View Park: A Case Study in Racial Ironies

“Who told you to buy a brownstone in my neighborhood, on my block--on my side of the street?” yells Buggin’ Out, a character in Spike Lee’s latest movie “Do the Right Thing,” when a white urban pioneer inadvertently stepped on his brand-new gym shoes.

Across the country, black viewers painfully familiar with rampant gentrification nodded in empathy.

Even the polite, urbane residents of View Park who live worlds away from Buggin’ Out’s poor neighborhood identified with his acute frustration, for their own comfortable, black middle-class enclave in Baldwin Hills is seeing an increasing number of white home buyers.

The Urban Good Life

Abutting Crenshaw Boulevard and nestled into the hills above Stocker Street, View Park reflects many aspects of the urban good life. Gardeners toil over manicured lawns. On weekdays, many children car-pool to private institutions, spending after-school hours on tennis, ice-skating, French, piano and swimming lessons. The two- and three-car garages often house status vehicles like Mercedes, BMWs, Volvo wagons and trendy Jeeps.

To the outside observer, it may seem ironic that this group of professional blacks, who have successfully assimilated into mainstream white society, choose to live in a mostly black neighborhood--especially one that is situated a quick drive away from the gang-scarred neighborhoods east of Crenshaw. But for many, like John Gordon, 50, the presence of successful black role models for his two pre-adolescent children outweighs any of the worrisome factors attached to urban life. “In this community,” says Gordon, a senior airline pilot, “they can see black doctors, writers, lawyers, artists, craftsmen, law-enforcement officials. They’re all within a hundred yards of where we live.”

Many View Park residents say they experience relief when they come home to a black environment after having endured the stress of competing on a white playing field all day. A Century City investment broker says: “I have to work with them 12 hours a day. I wear my white-boy demeanor during the day because that’s what they can deal with, but, when I come home at night, I want to be me. I’m black.”

Even their kids need a respite. Gordon’s wife, Melanie, thinks it “critical” that her children, who attend a predominantly white, private school, come home to a neighborhood where being black is the norm. “So many black kids from comfortable families don’t have that grounding,” the 40-year-old MBA laments. “I just think a lot of them will grow up lost, not knowing who they are.”

But the cultural insulation that the Gordons and their neighbors sought in View Park is beginning to wear thin. Now, with soaring real-estate costs and increasingly onerous commutes from rapidly expanding suburbs, the neighborhood is being discovered by white home seekers. It was recently cited by Los Angeles magazine as one of the last remaining bargains in the city “if,” the article cautioned, “you don’t mind ethnic diversity. . . .” And while once the area’s real estate was handled almost exclusively by black realtors, now signs from huge Westside firms like Jon Douglas and Coldwell Banker (two of many firms that once considered the area undesirable) are popping up like mushrooms after a hard rain.

Though she is black, Rhonda Payne, a realtor with Jon Douglas’ Hancock Park office, was initially unfamiliar with the area. Now she is enthusiastic about the potential for sales there.

“Most Westside brokers have just discovered View Park,” she admits. “It’s a great neighborhood: the L.A. views are spectacular and there is an opportunity to get a family home. I plan to be much more active here.”

Indeed, many white, thirtysomething home seekers, who never would have considered settling below the Santa Monica Freeway or east of La Brea Avenue, have had a painful bout of reality therapy when they’ve found out what their professional salaries would buy. View Park is sometimes tentatively broached as an alternative that, to realtors’ delight, many white buyers are accepting.

“We couldn’t afford to live in Beverlywood so we started to look in other places,” concedes Alan Fisher, 46, a professor of political science at California State University at Dominguez Hills. “We found View Park tremendously attractive.” His wife, Janet, a 36-year-old psychologist, admits that “for the price we’re paying (in View Park), we’re getting a home instead of a box.”

More bang-for-the-buck has prompted increasing numbers of white prospective buyers to investigate the neighborhood. Any given weekend yields growing numbers of potential white home buyers looking alternatively worried (for most, life beyond La Brea is terra incognita ) and amazed. “You can see it on their faces,” one resident laughs. “Their look says: ‘This is so nice! Why didn’t we know it was here ?’ ”

Those young professional blacks who bought their houses in View Park because they wanted to be with black people view the white influx with alarm.

“I think I’m entitled to a little anxiety,” said a financier who, like many people interviewed for this article, asked that his name not be used, “when it looks as if the reason that I bought the house in the first place no longer exists.”

They worry about the newcomers mindset. “I don’t want somebody coming in here who’s culturally arrogant, who’s going to assume they’re rescuing this neighborhood, who thinks they’re better than I am,” says a communications consultant. “I don’t want to deal with that.”

But they are worried about being worried. “I think the concern about the changing racial composition is valid,” one woman explained carefully, “but it’s real easy for people to take my being worried the wrong way. I am not a racist.”

Are View Park residents’ anxieties over what they feel is cultural dilution racist?

Leo Estrada, a professor of sociology at UCLA, says no. Worries about displacement are common among minorities in transitional neighborhoods, says Estrada, who has studied this phenomenon across the country: “They feel that an area in which they had previously been comfortable will become alien to them. They’ll become strangers in their own environment.”

Residents also worry that younger black families are being quickly priced out of the area by the growing white interest.

“I grew up right down the street,” says one man in his early 30s, pointing at his parent’s Mission Revival house on Olympiad Drive. “I own my own business but, even if I sold my condominium, I can’t afford to live here now. Prices are going through the roof, and it’s really making me crazy.” One Westside broker claims to have sold 17 houses in the past few months--”every one of them to a white family.”

But as anxious as some black families are over the perhaps inevitable arrival of significant numbers of whites, they are loathe to condemn wholesale the idea of more white residents, possibly because of personal experiences with discrimination. The big difference between black residents wanting View Park to stay black and, for instance, whites in Cicero, Ill.--or Bensonhurst, N.Y., or Howard Beach, N.Y., or Forsythe County, Ga.--wanting those places to remain white, says the financier, is this: “I might not be thrilled that you’re coming in here in large numbers, but I’m not going to try to band together with my neighbors to keep you out. There’ll be none of the barbarism associated with what goes on in white neighborhoods. If you move to View Park, even if I don’t want you to, nobody’s going to throw a rock in your window, or burn a cross on your lawn.”

“Ultimately,” says the communications consultant, “black people are more willing to judge you on your individual merits. Our attitude is, ‘OK, prove yourself: Are you going to be a good neighbor or not? I didn’t want you here all that much, but you’re here, now how are you going to be?’ Who knows? We might get to be best buddies by Christmas.”