expand itself with more multifamily residents at another mass meeting.

While the residents were organizing, Caltrans' position against any sale to the residents hardened. The Caltrans position remained, "We are not in the housing, welfare, or other type of business. We are in the transportation business and are using taxpayers money" (Northwest Leader, March 24, 1977). In mid-1977 Caltrans cut off communication with the tenants. The tenants responded with the one mass public action in the entire struggle. One hundred tenants helped form a one-day picket line at Caltrans' Los Angeles headquarters (Northwest Leader, September 21, 1977). With some of the media-connected residents' help, full media coverage was obtained (L.A. Times, September 8,1977).

Soon after the demonstration Caltrans reversed itself and rejoined the process. The residents believed that their action had significant impact on Caltrans. Caltrans seemed to be very uncomfortable with such negative publicity. It is, of course, hard to tell what brought Caltrans back. The tenants demonstration was accompanied by pressure from the senator's office and support by HCD staff.

The belief that Caltrans was publicity shy led some of the traditional left residents among the leadership of the corridor to urge the group to take a public confrontative style in approaching the resolution of their problem. This position set off a debate fairly typical of this period. The populists in the group wanted to exploit Caltrans' discomfort with the threat of further demonstrations but did not want to carry out the threat unless there was no other option. This group felt the residents would have more maneuvering room for what it saw as their very radical demands without the intense public scrutiny the media can bring. It caused some shouting and hard feelings in the committee. In the end, the populists with the support of the individualists won out.

In the period that followed, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 A Struggle for Community
• 2 Community
• 3 Empowerment and Disempowerment
• 4 Class
• 5 Ethnicity, Language, and Racism
• 6 Gender
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index