In the article, “South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles,” Laura Barraclough compares two distinct cases of flighting for your community in Los Angeles: the South Central Farmers who are fighting to be able to continue their community garden that allows low income families to sustain themselves and the Shadow Hills Homeowners who are fighting to pass a notion to increase the lot size of their homes to preserve their rural aesthetic. She argues that although the cases may look different on the outside, that the internal factors such as race, property, and economics unify them and show the difference that your demographic can make when advocating for yourself.
These pieces relate to last week’s readings regarding the gentrification of South Francisco because they both highlight the unequal representation and distribution of white individuals in higher paying positions and in better living situations than POC. This relationship contributes to the disparities in housing and access to property highlighted by both articles. Although the articles do not deal with housing directly, they show how the government’s interventions are pushing people out of their community spaces that they have inhabited and maintained for years.
Something that caught my attention in this article was the issue with the youth basebath academy that they proposed to build in the Shadow Hills community. Specifically, their conscious strategy to use their community and homeownership as a way to mask their real issues concerning how the presence of minorities would bring their property value down. It is concerning that they felty free to openly discuss these ideas and put them on a handout where anyone could have seen it. Not only did they affect the youth’s ability to participate in recreational activities which is bad on its own but they also stopped people from accessing the affordable housing that would have been built.
Something else that caught my attention was how the Shadow Hills Homeowners used heritage as a way to defend their movement while using words that were in Spanish such as “ranchos” and “caballeros” that did not belong to their culture but to the people they did not want to move into or near their community
Leave a Reply