Gentrification or Revitalization: From Chavez Ravine to Elysian Valley

By Arielle Samuelson

Playing Baseball with Ghosts

In the vault of forgotten history, there lies a newsreel of Los Angeles police pulling Chavez Ravine residents from their homes. The Chavez Ravine homes were razed, or burnt to the ground by homeowners, in a last act of defiance against the government that had bought them. The city of Los Angeles, which had promised to build low-income public housing, gave the land to the Dodgers. Dodgertown was born. The bought-out families moved a few minutes upriver to Elysian Valley.

In the present, the city of Los Angeles is launching a new public works project- revitalizing the Los Angeles River. The redevelopment would return the river to its green and natural state, potentially transforming the neighborhoods alongside the river into desirable waterfront property. The children of Chavez Ravine, now grey-haired with children of their own, began receiving mail from developers, asking to buy their homes. One advertisement touted the neighborhood property as “Just minutes from Dodger Stadium.”

“[My husband] told me that when he came down here and there was talk of people greening or removing, he said that will never happen again. Ever,” said long-time resident Ceci Dominguez of her late husband Rey Dominguez, who grew up in Chavez Ravine.

“Those were his words. We will never let that happen again.”

A Sleepy Hollow

The city of Los Angeles is an incongruous place to find the quintessential small American town. Those places lie somewhere vaguely in the Midwest, where quiet houses with little gardens nestle side-by-side, the neighbors know your name, and family homes are passed down from generation to generation. But within the Los Angeles city limits lies just such a place. It’s called Elysian Valley, named after the Elysian Fields, the Greek vision of heaven. Elysian Valley is a neighborhood squeezed onto the small area of land between the I-5 freeway and the Los Angeles River.

“We have that Mayberry feel to a large degree, have had it. I think we’re starting to lose that,” David De La Torre said. Head of the Neighborhood Watch and 35-year resident, David De La Torre, compares his neighborhood to Mayberry, the congenial tv-perfect town featured in the Andy Griffith show. The town’s official title, Elysian Valley, is rarely used by locals. They call it Frogtown, in homage to a long-gone history when toads by the multitude crawled out of the Los Angeles River, before the river was altered by man.

The L.A. River flooded the riverbank catastrophically in 1938, sweeping through homes and buildings. The concrete now corseting the L.A. River was the Army Corp of Engineers’ idea of flood control; 40 feet of concrete replaced the river banks, and in most places buried its natural silt bottom.

Fast-forward 70 years into the present. The same Army Corp that engineered the current architecture of the river pledged this May to return the river to its natural state by combining funds with California and the city of Los Angeles for a total sum of $1 billion US dollars. The River Project plans to tear out three miles of concrete, restore 719 wild acres, and create an unbroken 51-mile “greenway” along the entire length of the river by 2020. The money will be invested first into the Glendale Narrows, an 11-mile stretch of the river that includes the 2.34 miles comprising Frogtown’s eastern border.

In 2014, the price of a house in Frogtown jumped to almost half a million dollars.

A Poor Man’s Paradise

To own a half a million dollar home in California requires a family to bring in more than $100,000 per year. Self-described as a working class neighborhood, the measured median household income for Elysian Valley is under $50,000. Over half of Elysian Valley residents rent, rather than own their homes. In Los Angeles county, more than 50 percent of homeowners spend almost a third of their income on housing. Over one-third of “working households” spend 50 percent or more of their paycheck on housing expenses. Los Angeles is the city with the second highest “severe housing cost burden” for working households in the nation.

For some of the residents of Elysian Valley, home ownership is a sensitive subject, dating back to the forced Chavez Ravine evacuation fifty years ago. Though Dodger Stadium wasn’t built until 1962, the first homes of many Elysian Valley residents were razed 10 years before that, when the L.A. city government purchased their homes for the Elysian Park Heights Project, or public housing that never materialized.

The last stubborn residents of Chavez Ravine, who held out against the property buy the Los Angeles government first initiated for a public works project, were ousted when the property was sold to the Dodgers. Using private money, the Dodgers built the stadium so well-loved today. The residents were described as mostly “Mexican-American” by late photographer Don Normark, who documented their last days in their Elysian Valley homes, before the stragglers left-over from the buyout were forced out of their homes and into other areas of the Elysian Valley. Characterized by Don Normark as a poor man’s paradise, Chavez Ravine was the first home for many of the residents of Elysian Valley.

Notwithstanding Mayor Garcetti’s assurances that current residents will not be evicted, the fear of a repeat of Chavez Ravine creeps through the neighborhood. The price of a house in Elysian Valley rose 21 percent over the last year. Prices for the rest of L.A. county rose by 16 percent over the same time period.

“The location’s going to be great,” Ceci Dominguez said of the planned river redevelopment. “Who wouldn’t want to have a beautiful three-story facing the river? Will it bring people? Of course.”

Ceci Dominguez’s husband first lived in Chavez Ravine, before bringing her to his family home in Elysian Valley as a young bride, over 40 years ago. Now a neighborhood activist in the manner of a mature Erin Brockovich, Ceci Dominguez explained that going door-to-door is the only way to make some of her neighbors aware of what’s happening in their neighborhood.

