Community Benefits or Community Control?
Gilda Haas on Mar 06 2008 at 9:32 am | Filed under: Opinion
What We Really Want
In 2001, the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, comprised of 300 predominantly immigrant residents, and five unions joined forces to win an historic community benefits agreement with Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) the owners of the Staples Center.
So here’s the good news about that: The developer, AEG, has acted with integrity, has lived up to the terms of the agreement, and, in 2005, joined forces with the Coalition to take on another developer that tried to evade the pact. Both the agreement and the Coalition have served as an example to others around the country and was recently featured in Tavis Smiley’sbest-selling Covenant with Black America
Most importantly, the Coalition is still around, and continues to fight the good fight.
Fast forward six years.
On February 13, 2007, SAJE, together with Los Angeles Community Action Network, Concerned Citizens of South Central, CD Tech, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, and many others, others witnessed the LA City Council’s unanimous approval of the Grand Avenue Project—a $2 billion high end development that a lot of people downtown thinks will look really nice next to the Disney Center, the Cathedral, and the Music Center.
And it very well may look really nice.
But back when it was first proposed, we all wondered who it would benefit.
Due to our combined efforts as the Grand Avenue Community Benefits Coalition, this project will now provide benefits to really poor people—affordable housing, investment in supportive housing for homeless people, local hiring, and more.
As a coalition, we are really proud of our shared achievement and our ability to extract material benefits for our members from projects that are ultimately replacing, rather than building, our communities.
So, what’s the down side?
Despite these exceptional agreements, the fact remains that the downtown Los Angeles currently being developed and expanded is not one that primarily reflects the needs or interests of the majority of people who live in Los Angeles. It deserves to be pointed out that the majority of those moving in to the ‘new’ downtown are white and wealthy, while most of the thousands of current residents being displaced are black, Latino, and poor.
And, while piecemeal agreements are important to our community, they remain insufficient responses to such a large-scale problem.
It’s a fact that most of us, rich or poor, cannot afford to even rent an apartment in this city without paying out more than half of our income every month.
And, downtown Los Angeles is certainly is not being developed to meet the needs of people who are currently being swept off the streets of Skid Row—by no less than 50 specially and publicly assigned police officers who patrol Skid Row (in addition to those police already assigned)—and who are as likely to busted for holding a milk crate or flicking a cigarette ash on the sidewalk as for any serious offense.
The fact remains that the same projects that will provide our members with hard-won benefits, effectively produce the market conditions that are pushing our members out of the neighborhoods where they have lived for decades.
For this reason, to SAJE and many of our base-building community allies, community benefits agreements are tactical maneuvers in a strategic offense to take back our city.
We want to take it back from historic redlining and absentee owners that have stripped our neighborhoods of their equity.
To take it back from slumlords and speculators.
To take it back from people who do not even see the beauty of our members, relationships, and children—who do not, in fact, see our communities at all.
This is not an indictment of community benefits agreements.
It is, rather, a placement of these agreements in the big scheme of things.
Our community benefits agreements include affordable housing requirements which can produce hundreds of units that poor people can afford. They produce specific ways that hundreds or even thousands of poor people will be connected to better paying jobs. But they cover a tiny portion of L.A.’s housing stock and L.A.’s labor base. If the points in the agreements were lifted up into city-wide policy, Los Angeles would be a better place for everyone.
The goal is to make the content of these agreements the norm for Los Angeles, not the exception.
Community benefits agreements can be the building blocks of policies that need to be adopted to create a more equitable and livable city. With this in mind, perhaps the most exciting result of the Grand Avenue agreement is the fact that the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency agreed to engage us in an effort to develop an agency-wide jobs policy.
So, while it is an unfortunate reality that it was almost as hard to win a community benefits agreement in 2007 as it was in 2001, we have our eyes on a much bigger prize—a right to the city for all.
[...] housing set-asides for our families so they aren’t displaced (See Gilda Haas’s article, “Community Benefits or Community Control” at the Making Sense Blog for an excellent analysis of this tactic that puts it in its proper [...]