Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ their appreciation for sanitation.”⁶ After this comic relief, the commission accepted several hundred pages of dense reports and two days of testimony about housing segregation from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California, an umbrella group that included the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, the Jewish Labor League, American Friends Service Committee, and the LA County Commission on Human Relations.

      Assembly member Augustus Hawkins, the sole representative of Black Los Angeles (13.7 percent of the city’s population) in any elected office, told commissioners that because Blacks were unable to buy homes financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), growth was accommodated through the widespread construction of rental units or second homes on single-family lots, resulting in overcrowding and blight. He also talked about hugely discriminatory fire and car insurance rates where such insurance was even available in inner-city areas. Eloise Kloke, regional director of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, testified about the racial consequences of the suburbanization of employment: “We find where Government contractors are located in geographical areas in which Negroes are unable to obtain housing, Negroes are found within the work force not at all or in very small numbers.” In a submission, the Community Relations Conference cited the example of a medium-sized LA manufacturer that relocated to Placentia in Orange County. A single Black employee had succeeded in buying a home in the area, only to have vandals break into his house, cut up all the carpets and pour cement in the plumbing. This was soon followed by a Molotov cocktail hurled against the front window.⁷

      The definitive presence at the hearings, however, was Loren Miller, publisher of the California Eagle and the nation’s leading legal expert on housing discrimination.⁸ In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miller had won a stunning series of legal victories—including (with Thurgood Marshall) the landmark case of Shelley v. Kraemer before the Supreme Court—that had overthrown the legality of the restrictive covenants that excluded Blacks, but also sometimes Chicanos and Jews, from more than 90 percent of housing tracts in Los Angeles. But these constitutional victories, Miller emphasized, so far had not opened a single suburb to Black homebuyers or altered the relentlessly discriminatory practices of realtors, developers, and savings and loan institutions. He told the commission of a study by FHA housing analyst Belden Morgan in 1954 that found that “approximately 3,000 of the 125,000 housing units built from 1950 to 1954 in the Los Angeles area were open to non-Caucasian occupancy.” More recent research by the Los Angeles Urban League concluded that less than 1 percent of new housing between 1950 and 1956 was occupied by minorities. In addition, “most of the housing that is open to non-Caucasian occupancy is located in subdivisions built expressly for Negro occupancy.” Miller reminded commissioners the contemporary ghetto was as much the deliberate product of federal policy as the organic result of local racism. Since the 1930s the FHA had underwritten exclusive practices and was continuing to subsidize mortgages in racially-restricted developments while allowing lenders to limit loans in minority areas.⁹

      The result of government-sanctioned discrimination during the 1950s had been the creation of a super-ghetto: 75 percent of Los Angeles County’s Black population concentrated in the metropolitan core between Olympic Boulevard on the north and Artesia Boulevard on the south.¹⁰ Alameda Street, the old highway and railroad route to the harbor, was called the “cotton curtain” because Blacks could not live or be seen at night in any of the dozen or so industrial suburbs to its east. A clan of white gangs, the “Spookhunters,” patrolled racial boundaries, attacking Blacks with seeming impunity. Meanwhile the western edge of Black residence was roughly Figueroa Street on the south, but northward, at Manchester Boulevard, it began to bulge westward, ultimately as far as Crenshaw in the latitude of Slauson Avenue. South Central L.A. also had an internal physical and socioeconomic boundary: The Harbor Freeway, parallel to Main Street and completed as far south as 124th Street by 1958, “had created a massive structural and symbolic barrier between the Eastside and Westside [Black] communities.”¹¹ By 1960, the old “main stem” on Central Avenue was in decline, middle-class Blacks were moving as far west as Crenshaw, and Western Avenue had become the business and entertainment axis of the Black community.

      Thus Black Los Angeles expanded, with continuous friction and controversy, through white flight and “block busting” on its southern and western peripheries where the housing stock dated primarily from 1910 to 1940. The chief hot spots of white resistance were the city of Compton (south of Watts), where a racial transition had already begun, and all-white Inglewood, where police and residents were mobilized to defend the city’s eastern and northern boundaries against Black homebuyers. (Only the Crenshaw area, with its mixture of Jews, Japanese-Americans and Blacks, qualified as a true multiracial community.)

      Apart from South Central Los Angeles, there were also historical Black neighborhoods in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, Long Beach, and Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley—each of which could be accurately described as a ghetto. The rest of the older secondary cities—like Torrance, Hawthorne, Burbank and, above all, Glendale—were zero-Black-population “sundown towns,” where the local police enforced illegal curfews on Black shoppers and commuters. Meanwhile in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, tens of thousands of acres of citrus groves had been bulldozed over the previous decade to create huge new commuter dormitories such as West Covina (which by 1960 already had a population of 50,300) and La Puente (pop. 25,000). It was a mirror image of the segregated San Fernando Valley, as were the hundreds of racially exclusive new home tracts in the southwest (the South Bay) and southeast quadrants of LA County.¹² According to John Buggs of the LA County Commission on Human Relations, segregation was rapidly increasing: between 1950 and 1959 the percentage of nonwhites in thirty-four of the fifty-four county cities had declined; in twelve cases, the decrease was absolute.¹³

      While realtors and white homeowners within the Los Angeles city limits confronted the threat—albeit still very small in 1960—that growing minority political clout might eventually pry open housing markets, the county suburbs were building invulnerable walls through home rule. Indeed, as political scientist Gregory Weiher illustrated in a 1991 study, after restrictive covenants had been ruled unconstitutional, the separate municipal incorporation of new suburbs (a practice upheld by California and federal courts) became the most effective method for excluding minorities.¹⁴ Lakewood was the pioneer. Faced with annexation by Long Beach in 1953–54, this mega-development of 17,500 new homes, Southern California’s counterpart to the Levittowns erected on the East Coast, had struck a deal to lease municipal services (police, fire, libraries, water, sewage, and so on) from the county. The so-called Lakewood Plan, subsequently reinforced by a law allowing municipalities to keep a portion of locally generated sales taxes, spurred thirty similar incorporations between 1954 and 1970. Through their control over land use, these “contract cities” could ensure residential homogeneity (for example, by excluding apartment construction), while attracting sales tax generators like malls and auto dealerships that enabled many to eliminate local property taxes.

      “Promiscuous incorporations,” wrote two UCLA researchers, also prevented “the equalization of tax resources among local units of government. Areas possessing high property valuations, such as Commerce, Industry, and Irwindale, have incorporated as cities and have sought to withdraw from arrangements that distributed their taxable resources so as to assist less favored communities.” The Lakewood Plan quickly became the utopia of pioneer “public choice” theorists like Charles Tiebout, Robert Warren and Vincent Ostrom, who argued that a large number of competing local governments created a “quasi-market” that optimized consumer choice in public goods. Residents could, in theory, “vote with their feet” for the municipality with the best schools, the lowest taxes and the highest likely appreciation of home values. But minorities had no “foot vote” and could rarely use home equity to buy up into preferred housing; thus their capacity for wealth accumulation through homeownership was extremely limited. The political fragmentation of metropolitan Los Angeles, in other words, was an insidious and largely unassailable form of disfranchisement; one member of a 1959–60 commission studying Southern California’s urban issues aptly called it “apartheid.”¹⁵

      February: СКАЧАТЬ