In one of Los Angeles’ oldest neighborhoods, a tidy elementary school sits on ground it has occupied for nearly a century, proudly displaying its “gold ribbon” from the state of California, an honor for exemplary public schools. Victorian homes and family-owned shops line the nearby streets of Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood that hovers just above the heart of Downtown.
Last week, more than 100 residents — parents and children, activists, elected officials and businesspeople — marched in opposition to a warehouse development planned for directly across the street from Hillside Elementary. The warehouse would bring diesel and other trucks, traffic, noise and pollution.
It’s a familiar struggle in California, pitting commerce against a community. The residents want it stopped.
“This is a residential community,” Michael Henry Hayden, who lives nearby and has helped galvanize opposition to the proposal, told me a few days earlier as we walked around the area. “That should matter.”
The site of this dispute has its own, long history. Once the home of a dry cleaner that billed itself “America’s largest industrial laundry,” the parcel is scarred by decades of chemical contamination, and it abuts the 110 Freeway.
It’s a pie-shaped corner of land adjacent to three gigantic apartment buildings that are under construction and nearing completion. The apartment buildings are an eyesore — “skyscrapers lying on their sides,” as Hayden aptly described them — but at least they will bring housing to a city that badly needs more of it. In this case, they are expected to deliver 468 units, enough for some 1,400 residents, when they open.
But the remaining wedge of land is being offered up as a “distribution center,” the new euphemism for a warehouse, and will be served by an endless stream of trucks — big ones arriving with loads from the port and airport, little ones leaving to distribute those goods around Los Angeles.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Angelenos need goods, and those goods arrive from around the world, delivered to homes within days of hitting a button on a smartphone or computer. That requires a distribution network that stretches from our devices to a manufacturing plant, often very far away, and back home.
But this particular site is a reminder that just because the world relies on the movement of goods does not mean that every parcel is equally appropriate for joining that network.
The warehouse is opposed by City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, as well as County Supervisor Hilda Solis and LAUSD Board Member Rocío Rivas, all of whom represent the area. At the recent demonstration, Hernandez said the project should “never, never be allowed to go forward.” Rivas called it “dangerous and irresponsible.”
“This is our home,” she said of the neighborhood. “We’re going to protect it.”
The broad opposition to this project is the latest flashpoint in an everlasting test of what Los Angeles is — and what it aspires to be. They sketch the boundaries between a city that imagines itself as a waystation in international trade and one that sees itself as a collection of self-regulating communities, one of neighborhood councils and community solidarity.
Here, activists and residents and their representatives present a compelling case.
Questionable location for a warehouse
Start with children. There is just one way in and out of the warehouse site, which at the moment is being used as a staging area for construction of the adjacent apartment complex. That entrance sits squarely in a crosswalk that children use to traverse Pasadena Avenue to reach Hillside Elementary. Fumes from the trucks would add to what already is some of the city’s worst air pollution.
Beyond the school is the community itself. This is not a warehouse district. It’s a neighborhood of homes and small businesses. It’s overwhelmingly Latino and mostly low-income. The Fortuna general store is on one side of the school, and a tamale restaurant on the other.
The apartment complex is already going to change the character of these streets, especially because it includes just 200 parking spaces for its 468 units, a tradeoff that helps maximize multifamily housing projects. The warehouse will redouble that impact, and it will sit right up against one of the new apartment buildings, which surely would be a rude awakening for future tenants.
And then there is the question of access. On the map, it seems like a smart place to build a facility that relies on the freeway — the site is adjacent to the Pasadena Freeway, which runs along the property’s western edge. But that’s misleading: There are no onramps or offramps to the 110 from the property, and the winding Pasadena Freeway does not allow truck traffic anyway.
The result is that trucks utilizing this warehouse will be next to a freeway that they can’t use. Instead, they’ll have to travel surface streets, barreling through residential neighborhoods to get on and off Interstate 5, which is roughly a mile away.
It is, all in all, a stupid place to build a warehouse. Surely, then, the city will step in to stop it.
That’s proven difficult so far. Since the school-adjacent property is foolishly zoned for industrial use, the owner believes it is being developed “by right” and doesn’t need city approval. Once the apartments are done and the construction area is closed up, the developer, Xebec, may be free to put up its warehouse — sorry, “distribution center.”
That doesn’t mean local officials have surrendered. The company needs permits to begin construction, and it needs them by today. Last week, Hernandez was coy about what her office is doing to prevent that, but she vowed to intervene with city departments to force the developer at least to perform an environmental analysis and face public questions about the proposal.
Ultimately, she wants the parcel to become a park, which is clearly not what Xebec has in mind. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Market uber alles’
All of this is puzzling in Los Angeles, which, if anything, has a reputation for being too accommodating of residents, sometimes at the expense of business. Try building a homeless shelter or affordable housing, for instance, and watch homeowners rally to protect their investments and communities.
But in Lincoln Heights, these are mostly working-class people in neighborhoods that lack the organization that wealthier communities have established over the years. They’re alarmed but not surprised at the suggestion that their neighborhood school could be pummeled and their streets flooded with trucks, just so that shippers can inch closer to customers.
If development is often a balance between commerce and community, in this case, the pendulum has swung awfully far toward commerce — and at the expense of the people who already live here.
“Everybody says we have too much regulation,” Hayden observed. “Sometimes, we don’t have enough.”
These are new versions of old problems, and as such, it’s worth considering what some of this state’s wiser heads have thought about them. Take Jerry Brown, for instance.
Near the end of his last term, Gov. Brown was sent a bill that would have allowed bars to stay open later in some cities. It was supported by the hospitality industry, of course, because it would have allowed some of its members to make more money. Brown recalled that one representative implored him: “We have to support our nightlife industry.”
“Why?” Brown asked. Why should he sign a bill that would allow people to drink and carouse longer just because a business wanted them to do so? Why should policymakers feel compelled to elevate money over other priorities? Would that not, as Brown called it, “market uber alles?”
“What else is there?” Brown continued when we discussed this in 2018. “Only the market — unfettered buying and selling by distant corporate aggregates… That trumps thousands of years of custom and tradition and religious sentiment.”
When the only question is money, Brown went on, other priorities get lost. What enhances freedom? What makes communities safer and more livable? Why do those not rank at least as high for policymakers as the money that might be made by a bar staying open late or a warehouse being built in a residential neighborhood?
Those questions need to be asked in Lincoln Heights, not just because a community’s well-being is at stake but also because the answers reveal what Los Angeles actually cares about. As this city and others find their place in international trade, it can’t come at the expense of communities and those who depend on them. To ignore those people is indeed to acquiesce to “market uber alles.”
Brown, incidentally, vetoed the bill. The market does not always prevail.
Jim Newton, CalMatters
