A river renewal plan to benefit the Gateway Cities
The L.A. River Master Plan must guard against displacing working-class communities.
An ambitious new Los Angeles River Master Plan, available for public comment until March 14, promises big changes all along the waterway’s 51 miles — nowhere more so than in the Gateway Cities, at the river’s confluence with the Rio Hondo southeast of downtown.
This part of the river’s renewal centers on a Frank Gehrydesigned set of elevated platform parks over the rivers and a $150million cultural center on the riverbank.
The intentions are good: bringing green space and cultural resources to working-class neighborhoods. But this revitalization effort must prioritize residents’ essential needs for affordable housing, decent jobs and local businesses, safeguarding against green gentrification.
The potential for a tragic backfire is huge. We could pour millions of public dollars into a plan that looks impressive but drives out its target audience — communities that have found it hard just to survive in recent decades.
The Gateway Cities have always been scrappy. In the 1920s and ’30s, white working-class families were drawn to these towns for the chance to live cheaply — they built their own homes, labored in nearby factories and demanded low taxes.
In the 1940s and ’50s, federal support for housing and unions enabled white working families to rise into the middle class. Residents had a political voice in shaping their communities.
In the 1970s and ’80s, that changed. General Motors, Firestone and U.S. Steel shuttered factories. Many white families fled, opening space for Latino immigrants
to move in. This mirrored patterns nationwide, as Latinos migrated directly into the “urban crisis,” seizing opportunities where others abandoned them.
Since then, the Gateway Cities have struggled. They embraced retail as industrial development slowed, depressing local wages. Housing went from affordable to precarious. Residents were left to cope with the toxic residue of longgone industries.
Poor residents, and those without documents, were marginalized politically.
The L.A. River Master Plan could play an outsize role in reversing this trajectory. Gehry’s cultural center and platform parks will be added to another new park, the Urban Orchard in South Gate. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority promises to build a light rail line from downtown through southeast L.A. to Artesia, bringing stations to
both sides of the river.
The master plan recognizes that these developments are gentrification magnets. Recent real estate transactions, including sales of surplus government land, suggest that developers are already recognizing the potential for rising property values.
And Los Angeles has consulted with the founders of New York City’s High Line — an abandoned elevated railroad remade into a park that stretches for blocks. The High Line’s outsize success pumped up the cost of living nearby, to its designers’ dismay. The lesson? Focus early on equitable outcomes for high-minded urban renewal projects.
The L.A. River Master Plan acknowledges the threat of displacement, but the solutions it proposes won’t go far enough, fast enough to ensure river renewal creates prosperity for all in the Gateway Cities.
The key ingredients are no big
mystery:
Affordable housing and homeownership. The master plan advocates for more funding and a “land bank” to acquire property for affordable housing. It should require both. Reducing the cost of building affordable housing is essential. Rent control should be on the table along with inclusionary zoning so that the developer must include units affordable to low-income renters. Home buyers clubs that subsidize down payments and provide low-interest loans can help renters become homeowners. The county has such a fund. Southeast L.A. needs one too.
Support for local businesses, workforce development and wellpaying jobs. The Gateway Cities sit between downtown and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, along the Alameda logistics corridor. Banks should provide credit to help new light industry and businesses in the area, coupled with targeted public workforce development. Local hires should be prioritized, unions encouraged and fair pay policies pursued.
Support for families and education. An equitable community development plan around a new platform park spanning the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., includes children’s educational savings accounts that match parents’ deposits up to 5 to 1, a good example of the broad range of public and private approaches that should be part of the plan for the Gateway Cities.
Celebration of local cultures. Gehry and his partners in the new cultural center — the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — deserve credit for recognizing that it’s not just about bringing their music and art to Southeast L.A., but also supporting diverse Gateway Cities artists, musicians and performers. Making sure that people feel at home is as important as ensuring that they literally have a home in a community.
It’s also crucial to ensure that those who live in these cities have a voice in what will happen to them. The Gateway Cities have made it through our region’s toughest history over the last 50 years. They deserve a community-driven plan to benefit from its revival.
The rest of us — the county, private sector, philanthropies, nonprofits and state and federal agencies — must step up to help them put in place rules, strategies and funding that will tame gentrification and promote equitable development before it’s too late. Otherwise, we will miss a historic opportunity to open a new future for our region’s working-class.
Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Luskin Center for Innovation and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Becky Nicolaides is author of “My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965” and a research affiliate at USC and UCLA.
slightly distracted little girl, sitting on a bed, twirling a piece of her hair and sucking on it, answering questions her mother gently poses: “What did daddy do?” In never-before-released home video that represents a crushing blow to Woody Allen’s years of denials, his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, tells her mother, Mia Farrow, that her father touched her at their Connecticut farmhouse.
