Another L.A. Gentrification Story

Writing in Hyperallergic, Matt Stromberg calls out the new art galleries popping up in a Los Angeles neighborhood being billed as ‘Melrose Hill’ for claiming to ‘revitalize’ an area that never lost its vitality to begin with. “In fact, ‘desolate’ was precisely the word used to describe the area in a Vanity Fair article last month on the recent influx of galleries to the block, which drew immediate and sharp criticism from Angelenos who know better.”

As Stromberg explains, “The phenomenon of a neighborhood being re-branded by developers, often aided by Google Maps, to present an area as a kind of ahistorical blank slate is nothing new.” Stromberg adds, “There is, in fact, a neighborhood called Melrose Hill, just not where these new art spaces are located.” The real Melrose Hill includes a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) that protects 45 historic California bungalows.

As for the ‘desolate’ neighborhood in question, “Residents are overwhelmingly renters, with low to average median incomes for the city. Once you move off the main commercial and transit arteries of Western and Melrose, the streets are filled with low apartment buildings, single-family homes, and courtyard housing, originally built by Hollywood studios to house their workers.”

Longtime community members express concern that the galleries have not conducted public outreach or attempted to integrate themselves into the existing community while bringing hundreds of cars crawling the neighborhood for parking to gallery events. The pattern is familiar for L.A. neighborhoods, which regularly undergo ‘rediscovery’ and gentrification. “Large sections of LA have been transformed by development and gentrification over the past 20 years, but the speed at which it is taking place here seems exceptional.”