LA's Santa Barbara Plaza: Black Community Gets Hoodwinked, Bamboozled, And Left Holding The Bag

REASON #367 WHY MORE OF US ARE MOVING TO THE SUBURBS

The stalled Santa Barbara Plaza development in the heart of Black LA's famed Crenshaw District suggests how badly a project can be bungled when incentives are not in line with goals.

It was supposed to have been a model of urban renewal -- a mix of housing and classy stores to replace a decaying 20-acre shopping center at the foot of the affluent Baldwin Hills. Instead, the once prime location is a collection of blight, dead or dying businesses, and a vast concrete lot with weeds pushing through large cracks. Most of the housing was never built; none of the retailers ever came.

The largely middle-class, African American area is stuck with a mostly deserted commercial slum. Southern California leaders gambled on a check-bouncing, politically connected developer to shepherd the project. And after $15 million in government subsidies and more than $30 million in private investment, taxpayers -- and the community -- have lost.

Christopher Hammond, a bespeckled, light-skinned politically connected developer, was able to draw $15 million in public funding for a retail and housing development at the foot of Baldwin Hills that remains an unbuilt eyesore that's left Black Angelenos pissed.

Government Pays Hammond 400,000 More Than Appraised Value For Property

Despite a history of questionable credit-worthiness and reliability, bounced checks, and no shortage of lawsuits from unpaid contractors and bill collectors, former city Mayor James K. Hahn and former and current City Council members Mark Ridley-Thomas and Bernard C. Parks (locked in a contetious political battle for a ) continued to work with the tall, charismatic African American brotha.

The complete article can be found here.

Fish Don't Fry In The Kitchen... Movin On Up To The Low Budget Part Of Town

Live In The Ghetto? Here's How To Tell

By Ms. Tricky

I thought it was important to live in the city so my family would be surrounded by diversity. It's an urban, somewhat artsy district, where diversity includes everything from race, ethnicity, religion and age, to income, education and sexual orientation.

My neighborhood has it all…. including the thin, fast-walkin’ crack head, the inappropriately-clad for Sunday morning prostitute (on her way home from work) and a small pack of juvenile bad-asses on bikes.

I purchased a new-construction home, built on a vacant lot, in the midst of century-old homes, tall, mature trees and very few garages. On the left, an older African-American couple with four adopted girls and a small cleaning business. On the right, a rental consisting of 4 to 5 White college guys. Both sides have nice people who have lived there as long as I have. We all respect each other’s property and generally have a good neighborly relationship.

That's why I was so surprised this summer when I started to have problems with some of the kids in the neighborhood. They ride over my lawn, pick my flowers, and race behind my SUV while I am backing out of the driveway.

But now that I think about it, there have been some things that have happened over the years that may indicate that I live in “the ghetto.”

Perhaps these top five things should have been red flags:

5) Waking up to police sirens multiple times a year to find about 10 squad cars parked hap-hazardly in front of your home, discussing the individual pinned down to the ground on your lawn (that’s after the chase and the tasering). Everyone from age 3 to 70 is standing outside in the snow watching.

4)Your sixty-year old neighbor engages in a screaming match (laced with expletives I've never heard strung together in a sentence) from her porch arguing with the teenager across the street (who we all know has herpes). The sixty-year old concludes her argument by pulling her pants down and mooning the teen.

3) You're in bed quietly reading one warm summer night and suddenly who hear a child ram his bike into your garage door. Although you find the child still in the driveway - slightly bewildered and sitting on a bicycle intended for someone twice his age - the kid’s parent wants proof that it was her angelic son who did $400 dollars worth of damage (‘Cause yah know, she wasn’t watchin’ him!)

2) You regularly get a knock on the door from either the toothless lawn-cutting brotha who needs a dollar to take the bus at midnight, or the cross-dresser offering to sell you a Tahari suit for five bucks.

1) The postman apparently delivers your Mary Kay catalogue to another address by mistake. By the time you get it, the free sample of lotion has been ripped out.