How to Alienate a Community
A formula for community alarm: Have a big, faceless government agency plan major changes that will cause upheaval in the neighborhood. Then send out information to residents that is written in such dense bureaucratic jargon that it almost seems a foreign language. When neighborhood residents ask whether the agency will condemn homes and tear them down, make the agency noncommittal.
The Community Redevelopment Agency certainly has this formula down pat. In Watts, some longtime residents are up in arms about the news that the agency is planning a $200-million redevelopment project to attract more office buildings, industrial parks and theaters, as well as several hundred new homes and apartments. In a community where 40% of the residents live below the poverty line, what could be wrong with such plans? Probably nothing.
But the CRA has undermined its own star project by failing to properly announce and explain it to the people whose lives will be most affected.
The CRA’s demonstrated lack of community relations savvy is surprising, since it has been down this road before. Its Hoover Redevelopment project 20 years ago also went into a depressed black and Latino neighborhood to revitalize it. The project helped USC quickly, but nearby residents had to wait years before they started to regain lost housing.
Council members Robert Farrell and Joan Milke Flores know that history, as well as the recent history of the fine job done by the CRA at Watts’ Martin Luther King Jr. shopping center. That’s precisely why they should have been involved sooner to make sure their constituents knew enough to make informed judgments about the new Watts project.
The CRA did send out notices but little information. The notice announced meetings to discuss an “amendment to the existing Redevelopment Plan.” It’s no wonder that Watts residents didn’t know what the plan is or how the CRA proposes to go about the job.
For all the outside attacks leveled against it in recent years, the CRA can still be its own worst enemy.
