Housing – Page 5 – J.T. the L.A. Storyteller

Reading and learning about Los Angeles has been a privilege, but I heard once that the more you know, the more you owe.

In the third chapter of City of Quartz, Davis introduces readers to a more ‘modern’ kind of power-player in The City’s shape and politics: the Homeowner’s Associations.

The first Homeowner’s Associations in Los Angeles, beginning with the Los Felix Improvement Association in 1916, were the children of deed restrictions in a new kind of planned subdivision. As Marc Weiss has pointed out in The Rise of Community Builders, early twentieth-century Los Angeles established the national legal precedent for zoning districts exclusively for upscale, single-family residences…

At first, it’s no major news to find out The City was the first to institutionalize certain restrictions to develop particular types of neighborhoods. After all, how else could places like Beverly Hills, Silver Lake, or Los Feliz come to form if not by some kind of ordinance?!

On closer look, however, it turns out that the zoning restrictions weren’t just aesthetic regulations, as the Homeowner’s Associations weren’t just a band of fellas looking for a book club.

“Although deed restrictions also specified details of lot and home design, their overriding purpose was to ensure social and racial homogeneity.”

Here, I think it’s useful to point out how with any law or restriction, while there might be a totally fair or logical effect for it on paper, there’s a way in which these things are applied that makes for a much different story. To see how, one just has to ask why certain laws or restrictions or –in this case– associations are formed.

“Homeowners’ associations first appeared on the political scene in the 1920s as instruments of white mobilization against attempts by Blacks to buy homes outside the ghetto.”

At the time, many Black workers and families presumably made it to Los Angeles in hopes of better lives from those of the Jim Crow South. But as Davis points out, while Los Angeles in the 1920s didn’t have official segregation laws like the former confederate states, it didn’t account for them either.

This left room for many Homeowners Associations to take matters into their own hands.

“Where tracts were not already legally bound by subdivision deeds, white homeowners banded together as ‘protective associations’ to create racially specified ‘block restrictions’. In this fashion 95 per cent of the city’s housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians.”

At this point in the author’s analysis, history feels so close by, like a ghost from only yesterday. It’s strange; even for those of us who hail from the “losing side” of history, which any immigrant family can finds itself in at some point, there’s a way in which the experience of history tends to be inconceivable.

Moreover, in an age where history is made every time another photo or video from just the other day is streamed, the stories of our predecessors from nearly 100 years ago have never seemed more far away; it’s like they’re from completely different contexts.

In fact, they’re very much the same contexts we’re still (trying) work our way out of.

This is how the city of Los Angeles today came to form, not far removed from the segregation and exploitation throughout so much of the rest of America. Of course, things had to change eventually. Otherwise, how else could we have gotten here?

“Until the US Supreme Court finally ruled against restrictive covenants in 1948, white homeowner groups in Los Angeles had ample sanction in the law. The California Supreme Court first established the doctrine in the Gary case of 1919, and continued to reaffirm it as late as 1947. Thus Harry Burker, the erstwhile president of the White Home Owners Protective Association (covering a vast residential area bounded by Santa Barbara, Main, Manchester and Vermont) ran for various municipal offices on a platform of Black and Mexican exclusion.”

Lest I digress from this post and join in on the circus surrounding another certain candidate running for office on xenophobic terms, I’ll just leave it to the readers to draw parallels between Burker and our current political contests.

But even beyond Burker and the Associations, there are still so many more parallels to discover between our time and the past. While City of Quartz is an extraordinary vision with a masterful analysis, it’s still only one part of the picture, i.e. there’s still so much more reading (and writing) to do.

For now, however, the book is far more than a great start to understanding Los Angeles beyond the sunshine and palm trees. 165 pages in, it’s clear that calling attention to power-players is a battle-cry, but that author Mike Davis knows where he stands, like a great fighter who respects the great battles and their warriors before him.

“Veteran Black newspaper publisher Charlotta Bass recalled some of these now forgotten battles in her memoirs. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, for example, whites in the West Jefferson area sued to evict five Black homeowners, while the local Klan burnt ‘Keep Slauson White!’ crosses a few blocks away. The gradually increasing Black presence in the old railroad town of Watts was contested by the virulent South Los Angeles Home Owners Association, whose spores later became the core of white resistance in Willowbrook and Compton further south. A Black home was blown up (presumably by the Klan) on 30th Street, crosses were burnt in Crenshaw and on the USC campus, and white homeowners rioted against sales to Blacks on East 71st Street…”

With more soon,

J.T.

