The Disconnect Over Displacement in Los Angeles

The development known as The Reef is all about "placemaking." Located next to a Metro rail station, it aims to increase density as well as housing supply, attract investors to South Los Angeles, and create jobs through a local-hire agreement.

In addition to your typical mixed-use fare—residential, hotel, retail, and restaurant—the billion-dollar project will ultimately include amenities designed to meet specific community needs: a grocery store, a pharmacy, a bank, investment in a new DASH route (the hyper-local bus service run by LADOT).

But what residents want is much more basic: not to have to leave once the project moves in.

In an important analysis in Streetsblog LA, Sahra Sulaiman writes:

To an urbanist or a livability advocate, [The Reef's] approach might sound like it hits all the right notes … But to a lower-income black or Latino resident of Historic South Central – a historically disadvantaged community with the distinction of having the most overcrowded housing in the country – that approach and its potential ripple effects present a much more complicated and far less rosy picture.

Plans presented at public meetings "pitted members of the community against each other by seemingly asking them to make the impossible choice between jobs and housing," she explains. The promise of mostly temporary jobs belied the certainty of long-term increases in rents and the cost of living—leading to likely permanent displacement.

Community activists like the UNIDAD coalition (which went up against Geoff Palmer’s Lorenzo project in 2011) want The Reef to skip the fitness center and tackle those consequences head on. Their community benefits proposal asks developers to help secure eviction protections, an emergency rental aid fund, and other anti-displacement tools for residential and commercial tenants, as well as safety solutions that won’t further criminalize youth of color and the homeless.

These demands, Sulaiman writes, reflect "an understanding of how a history of discriminatory planning policies, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement created the very conditions that make the community so favorable to developers today."

But as she also notes, developers are only one piece of the puzzle. The difference between what they can or are willing to offer, and what residents want and need, "highlight[s] how few tools we actually have at our disposal to ensure our communities become more inclusive as they grow."