east hollywood – Page 4 – J.T. the L.A. Storyteller

An Open Letter to Mitch O’Farrell’s Office in CD-13; 439 Days to June 7, 2022

March 25, 2021November 12, 2022 J.T.4 Comments

On behalf of a critical segment of residents in East Hollywood, this office can now keep for its records that the level of abandonment towards unhoused residents in the 13th district in the years leading up to COVID-19, and then during the year of stay-at-home orders, has gone from derelict to criminal and back again.

As if to add further injury to insult of the principles that CD-13’s office should stand for, actions taken in Echo Park this week at Mitch O’Farrell’s and homeowners’ direction to forcibly remove unhoused residents and housing-insecure residents, as well as their supporters, are fascistic at their core, and obvious as such to all but this office and the homeowners whose wealth and property values they seek to protect by so doing; O’Farrell’s decision to undermine unhoused bodies at Echo Park also mirrors what real estate appraisers sought to do in the 1940s when they redlined property values against Negroes and “foreign families.”

In the 1940s, explicit prohibitions against homeownership by non-whites were legal, but neither right nor humane. When racial covenants were banned by the Supreme Court in 1948, it was largely due to pressure by African-American civil rights organizing in our cities, as well as because of a need for the U.S. judicial system to distinguish the U.S. from “[Soviet] communism,” that is, at least on paper. But today, while deploying police officers paid for by tax dollars extracted from a city that’s 3/4ths non-white against unsheltered bodies, 3/4ths of whom are non-white, remains legal, it is as wrong and inhumane as previous removal policies in Los Angeles and California; a special rapporteur for the United Nations, Philip Alston, as much as noted this in 2017.

These issues are not just temporarily emotional or online issues for us, either, but issues we live with each day as we walk through our avenues, open up our shops, and make our way to and from work inside of the 13th district; many of us preceded Mitch O’Farrell’s term here–and also Garcetti’s from 2001 – 2012–and will outlast O’Farrell’s tenure, but make no mistake about it: the damage wrought on our community by O’Farrell’s and Garcetti’s dedication to Business Improvement Districts, hotel and condominium developers, and entitled home “owners” will take our community generations to recover from.

We also know the office is fond of sending newsletters to constituents noting their “clean-ups.” But until June 7, 2022, the only clean-up we’d like to see is of Mitch O’Farrell’s office on Sunset boulevard. The “flight” of white supremacy and its proponents in the 13th district, who regard our unhoused residents only as “blight” on our streets–truly the pots calling kettles black, given that these streets belong most of all to the renters and workers who share them–will also be a welcome reprieve.

J.T.

EPISODE 48 – REDLINING, INTERNMENT, AND RESILIENCE

March 8, 2021January 21, 2023 J.T.Leave a comment

In our 48th episode, we give listeners the LIVE recording of our first panel for Making Our Neighborhood: Past: Redlining, Internment, and Resilience. Our fundraiser for translation services over the next two panels is nearly complete. Please visit our FUNDLY to support!

J.T.

(Re)Making Our Neighborhood – An Excavation of East Hollywood, Part III

February 28, 2021January 3, 2024 J.T.Leave a comment

This is the third installment of a three-part series.

“The Marshalls were close to their Japanese-American neighbors, particularly the Hoshizakis and the Kakibas, who lived on either side of them. Their daughter, Barbara Marshall, remembers food and culture being exchanged over the hedges of their houses.” – Samanta Helou-Hernandez, This Side of Hoover

The Japanese American and African American families documented on This Side of Hoover were the types of families in East Hollywood whom a band of real estate appraisers & L.A. County officials in the 1940s would come to label “undesirable” for investment. Today, the area, east of Hollywood and west of Silver Lake, is a majority-immigrant community where nearly 4/5ths of the population rent apartments, and which is also disproportionately policed over increasingly valuable real estate for appraisers.

Now, nearly one hundred years since deed restrictions in Los Feliz–a wealthier neighborhood to the north of East Hollywood–stated in their clauses that only members of the “Caucasian Race” were allowed to own property in the area, Black residents there and in East Hollywood face the highest rates of homelessness and policing of their bodies. Non-white immigrant communities face the second highest rates of homelenessness and policing in Los Feliz and East Hollywood.