City of Quartz,

We meet at last. It’s taken me twenty-four years to reach Mike Davis’s legendary “excavation” of Los Angeles, and yet I know I’m right on time. Published just two years before rioting rumbled through the streets of South Central, the book is renowned for its unfaltering confrontation of the money and politics underpinning life, crime, and movement in Los Angeles. For this, the book is particularly special to yours truly, as it paints a unique portrait of worlds in The City that I walk through each day of my life. As such, my next few posts will be reviewing the book’s chapters in hopes of “carpooling” with J.T.’s readers on a journey with the author.

For some time, I’ve done my best to steer clear of politics with my writing on JIMBO TIMES, and yet I’ve always known I could only look away for so long. My writing has always been a world exploring contrasts, honoring what’s beautiful throughout the world, while also acknowledging what threatens its beauty. This is what makes it an honor to reach the pages of City of Quartz, as I know the book will play a significant role in shaping The L.A. Storyteller’s perspective.

In fact, it already has. Just a few pages in, the book’s very preface has already helped me to identify a key aspect of my relation to The City. I’m reading the re-edition of Quartz, published in 2006 with an updated preface from the author, and I think a great starting point for reflection can be found in Davis’s assessment of then-Mayor Villaraigosa’s impact on the city.

“After a municipal election (2005) sadly devoid of new concepts, genuine passions, or substantive debate, Los Angeles at last has a mayor -Antonio Villaraigosa- with a surname that resounds with the same accent as the majority of the population. The election of Villaraigosa – once a fiery trade-union and civil-liberties activist – should have been Los Angeles’s ‘La Guardia moment,’ an opportunity to sweep city-hall clean of its old scheming cabals with their monomaniac obsession with gentrifying Downtown at the expense of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods. Instead…the former rebel from east of the river is now the jaded booster of a downtown-renaissance that promotes super-cathedrals, billionaire sports franchises, mega-museums, Yuppie lofts, and drunken Frank Gehry skyscrapers at the expense of social justice and affordable housing…“

Even before Davis’s mention of Villaraigosa, I’m almost immediately reminded of L.A.’s 2013 race for Mayor between then-councilman Eric Garcetti and City Controller Wendy Gruel, which finished with the lowest voter turnout in L.A. history. In fact, according to the L.A. Times, “Garcetti’s complete tally was 222,300, just 12.4% of the city’s registered voters. That was well ahead of his opponent, City Controller Wendy Greuel, but a smaller vote total than any incoming mayor since Frank Shaw in 1933.”

I was in Davis, California when the elections were taking place, but even from afar, I observed a contest that showed hardly any concern over the city’s housing, education, or transportation crises. Like Villaraigosa before them, both candidates seemed nearly oblivious to the worlds facing the people of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, or the neglected black and Latino students of L.A.U.S.D.

Garcetti spoke of “revitalizing” L.A., but for who? In the two years since his election, his time in office has merely been an extension of Villaraigosa’s liasoning to developers and other displacers with a stake in L.A. property. Just last year, despite heated protests from riders, Garcetti voted along with the Metro board to raise the fare on Metro’s ridership, the vast majority of whom – as cited by the L.A. Weekly – barely earn “an income of roughly $20,000 a year and more than 80 percent [of whom] are minorities, according to a Metro survey in 2012.”

Naturally, proponents of the fee hike pointed to rising operating costs for the Metro system, but as several leaders opposing the vote made clear, Metro’s board cited rising costs while failing to acknowledge their inability to attract new, wealthier riders over the last few years. In turn, their vote placed the costs of their under-performance on the backs of their already financially-strapped patrons.

As if to catch my drift, apart from the election at the time, the preface of Quartz also delves right into transportation, providing material for readers to place the relevance of Metro’s recent decision within the larger spectrum of L.A.’s transportation crises:

“Right now [in 2006], locals pay a ‘congestion tax’ – ninety-three hours per commuter per year lost in traffic delays – that is the highest in the United States, and twice as high as it was in 1982. In the worst scenario, it can double again in another decade.”

And here, I think readers can see why I’m so excited about the book: in the opening alone, Davis shows concern for the city like a driver exiting the freeway determined to find the origins of the traffic that stifles it. Taking a stand on the pathway overlooking the congestion, Davis is ready for a change. Walking down the street in my journey with L.A., I recognize the author as he stares down at traffic, and join him in observation. Together, Davis’s preface tells me that both the reader and writer can find key roots of the gridlock, and in turn, key roots of the response.

I look forward to sharing more of what these responses look like with City of Quartz soon, and I hope readers look forward to hearing them.

With Love,