Space, power, and justice: the politics of building an urban justice movement, Long Beach, California, USA

ABSTRACT

Cities are places where individuals emerge from their private spaces, connect with each other, form solidarities, politicize themselves, and begin to think as a group with distinctive interconnected interests. The politicizing effects of cities, particularly around social justic organizing, is not uniform across space. Long Beach, CA, USA is an unexpected case, a city with a long history of conservative politics. As recent as 2007, the pro-growth coalition blocked challenges to its neoliberal strategy; by 2014 a social justice turnappeared possible. This study makes three claims. 1) Cities are part of broader urban spaces that can foster social networks within and across cities. 2) Interaction between regional progressive and city networks can facilitate mobilizations in cities without a history of progressive politics. 3) The effective leveraging of relationships and resources requires local leadership imbued with a thorough understanding of the city’s history.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban politics
• social movements
• neoliberalism
• framing
• living wage/community benefits

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Varisa Patraporn, Alfonso Hernandez-Marquez, and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Special thanks to Walter Nicholls for helping me clarify my thinking in revising the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, the Environmental Justice Movement, the Immigrant Justice Movement, labor-LGBTQ alliance building, and Participatory Budgeting. See Cersonsky, 2012; Gutstein & Lipman, 2013; Pastor, Carter, Sanchez-Lopez, & Chala, 2015; Ransby, 2015.

2. 2016 data.

3. The Navy shipyard is a case in point. The shipyard was established in 1940, when, for $1, the Navy purchased 104 acres of oceanfront property on Terminal Island from the city of Long Beach. In 1950 the Navy inactivated the shipyard and the city lost almost 6,500 jobs and an annual payroll of more than $30 million. When hostilities broke out in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, the yard reopened in 1951. More than 2,400 workers were hired. By 1953, employment was back over 8,000 with as many as 25 ships being repaired per month. By the early 1960s, the shipyard had again made the closure list as President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Pentagon to list bases that could be closed. But after several ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, the yard was saved from closure. Again in 1991, the yard was listed for closure, but was spared, after a campaign by local officials and employees. For an overview of this history, see Hale-Burns (2011).

4. The Pike was an amusement park and arcade near the beach south of Ocean Boulevard . The Pike was part of the marketing of Long Beach as a tourist destination, which has had numerous permutations since 1900–1920 period, when city leaders first sought to transform Long Beach into the “Coney Island of the West” (Hytrek, 2009, p. 5).

5. In 1981, for instance, President Reagan cut $7 billion in aid to cities, and in 1987, the major federal aid program to cities, the Urban Development Action Grant program, was cut entirely (Luce, 2004, p. 19). In 1980, federal dollars accounted for 22% of big city budgets, eight years later it had shrunk to 6% (Dreier, 2011).

6. Leading the drive would be the Redevelopment Agency created in 1961 with the power to purchase “substandard or blighted land areas … and sell the land to a redeveloper … ” (Houser, 1961). The Agency adopted a three-point policy statement emphasizing the central role of private enterprise, what journalist George Weeks (1962) called the “free enterprise policy,” essentially a top-down, developer-driven process predicated on growth.

7. Douglas Mitschke (1981, p. 30) quotes the city’s economic development specialist that “We want to include middle and upper class people into the downtown area if the downtown is going to resemble what it once was.”

8. Even today (2014) jobs at the port range from $10 an hour to over $350,000 annually. This includes jobs in international trade and goods movement that span the spectrum from sales clerks in retail, to entry-level positions at major railroads, to UPS drivers, to high-level careers in international law. Longshoremen, for instance, make from $50,000 to well over $100,000 per year. Unionized clerical workers make an average of $40.00 h. The irony here is that many of the jobs pushing up the wages and salaries the port officials praise are unionized, the very force the Long Beach (and LA) business community have so vehemently opposed over the past 100 years (Hytrek, 2010). Hidden in these data, however, are the rampant misclassifications of workers, such as truck drivers, which reduce the pay of many to well below minimum wage (Kitroeff, 2016, p. C1).

9. The language used by elected officials when discussing the development plans.

10. The referenced hotel markets include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Phoenix and Seattle (Kohli, 2009, p. 33).

11. A second major business group (with the largest concentration of Press Telegram executives) was the Downtown Long Beach Associations (today called the Downtown Long Beach Alliance), a tax-exempt corporation of downtown business owners. In the late 1970s, the DLBA also came under investigation by the FBI and a federal grand jury in connection with political contributions (Kim, 1979, pp. 197–198).

12. The City acquired British Cunard Steamship Company’s once luxurious Queen Mary ocean liner in 1967, hoping to revitalize seaside tourism with a refurbished Queen Mary as the centerpiece (See City of Long Beach Historical Context Statement, 2009).

13. In interviews with former LBACI members, they pointed out that the LA Times’s exposé was a major impetus for LBACI’s founding.

14. In the 1970s real estate prices were skyrocketing, interest rates were out of sight and the lack of affordable housing was a serious problem. In response, the city council changed zoning laws for what they thought would increase the supply of affordable housing. Developers exploited a loophole to construct legally 8- and 10-unit complexes on a single lot – called “crackerboxes”. Soon, these kinds of apartment were going up all over the area. Developers were paying top dollar for historic 1920s bungalows, tearing them down and putting up apartment buildings that were being sold to investors for $800,000 to $1 million, without any parking requirements.