Data also shows that from 1980 – 2014, when areas like East Hollywood saw their largest waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia, rents in Los Angeles jumped 55%, while incomes increased only by 13%.

In 2018, according to the California Housing Partnership (CHP), “Renters in Los Angeles County [needed] to earn $46.15/hr – more than 4 times local minimum wage – to afford the median monthly asking rent of $2,400.” The CHP also estimated that Los Angeles County needs at least 500,000 additional affordable rental homes to meet current demand, a number that’s only increasing due to Ellis Act evictions.

Ellis Act evictions take place when landlords decide to convert buildings, including rent-stabilized (RSO) buildings, into condominiums. Since 2000, Ellis Act evictions have taken nearly 500 housing rent-stabilized units out of East Hollywood and nearly 27,000 RSO units from the city of Los Angeles overall. At the same time, since 2000, homelessness in the 13th district, of which East Hollywood is a part of, has accelerated, with at least 544 families without housing as recently as 2019. The total number of unhoused people in the 13th district is now at least 4,000, according to the most recent numbers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

As we discuss redlining in East Hollywood, then, it’s also important to note that Los Angeles was not always segregated between wealthy neighborhoods on the west and north sides and impoverished neighborhoods in the central, east and south sides. Redlined neighborhoods in Los Angeles actually meant that neighborhoods were integrated, made up of Black, immigrant, and European-born residents. The clearest consequence of redlining and related policies was therefore explicit government investment in dividing cities by racial makeup, which came to promulgate the false notion that universal human necessities like housing, education, and healthcare should serve only some residents at the expense of others.

Also consider that Black and immigrant groups called “undesirable” for investment by the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) were groups of laborers, many of whom worked for the city’s biggest industries in the 20th century before WW2, that of service and agriculture. Black, Japanese, Mexican and other “minority” residents served wealthier white families in areas like Los Feliz as babysitters, nurses, fruit pickers, and more. Black and immigrant communities in Los Angeles thus played critical roles in making the state of California the fifth largest state in the U.S. by 1950.

Redlining also entailed private and public officials marking people as inherently hazardous to one another due to racial difference, not unlike an unsafe “building condition.” For example, there were certain parts of the northern portion of Hollywood that were redlined not because Black or immigrant people resided there, but due to an unsafe dam.

Private and public officials feared–or at least professed–that racially different groups living together could only lead to racial rioting, which was prevalent from the 50s – 60s, though largely over the same issues: housing, employment, and police discrimination against Black and other non-white bodies. But if groups of different skin color could only lead to rioting, then what explains the inter-ethnic community between Black and Japanese American families like those noted by Making Our Neighborhood…The Panel Series?

Here are also a few interesting questions for readers to consider about any redlined neighborhood in the U.S. today: What would the area look like if Black and immigrant communities had actually been invested in, or allowed to own homes in “white” neighborhoods and supported sufficiently in doing so? How many unhoused “tent cities” would have been prevented in the decades after the 1940s? And how much crime and policing over the last 80 years could have been avoided in the neighborhood?

Now Los Angeles is witnessing the rise of a new generation of multi-ethnic groups organizing to advance justice and equity in the city, particularly in the area of Tenants Rights. More interethnic movements need to be forged, however, at the same time that the vast majority of L.A. and California’s public officials continue to seem as distant as ever from work on the ground towards equity.

But if Los Angeles needed a reminder that Black people have worked to advance justice for ALL groups, or create justice where it was left wanting, including in this city and not just the historic U.S. south, Ms. Marshall’s account of her family visiting taking sweets and other shows of friendship to their Japanese American neighbors before their internment demonstrate it loudly and clearly.

“I didn’t know we were in an integrated neighborhood until I learned about that word. To be able to walk down the street without fear of people calling you names because everybody was part of the neighborhood.” -Barbara Marshall

Ms. Marshall’s description of everyone belonging to the neighborhood is precisely why the pamphlets for Making Our Neighborhood were translated into four of the most spoken languages in East Hollywood today, including Español, Thai, Tagalog, and Armenian. Our pamphlets have been well received by the community, and for good reason: In a city where at least 3/4ths of the population can trace roots to languages other than English, our informational pamphlets hint at what the next chapter of city planning and community engagement needs to look like.