“Things are moving and people still...aren’t really understanding fully what’s going on,” Dominguez said. “They’re understanding that rents are high, they’re saying that people are losing their homes, they’re understanding that their children are not going to be able to come back here like they did with their mother and father and find a place to live here. And it will disconnect the families from this community.”

The bounty of an unfettered river, with green parks, a place for river boating, and the attendant restaurants can be a weary proposition for some residents, who’ve called the neighborhood their own for decades. After Dominguez’s many years working on behalf of the community she loves, she has an idea of what her neighbors can afford. When president of the Elysian Valley Neighborhood Council Steve Appleton started renting kayaks on the shore of the river, Dominguez remembers when Appleton held a free kayaking day.

“I remember these three children that desperately wanted to go in the water in their canoe and their grandfather who only spoke in Spanish. ‘No. no.’ Because he knew he didn’t have the money. He didn’t understand it was free that day.”

Dominguez, who works with middle school and high school students, said she sees the frustration of children who can’t afford to buy a kayak. “They couldn’t even afford to use a kayak. $69 is too much money.”

It makes Dominguez wonder, “For what purpose are we having these things in our community if our own people can’t use them?”

In a story that mirrors the tale of fictional Bedford Falls, where a saintly George Bailey champions the poor of his own neighborhood, it’s tempting to make a Mr. Potter of anyone with monetary interest in the river. As if aware of this, the easy targets, the developers and groups with commercial interest, are vocal about their desire to retain residents.

Developer Robert De Forest of the Pinyon Group, who has a background in urban planning, carefully chose an abandoned lot where he intends to build a mixed-income workspace. "This is not a displacing project,” De Forest said. “We’re going to extreme lengths to provide space for businesses and live/work units,” that are affordable in his estimation to,”allow people already there to continue to be there, even if they are displaced from other projects.”

The workspace is for artisans, entrepreneurs, what De Forest described as creating habitats for makers. It serves Frogtown’s small, but vocal minority of artists-in-residence.

That small but vocal minority is worried about job loss for the rest of Elysian Valley’s residents. In October at a manufacturing plant, Aero Engines, Elysian Valley Neighborhood Council president and sculptor Steve Appleton watched with sadness as the small business auctioned off the last of its wares. Standing near bright airplane engines tagged for sale, Appleton, who also co-founded Friends of the L.A. River, said that businesses are closing through the neighborhood.

“Part of that changing economy is that these properties have become a lot more valuable,” Appleton said in reference to developers targeting commercial manufacturing locations for housing projects. “Here are 30 jobs now gone. Now that may have happened without all these other pressures, but I think they’re certainly accelerated by that kind of process. So who is it for?”

“We’ve had Vent Vue Windows just recently, behind us, sell and they employed a substantial number of neighbors that are unemployed now as a consequence of their departure,” said David De La Torre. “That is happening all up and down the river, and on the commercial properties alongside. They’re being bought out. They’re being offered far more than probably what the properties are truly valued at.”

But others argue the development of the river will bring more jobs into the area. The L.A. River Revitalization Corp says on its website that the river development is meant to bring “11,000 to 18,000 new jobs.” Tonya Durrell, Director of Communications for the city’s involvement in the River Revitalization Project, said by email, “LA River revitalization is expected to attract new patronage for existing businesses while also attracting new business enterprises.”

Jennifer Samson of the L.A. River Revitalization Corp said that the many partners in the river project had, “an earnest desire to have the community engaged” and that there is “a lot of work on all partners parts" to make it so. “We have to work with the community,” said Samson. “Because we have such strong voices from the neighborhood council.”

As part of its community outreach the L.A. River Revitalization Corp participated in the Northeast Los Angeles Riverfront District (NELA) 2014 economic development strategy for the neighborhoods along the river, including Elysian Valley. In the summer of 2013, NELA went door-to-door with surveys. They asked approximately 1% or 104 of Elysian Valley’s 8,000 residents about their community and their relationship with the river.

Whatever happens with the river, some think that Elysian Valley can’t escape changes. For Frogtown, “increased attention is great and long deserved, but you have to sort of step back and question if all attention is a good thing or not,” Robert De Forest said. “I do think overall the change will be positive,” he added.

“Change is inevitable,” Jennifer Samson said. “But we have to be equitable.”

In the meantime, the city and Army Corp of Engineers forges ahead with a plan to redo the river bank running along Elysian Valley. To achieve it, the city must buy the land of 27 private properties, including 11 businesses and one residence. “Implementation...will involve the City's negotiation to acquire all or part of the parcels of land that host about a dozen businesses now. Those lands will be converted to ecosystem restoration use,” said Los Angeles city spokesperson Tonya Durrell.

Recalling her husband’s experience at Chavez Ravine, Ceci Dominguez said, “That was pretty sad to see that...people torn from their homes. So I think people have a different opinion now. When people come to talk about them, they’re still not believing them, not trusting them. They’re more apt to not have too much trust.”