South-Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of an Urban Crisis
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South-Central Los Angeles: Anatomy of an Urban Crisis Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies Working Paper No. 6 June 1993 Price: $15.00 This report was made possible by a grant from the Poverty and Race Research Action Council Washington, D.C. Table of Contents page Preface ...............................................................vii by Allen J. Scott I. Poverty and Employment Issues in the Inner Urban Core ..........................1 Paul Ong, et al. II. Housing and Community .............................................. 21 Jacqueline Leavitt and Allan Heskin III. Inequalities in Health: "The Sickness in the Center of Our Cities" ....................................................... 43 E. Richard Brown, et al. IV. Coming to Terms With the Los Angeles Riots and Public Education in Los Angeles: A Time for Reflection and A Time for Action ................................ 89 Jaye T. Darby, et al. V. Mending the Politics of Division in Post-Rebellion L.A. ........................ 123 Leobardo F. Estrada and Sylvia Sensiper Preface The Los Angeles Rebellion, which broke out over the last days of April 1992, was a short but expressive symptom of a deep malaise at the heart of urban America. As brief as it was, the Rebellion was a predictable outcome of the festering crisis in Los Angeles where deprivation, social marginalization, and powerlessness exist cheek-by-jowl with extraordinary wealth, privilege and opportunity. And while South-Central Los Angeles is the single most concentrated focus of the crisis—just as it was the principal site of the Rebellion—the conditions that define the crisis as such, recur persistently in many other parts of Southern California, and indeed in other parts of the United States at large. These conditions are not difficult to identify in broad outline. They are represented in the first instance by a large pool of chronically impoverished and underemployed individuals, and by the syndrome of social ills that invariably accompanies this state of affairs (inadequate housing, family breakdown, illiteracy, drugs, violence, etc.). The individuals involved tend dominantly to belong to various racial and ethnic minorities, a circumstance which intensifies the problem by seeming to separate it from the concerns of mainstream society, and worse still, by tempting non-minority groups to view the causes of the problem as being intrinsically "racial" or "ethnic" in character. Moreover, the often competing interests of the Afro-American, Latino, and Asian groups who are most closely associated with South-Central Los Angeles have made it difficult to build a united political front of inner city residents and allied organizations. The isolation of these groups is then magnified by spatial ghettoization, which exacerbates the vicious circle of negative synergies alluded to above. The chapters that follow lay out a detailed bill of specifics as to the nature and causes of the crisis, together with various policy recommendations for dealing with some of its most troubling aspects. P In Chapter 1, Ong describes the depth and range of economic deprivation in both South-Central Los Angeles and other parts of the wider metropolitan area. The chapter documents the high levels of unemployment, falling incomes, and the huge deficit of skills that are the main sources of the crisis as a whole. P Leavitt and Heskin then take up the issue of the housing situation in South-Central. They provide detailed documentation of the inadequate shelter, overcrowding, exorbitant rents, and limited access to mortgage finance, that help to mark out South-Central Los Angeles as a zone of deprivation. They also provide a diagnosis of many of the essential failures of those public agencies that are ostensibly most concerned with the problem. P Brown et al. describe a number of alarming failures of public health and health care delivery in Los Angeles. They indicate that over 2.7 million people in Los Angeles have no health insurance whatever, and they provide a disturbing catalog of the incidence of disease, neglect, violence, and addiction among the poor. P Darby et al. point to the striking breakdown of education in Los Angeles in general and South-Central in particular. Education in the inner city is vitiated by a school system that is in effect defeated at the outset by underfunding, overpacked classrooms, and high levels of crime around individual schools. The problem is compounded by the need to serve an increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic clientele. Predictably, drop-out rates and illiteracy are soaring. P In Chapter 5, Estrada and Sensiper bring the proceedings to a conclusion with a discussion of the many different social cross-currents and the concomitant difficulties of vii political mobilization that mark South-Central. Estrada and Sensiper discuss the importance of unified political representation for South-Central, and they highlight the work of the Coalition of Neighborhood