In today’s Los Angeles, every resident, whether in the celebrity or political class, or not, is a part of this city. Indeed, this simple understanding is all that was missing during the days of deed restrictions, redlining, and other discriminatory practices in home-sales or home rentals to non-white communities. It’s the city that “should have been” built at the dawn of the twentieth century, but that we have to build–and fight for–now.

Consider that during the most fatal public health crisis in over a century, civic groups have taken almost no break from hounding at L.A.’s political leadership to “seize the hotels” in order to temporarily shelter a fraction of L.A. County’s 67,000 unhoused residents, who are predominantly Black and immigrant residents, even while the federal government ensures 100% reimbursement for this procedure. But the fact is that given Los Angeles Housing policy for non-white and immigrant communities over the last 100 years, the neighborly thing for our civic and political leadership to do would be to ensure such common sense calls don’t have to be made.

At the same time that our communities fight to shelter the unsheltered, we also have to protect what affordable, rent stabilized housing remains in Los Angeles. This includes repealing the Ellis Act, which has damaged East Hollywood and other Black and immigrant neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

Finally, we need to amplify calls on our political leadership to stand up to developers on behalf of our neighborhoods as they were elected to do.

Remember: The CHP has noted that L.A. County is behind, by over 500,000 affordable housing units and then some.

Yet if there’s one thing L.A. was known for since before the 20th century all the way up to 1951, when talks of a baseball team coming to L.A. were just getting started, it was setting records, including building records and booms.

For our part as storytellers, our research and documentation work uplifts elders, activists currently on the ground in our communities, scholars, and even more of what makes East Hollywood and any neighborhood like it more than just “worth” honoring for a moment, but something worth honoring at length for a future.

Already, we have taken the historical truths of redlining and gentrification and flipped them to serve more than just one group or narrative. Our political officials can do the same, and then some. Find our recorded panel sessions on YouTube, and pose your questions for us at the new website for the rest of our community wherever you may find us.

J.T.

An Excavation of East Hollywood, Part I

November 14, 2020January 3, 2024 J.T.2 Comments

This is the first of a three part series.

All photos are specific to a particular pocket of Los Angeles known as East Hollywood, and are courtesy of publicly available collections at the University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society, as well as at Los Angeles Public Library with the exception of two: The first, taken at LACC by L.A. Times photographer B.I. Oliver on March 13, 1969, and the second, taken by J. Benton Adams at Vermont & Santa Monica, circa 1998.

Hollywood, a land of valleys to be sold according to a map by Harvey Henderson Wilcox and wife Daeida Wilcox, 1887

Before Los Angeles was called so by Spanish settlers,“the city” is supposed to have been known as Yaangna village by aboriginal Tongva people, with respect to what we now refer to as the L.A. river. This is according to Cindi Moar Alvitre, a descendant of the Tongva and Cal State L.A. lecturer of Indian American studies. An excerpt from Alvitre’s essay, “Coyote Tours,” from Latitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas (2015) reads:

“Yaangna was the principal ancestral village that moved along the Los Angeles River for countless generations, before the water was confined and silenced in a concrete sarcophagus, separating the people from that which gives life. In pre-contact times people moved slowly, with the seasons, the food, and ultimately, the water.”

Alvitre also points out that Spanish invasion of the land in the late eighteenth century, which would eventually lead to “Los Angeles,” continually pushed out native or indigenous people farther away from their ancestral lands. For a time, the dispossessed communities found refuge along their ancestors’ storied riverbed. In Alvitre’s words:

“Colonization and missionization accelerated the pace of relocation as native people tried to outrun the colonizers, always clinging to the river…Yaangna became a refugee camp for tribal families seeking some sense of tradition.”

Finally, Cahuenga, the name first given to our special little library on Santa Monica boulevard in 1916, is Tongva for “place of the hill.” And since Cahuenga is also supposed to be related to Kaweewesh, describing “fox,” one can think of Cahuenga as “hill of the foxes.” Of course, more people think of the “Cahuenga pass” in Hollywood when that word comes up, but hey, I guess that does show the link between Humphrey’s Hollywood and our “East Hollywood.”

A few archival images of the area show hilly farsides, both before and up to the area’s time as a major site of lemon groves, hence Lemon Grove Park and such. The rest is history, as they say, although in a past that’s not yet past for our communities. At least, not if we’ve got anything to say about it.

