Blending Change With Harmony

West Adams is a neighborhood of large, old houses near downtown Los Angeles. Some buyers are snapping up the homes for their traditional architecture. Others are attracted by the bargain prices--an average of $122,500--and the close-in location. Most of the new homeowners are younger, professional whites. Most of the long-time homeowners are older, middle-class blacks. Hostilities, racial and generational, have developed. Those tensions need addressing.

Los Angeles City Councilman David Cunningham plans to ask for mediation by the city’s Human Relations Commission at its meeting on Thursday. That is a sound strategy. The nine-member board successfully reduced similar tensions between black residents and Korean shop owners in Watts and Inglewood earlier this year.

The commission worked through black and Korean business groups, the NAACP, community leaders, ministers and experts who addressed cultural conflicts and resentments stemming from a perception that the Asian immigrants shunned neighborhood involvement, looked down on blacks and refused to hire them to work in Korean-owned stores and gas stations.

In West Adams the commission must work with tensions that are both racial and generational. This is not the classic gentrification battle of haves against have-nots, or of professionals reclaiming slumlands at the expense of the poor. But some newcomers view themselves as rescuers who are restoring gentility. That attitude offends long-time residents who live in graceful mansions on streets marred only by occasional shabbiness.

Race is also an issue. Many older black residents remember the barriers that they faced when they tried to buy into the neighborhood, the subsequent white flight and the years when most whites avoided the area. Some older residents also blame newcomers for property inflation that could prevent their children from buying homes nearby.

West Adams is changing. The neighborhood was overwhelmingly black in the 1980 census, but the local grade-school population now reflects an increasing number of Latino and Asian students but only a smattering of Anglos.

Changes do not preclude harmony. Los Angeles, although it is no racial paradise, is better than many major U.S. cities--among them Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission can work to preserve that reputation.