15. Discussions over tactics and strategy continued among the Coalition’s core activists after these initial conversations. Some of these were basics, such as moving meeting locations to where workers lived and having Coalition representatives at the local labor strategy meetings; some were deeper and involved issues of base building and timing of launching policy campaigns.

16. The Coalition to Stop Plant Closing focused on keeping auto factories open in California.

17. According to the Tale of Two Cities report, the Hyatt received $76,844,308 in subsidies from the city between 1981 and 2007 (Kohli, 2009, p. 16, table1). While the Hilton did not receive direct subsidies from the city, it was part of the overall Three T’s redevelopment plan implemented in the 1990s and benefited substantially from the investment in tourist attractions and infrastructure (Kohli, 2009).

18. On the Sierra project, see Meeks 2009a. The 2nd & PCH campaign was spearheaded by Los Cerritos Wetlands; the Downtown Community Plan was led by Housing Long Beach and Legal Aid of Los Angeles. Up to this point, if development projects conflicted with existing zoning regulations, the developer simply asked for (and received) a zoning variance from the Planning Commission and the city council. The Los Cerritos Wetlands effort to halt the 2nd & PCH project was one of the few successful efforts by the community to challenge the impunity of developer. The city’s adoption of the Downtown Community General Plan, which set building regulations in downtown Long Beach, was a major victory for the Chamber (Eakins, 2010c; LAANE, 2010; Long Beach Development Services, 2011; Woo, 2011).

19. The adoption of new lobbying regulations in February 2010 was a remarkable accomplishment given that a similar ordinance was defeated in 2008. In December 2009, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Long Beach Press Telegram reporters, Paul Eakins, John Canalis and Karen Robes Meeks broke the story of a cozy relationship between Craig Beck, the director of the Redevelopment Agency, and the Department of Development Services, and Mike Murchison, a lobbyist. Murchison represented clients seeking to develop hotels and other projects that by their nature went through Beck’s office. The Long Beach Press-Telegram reported that during a trip to Napa, Beck received a discount at the Avia (now the Andaz) Napa Hotel, which was owned by LodgeWorks, the company that owned the Avia Long Beach Hotel at the Pike, and was seeking permission to build the Sierra hotel across the street. Murchison represented LodgeWorks in Long Beach (Eakins, Canalis, & Meeks, 2009a; Meeks, 2009b, Barboza 2009; Eakins, 2010a; Long Beach Press Telegram, 2009). In testimony before the city council, the Coalition called for a moratorium on new tourism-related development until the city attorney’s investigation was completed (See Wielenga, 2009). The Coalition supported efforts for a new Lobby Ordinance that was enacted in spring 2010 (Eakins, 2010b). It is notable that in 2008, residents debated a proposed law that would foster transparency by requiring lobbyists to register with the city. While Mike Murchison successfully led the effort to block the 2008 Ordinance, he and his allies failed in 2010 (Eakins, 2010b; Meeks, 2010).

20. The Coalition successfully argued the city failed to engage the community consistent with the law, or to consider adequately the project’s negative environmental impacts on the community. Rather that reengaging the community, the developer walked away. The 2nd & PCH campaign was also significant, representing an effort by the community to successful stop the impunity of developers to seek and obtain variances at will. Los Cerritos Wetland Trust was a new Coalition partner and reflected months of difficult conversations between environmentalists and Coalition and labor activists. At issue was a major hotel slated for the area, as well as condo and retail establishments. Overall, the project violated multiple zoning ordinances and threatened the adjacent wetlands. The major point of discussion among activists was the hotel and who would labor support (the environmentalists or the developer if card check was on the table). Los Cerritos eventually agreed to join the Coalition and the Coalition actively supported the successful campaign to halt the project.

21. The Coalition organized the event in conjunction with Dolores Huerta to honor inspiring Long Beach women who work to change the lives of their families, coworkers and all residents of Long Beach. The event was held in front of the boycotted Hilton hotel at the same time the Long Beach Press Telegram was holding its “Amazing Women of Long Beach Gala.”

22. These initial years of the Coalition’s work were tricky. While allies in Los Angeles supported the Coalition in many ways, those ties needed to be publicly minimized. Many Long Beach residents, even real and potential supporters, held a strong distrust of Los Angeles – after all, Los Angeles had tried to annex Long Beach up to the 1920s.

23. PB is a decision-making process, through which citizens deliberate, negotiate, and vote on how to distribute public resources (Wampler, 2007, p. 21).

24. The worker retention bill requires new subcontractors at the airport and convention center to retain the workers for 3 months when a new contract is negotiated; the living wage policy mirrored Measure N.

25. While Harvey (2012) argues for the re-claiming of the city, the argument here is that reclaiming suggests reacquiring something that was lost; Long Beach residents could not reclaim what they never had.

26. The challenges created for political coalition building by economic segregation comes from Dreier, Mollenkoph & Swanstrom.