Fear takes flight

MY NEIGHBOR is selling his house. That’s not necessarily unusual in Los Angeles, of course, and generally it means the person is moving on or moving up, getting a job or losing one, quitting the big city or, at the very least, cashing in on the astronomical rate of appreciation that has characterized Southern California real estate in the last few years.

For my neighbor, several of these reasons apply. But I took the news of his selling hard, with a spark of panic and a sense of loss that goes well beyond losing a friend I had just begun to make on my morning walks with the dog. This is not about me. Inglewood needs him.

My neighbor is young, in his 30s. He is black, like the majority of residents here. He and his wife moved in less than two years ago, on a long, lovely block I never tire of touring. It’s slightly uphill from my house, the first real step up into an L.A.-Inglewood enclave called Century Heights, a neighborhood marked by all the things that real estate agents eagerly describe as “charming”: landscaped front lawns that occasionally burst into bonsai or tropical themes, ‘50s architecture, generous backyards.

It’s the height of civility and middle-class pride of ownership that has prevailed in Inglewood for decades -- and that kept my neighbor faithfully watering his lawn every day. (That’s how we met.) But from the beginning, he was uneasy. The neighborhood’s idyllic look is not exactly representative of Inglewood as a whole, as it should be. Century Heights has endured, but it has done so in spite of deteriorating schools, lackluster commercial development and some gang activity.

It is unfortunately these elements, not the hardy optimism of Century Heights, that frame Inglewood to the rest of the world -- and that have framed it for some time. Century Heights has suffered from the general downward drift of black America into a vexing impoverishment and stagnation that encroach upon the middle class everywhere, breathing down its neck.

The prevailing black reality does not sit well in any kind of “heights,” and my neighbor finally decided it was sitting too close for comfort. On the block I found so tranquil and picturesque, he routinely saw young black men rolling up in trucks, sometimes idling in the middle of the street, playing music, hanging out. They did nothing wrong, he assured me. They were cooperative, even polite, parked their cars and trucks properly when asked. There was very little trouble in the law-and-order sense. Most of them seemed to have jobs.

BUT MY NEIGHBOR couldn’t help but conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that these congregations of young black men meant nothing good for the neighborhood, and for us. He worried not what it meant but what it could mean. He knew better than most; he’d grown up in South Central, like me, in a much rougher part of town than Century Heights. He confessed that these guys didn’t threaten him nearly as much as they threatened an expectation of stability and a black social order finally free from the worry of gangs, bad schools, all of it. Driving home at night, he wanted to turn the corner and not hold his breath about what he or his wife might encounter. He was sick of his own paranoia and wanted to be rid of it. He wanted to consider himself and all the other lawn-waterers and dog-walkers as the controlling force of the neighborhood, not fear.

But he says he’s not there yet -- we’re not there yet -- and he can’t wait to be. So he’s moving. He says it’ll be somewhere between here and the Valley, and I told him that sounded pricey. Homes are already well over half a million in Inglewood -- what comparable place in town could he and his wife possibly get north of here? He sighed, nodded. Then he shrugged. Such is the price of non-progress.

The irony of all this is that my neighbor agrees with me that he should stay. He knows perfectly well that what Inglewood needs to thrive is what every place needs: a critical mass of concerned citizens who stand their ground, geographically and metaphorically, who set agendas and who can tip neighborhoods from questionable to livable.

That’s hard to do when you’ve got options; even harder if you’re black and, like everyone else, conditioned to believe that blacks usually run down neighborhoods rather than raise them up. But the chains have to break somewhere, somehow. The dog and I are still walking, in faith.