J.T.

The LACC community must now reclaim its campus from the L.A. County sheriff’s department

June 23, 2020November 15, 2020 J.T.Leave a comment

(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 97)

Andrés Guardado’s and Terron Jammal Boone’s deaths at the hands of L.A. County sheriff officers in Los Angeles this past week cannot go in vain: they serve as crucial reminders that the people of Los Angeles can settle for nothing less than reclaiming their spaces from the police state before police cause more harm.

Even at this time of heightened tensions between communities of color and law enforcement across America, the L.A. County Sheriff’s department has shown no willingness to ban or even begin discussing a ban of its fatal policies against Black & Brown civilians, even after killing two Black & Brown men within just days of each other during the week of June 14th. At a meeting at L.A. City Hall this past Monday, June 22nd, L.A. City Council Member Curren Price said of Andrés Guardado’s death:

“He was shot by a sheriff deputy, but as far as the community’s concerned, he was shot by police, by law enforcement…That tragic death just underscores the conversation that’s happening all over this country.”

In East Hollywood, since March 16th of this year, sheriff deputies have guarded more than 1.5 million square feet of LACC’s campus, making it completely inaccessible for thousands of nearby students, workers, and other community members, the vast majority of whom are people of color and immigrants, but who also count African-American, disabled, elderly folks, and trans people within the community.

Signs posted around the campus state that authorized persons must “check-in” with the L.A. County sheriffs to be allowed on campus, but how can such a procedure possibly feel safe for Black & Brown people?

At first, the campus’s closing-off was admittedly in line with the uniform policy across L.A. County, under the notion that it was a precautionary measure against COVID-19 infection. More than three months later, however, when much of the city is “reopening” due to data suggesting we may now be getting ahead of the virus–at least, according to our public officials–the LACC campus continues idling by aimlessly, with sheriff SUVs and other vehicles guarding off the entrance. It does not feel safe for Black & Brown people, but is probably most dangerous to the scores of unhoused residents who set up their tents around the area.

Only a few weeks ago, I recall passing by the campus while an African-American woman sat on the curb on Heliotrope drive, perhaps resting from a jog or workout, only to have two sheriff officers call out to her from behind the fences separating the campus from the sidewalk, presumably to make sure she wasn’t “posing a threat.” It shouldn’t need to be stated that if not for one or two slight gestures, she could have been moments away from being shot, but time after time, we forget this is exactly how it happens across America.

Moreover, I’m confident that several more of these types of instances have taken place around the campus grounds, but that they’ve gone mostly unreported since Black, Brown, and other working-class communities have simply come to view such harassment from police officers as typical.

Instead of having armed law enforcement encroaching upon unarmed citizens who actually reside in the community, LACC’s campus should now be making space accessible to these groups.

For one, the campus can be used as a testing site for COVID-19, or as a location for limited exercising, as is the case at Dodger stadium and Elysian Park in Angeleno Heights. For another, LACC’s benches should be made accessible once again for pedestrians looking to take refuge from the exhausting rush of car traffic along Vermont avenue. The campus’s green spaces should be made accessible again for picnicking or some other respite. There is also much that can be done with the campus’s air conditioning to help the local community cool off over the oncoming summer. One way or another, it’s time to innovate. But whatever alternative use for campus instead of clustering large groups of people, one thing is abundantly clear:

The L.A. County Sheriff’s department has no grounds to be left as overseers of the college. It belongs most of all to students, student workers, and the various other civilians who make up the community in the “community college.”

If any of this sounds extraordinary, remember that even the Los Angeles Public Library community has taken its own Board of Commissioners to task, calling for the board to divest in police at our public libraries, since police only serve to intimidate and incarcerate our city’s most vulnerable populations there, and even to intimidate Black & Brown library workers into “walking a fine line” lest they be labeled as a threat by police officers. Only in America.

It’s therefore time for members of the LACC community to call for the reopening of our campus, hand-in-hand with the dismissal of armed law enforcement in order to ensure our safety and to prevent any more unnecessary bloodshed and loss of life for our families. If the weeks since the unrest in Minneapolis have shown anything, it’s that after marching, there is organizing, making our voices heard, and standing resolutely in our pursuit of a safer world for our health and well being. We deserve nothing less.

J.T.

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