“Where did he touch you?” Dylan reaches around to her bottom.
“We went into your room,” Dylan says, “and we went to the attic, and he started telling me weird things. He went behind me and touched my privates . ... He said, ‘Do not move. I have to do this.’ But I wiggled my bottom a little to see what he was doing. He said, ‘Don’t move. I have to do this. And if you stay still, then, um, we can go to Paris.’”
That was in the summer of 1992, the beginning of an intense, sordid battle between Allen and Farrow that resulted in accusations, investigations, a fraught decision by a prosecutor not to bring charges against the iconic filmmaker and a final, ugly custody battle initiated by Allen. Which he lost. In a scathing decision, the judge found Allen to be “self-absorbed, untrustworthy and insensitive.” Farrow’s main shortcoming as a mother, said the judge, was her continued relationship with Allen. No kidding.
So many important questions are raised in the new HBO docuseries “Allen v. Farrow,” four excruciating, enraging and enlightening hours by investigative filmmakers Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Amy Herdy, who have, in previous films, tackled such issues as sexual abuse on college campuses and in the military. “Allen v. Farrow” is based on attorney and police files, affidavits, interviews with friends and household staff, and private recordings that had never been made public until now.
“I was always in his clutches,” an adult Dylan tells the filmmakers. “He was always hunting me.” At the time of the alleged incident, Allen was in therapy for his “inappropriately intense” relationship with Dylan, who describes her father instructing her on how to suck his thumb and “what to do with my tongue.”
Unsure what to think about Allen? Just watch and judge for yourself.
But why is it so hard for us to believe beloved artists are capable of monstrous acts? Why don’t we believe children who tell stories about abuse that are consistent and corroborated by circumstantial evidence? Three babysitters, who have never before spoken publicly, say in the film that Allen disappeared with Dylan for 20 minutes on the day in question as they searched high and low.
Why do we apparently find it easier to believe the misogynistic and self-serving Allen narrative that Mia Farrow was a woman scorned and out for revenge?
“You don’t get to have sex with my children,” Mia Farrow says in the film. “That isn’t part of the deal.” Yet by Allen’s own admission, he had sex with another of Farrow’s children when she was a teenager.
Allen has devoted most of his film career to fantasies about relationships between older men and much younger women. As Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson tells the filmmakers, Allen’s whole career has been about “grooming us” — the audience.
“It’s basically always an older guy dealing with a younger woman,” says Richard Morgan, a freelance journalist who has read the entire Woody Allen archive at Princeton University — 56 boxes of material, made and unmade, spanning 57 years. In a 2018 Washington Post essay, Morgan wrote, “Running through all of the boxes is an insistent, vivid obsession with young women and girls.”
I confess, I was taken with Allen’s 1979 masterpiece “Manhattan.” But now, when I see 16-yearold Mariel Hemingway’s Tracy, kissing 40-something-year-old Allen’s Isaac, lying in bed next to him, all I feel is deep discomfort and disgust.
Allen did not speak to the filmmakers. But his voice is heard throughout the series, in clips of the audiobook version of his 2020 memoir, “Apropos of Nothing,” in press conferences addressing the abuse allegations and in chilling phone calls recorded by Mia Farrow, where his voice is cold and calculating.
Soon after Dylan told her story to her mother, Connecticut state prosecutor Frank Maco found probable cause to issue a warrant against Allen in the sexual assault of a minor.
He did not proceed with an arrest and prosecution because he feared for the emotional wellbeing of Dylan Farrow, who had already been interviewed an excessive nine times — unheard-of treatment of a victim of suspected child abuse — by experts at the Yale-New Haven hospital’s child abuse clinic, whose oft-quoted results calling into question whether abuse occurred is challenged in the documentary by the prosecutor and other experts.
Toward the end of the series, a now-adult Dylan sits with Maco in the yard of her rural home. It is the fall of 2020. She is 35 now, the married mother of a 4-year-old daughter, and considers herself a survivor of incest. Maco explains, almost tearfully, that he did not want to drag her through the trauma of a trial after she had already been through so much.
“I wish I had testified,” she tells Maco. “I wish I had been stronger. To this day, I feel like I was given an opportunity to be brave and I turned it down.”
“I never want to hear that you blame yourself,” Maco says. “I made the decision.”
Mia Farrow, for her part, wishes repeatedly that she’d never allowed Allen to become part of her family.
“Are you angry with me?” Mia asks Dylan, as they sit over coffee in Mia’s farmhouse.
No, Dylan says. “When it mattered, you were there for me.”