Southeast : County’s Land Use Legacy to Be Studied
Los Angeles County’s land use legacy will come under scrutiny over the next two years as a Whittier College team undertakes a $400,000 study recently commissioned by the Southwest Voter Research Institute.
Faculty and student researchers in seven academic disciplines hope to link specific, “undesirable” county land use projects since 1927 to the communities that have hosted the developments. Results of the study will be recorded on a computer database, which will then be made available to policymakers and students of urban planning, college officials said.
Minority communities in the San Gabriel Valley will probably be a focus of the study, said project coordinator Cheryl Swift, assistant professor of biology. Researchers plan to examine how possibly hazardous sites such as toxic waste dumps have landed in such communities, she said.
“What we’re really interested in is building a database to figure out why we have environmental racism,” Swift said.
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