The ‘New Majority’ Wants Its Share : Los Angeles: Putting aside their differences could mean prosperity for the African American, Latino and Asian communities. But can they meet the challenge?

Fueled by immigration and other demographic forces, the face of Los Angeles is changing. Traditional “minority” groups--African Americans, Latinos and Asian Pacific Americans--now comprise 54% of the city’s population.

The economic power of this “new majority,” however, does not match its numbers. Poverty rates in the Asian community, for example, are more than twice as high as in the white community; for African Americans and Latinos, poverty rates are three times higher than for whites, and real family income for these groups has fallen throughout the 1980s. Most of the new majority’s members--for years designated as minorities--wereleft out of the downtown boom and dynamic regional growth, leaving Los Angeles with a populace increasingly polarized by income, race and ethnicity.

A prosperous and peaceful future for Los Angeles depends on reversing this polarization and incorporating all of our people into the economic development process. This can be done only if the new majority communities fashion their own vision of prosperity and seek the political and economic power to implement it.

What little has been written about the new majority has tended to focus on inter-community problems: tensions between Korean immigrants and African Americans in South-Central Los Angeles, or conflicts between Latinos and blacks over public employment. What the press has generally missed, however, is a number of initiatives--the Latino-Black Roundtable, the Black-Korean Alliance, the Hispanic-Asian Dialogue, the Federation of Minority Business Assns. and others--that are seeking to establish dialogue.

Our own efforts have started from the premise that the root cause of many of the current inter-ethnic conflicts is a sense that others are gaining larger shares of smaller and smaller development leftovers. We have therefore sought common ground on economic development models and policies that could meet the challenges of the 1990s.

This approach argues that the current development strategy in Los Angeles is of the corporate center variety: Use public subsidies to spark a downtown boom and hope that the benefits will trickle down to poor communities.

An alternative model would focus on the communities and neighborhoods, creating an atmosphere in which human-resource development (that is, education and training) and enhanced spending power would eventually trickle up to corporate employers. The policies that flow from such a model are straightforward.

First, community organizations should become actively involved in creating development plans and implementing projects; a positive example is the effort by the Los Angeles Jobs With Peace Campaign to redefine how the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency’s policies can positively affect the failing infrastructure of South-Central Los Angeles. Second, the city should extend the linkage concept, requiring downtown builders to simultaneously develop parcels in new-majority areas or contribute to a fund for housing and job training in poor neighborhoods. Third, the city should encourage downtown businesses to pursue fair-share policies, such as hiring new majority residents and subcontracting to small new majority businesses. Fourth, business should develop joint ventures with community groups, using them, for example, to provide potential employees.

Finally, the African American, Latino and Asian American communities that comprise the new majority should pursue joint ventures: agreements to work together politically, pool capital resources, organize workers across ethnic lines and support community development efforts in each other’s neighborhoods.

There are signs that such an alternative development strategy is not only needed but possible. Mayor Tom Bradley has recognized the patterns of inequality and appointed development councils to study and spur growth in East and South-Central Los Angeles. In other cities, such as Boston, neighborhood groups have successfully organized to take advantage of linkage legislation. In Los Angeles, we have initiated a series of discussions leading up to a conference next month in which such a model will be sketched out and discussed.

The challenges facing Los Angeles are many. It is not enough to clean up our dirty air; we must also clean up the racially polarizing development that has characterized the last decade. It is not enough to simply respond to the drug and gang crises; we must also alter the pattern of economic stagnation and frustration that leads to so much destitution and despair. Since public policy and corporate organizing have driven the downtown boom, it is wholly appropriate that public policy and community organizing now provide the basis for neighborhood revitalization.

Such revitalization, however, cannot be achieved if the new majority remains divided. With a new and common vision, we can pursue our goals of reducing poverty in the African American, Latino and Asian Pacific American communities, making Los Angeles a better place for all its citizens. It’s a matter of justice and good sense for a city that has a new majority.