Developers as a promising experiment in local political consensus-building and activation. Individually and collectively, these five chapters present a grim portrait of life in South- Central Los Angeles and other places like it, and they constitute a remarkable indictment of mainstream society for its indifference and neglect. The indictment is all the more distressing because the crisis has been such a durable feature of large metropolitan regions in the United States over such a long period of time. Some three decades after the Watts Riots, things have only gone from bad to worse. The dynamic of job loss in inner city areas has intensified, skills continue to be eroded, and the polarization of urban society between the rich and the poor has become more pronounced. Such jobs as are available to inner city residents are largely in low-wage service and sweatshop sectors. In turn, employers in these sectors have exacerbated the problem by their practice of preferential hiring of the most marginalized and powerless of workers, thus also helping to fuel and maintain an anarchical process of illegal immigration. All of the papers presented here offer important suggestions for the formulation of policies and public action to deal with the various problems at hand. Clearly, however, there is no single and clearly-delineated line of attack that will once and for all reverse the pattern of breakdown and neglect alluded to above. Or rather, reversal will come only in the context of long-term local institution- building and intensive federal attacks on the problem of inner city areas at large. Political mobilization of those whose lives are most centrally affected is especially important, for as we have learned from past experience (ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to the Women's Movement), meaningful change is promoted and shaped most effectively by those whose interests are most centrally at stake. In the light of these remarks, the work of the Rebuild LA Committee, as useful and important as it is, will surely be stillborn in the absence of a wider social and political effort to turn the tide of America's inner cities. This volume of essays and reflections is offered as one small contribution to the task of charting out the difficult road ahead. Allen J. Scott Director Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies viii Chapter One Poverty and Employment Issues in the Inner Urban Core1 Paul Ong with contributions from Evelyn Blumenberg and Jianling Li 1.1. Introduction Economic inequality has been and remains deeply ingrained in Los Angeles.2 The disparity in income between rich and poor continues to widen with a dramatic increase in low-wage workers and the steady rise in the poverty rate. Not surprisingly, economic inequities coincide with racial and ethnic divisions, leaving African Americans and Latinos disproportionately over represented at the bottom of the economic ladder. Therefore, while many residents bask in the well celebrated Los Angeles charms, others, the poor of Los Angeles, survive in impoverished inner-urban neighborhoods, the very same neighborhoods that exploded into violence on April 29, 1992. This chapter focuses on employment related issues in the core poverty areas of Los Angeles Metropolitan area. The analysis relies on data from both published and unpublished sources, including information from the decennial censuses. We start by examining the broader process of economic polarization in Los Angeles within which the specific employment problems are embedded. 1 Parts of this paper are also included in Ong and Blumenberg (1992). This research was partially funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. The author alone is responsible for the contents of this paper. 2 Los Angeles, as referred to in this chapter, is the Los Angeles-Long Beach MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), which includes only Los Angeles County. The county covers 4,080 square miles, houses a population of approximately 8.6 million persons in 1988, and includes 84 incorporated cities. The City of Los Angeles is the largest city within the MSA, with approximately 3.4 million persons. 1 1.2. Economic Polarization and Growing Poverty Like the rest of the nation, Los Angeles has not escaped the problem of increasing income inequality despite economic growth in 70s and 80s.3 The growth of income inequality is tied to increased earnings polarization in the labor market. The median earnings for male full-time, year- round workers (in 1990 dollars) dropped from a two decade high of $35,270 in 1973, male earnings fell to a 1989 low of $30,500.4 It is not surprising, therefore, that the collapse in male earnings translated into a polarization of income. The percentage of male full-time, year-round workers earning less than $20,000 a year has almost doubled, growing from less than 13 percent of all workers in 1969 to approximately 25 percent of all workers in 1989.5 As of 1989, approximately 300,000 full-time, year-round men earned less than $20,000, with approximately 61,000 of these men earning less than $10,000 per year.