Cultivating Just Planning and Legal Institutions: A Critical Assessment of the South Central Farm Struggle in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT:

The South Central Farm (SCF) in Los Angeles was a 14-acre urban farm in one of the highest concentrations of impoverished residents in the county. It was destroyed in July 2006. This article analyzes its epic as a landscape of resistance to discriminatory legal and planning practices. It then presents its creation and maintenance as an issue of environmental justice, and argues that there was a substantive rationale on the basis of environmental justice and planning ethics that should have provided sufficient grounds for the city to prevent its dismantling. Based on qualitative case study methodology, the study contributes to the formulation of creation and preservation rationales for community gardens and other “commons” threatened by eventual dismantlement in capitalist societies.

Notes

1 Martin’s“The Journey” is a story about the U.S. settlement of Arizona and the struggle of the Hispanic culture that it aimed to erase. It ends with the narrator discovering a flower springing through a crack in the asphalt covering her aunt’s destroyed house (cited in Brady, 2002).

2 This area was previously known as South Central LA. Its name was changed in April 2003 to South LA by a unanimous vote of the LA City Council in a marketing attempt to dispel the negative connotations of crime, drugs, and gangs associated with it. Councilwoman Jan Perry wrote the motion to change the name. Keeping “South Central” in both the names of their farm and organization (South Central Farm and South Central Farmers) is in this context an act of resistance by the farmers.

3 As determined by the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) (Darren Hoffman, personal communication, September 3, 2006). TEFAP is a federal program that works in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It helps supplement the diets of low-income needy persons, including elderly people, by providing them with emergency food and nutrition assistance.

4 Figure 2 demonstrates that change in the area since 1980 has been significant, with more than half of the tracts seeing a 200–399% change in Latina/o population, with five tracts experiencing greater than 400% growth. For analysis of trends over time within specific tracts, eight tracts in 1990 that were split into multiple tracts in 2000 were converted back to their 1990 boundaries. The time frame and boundaries for the study were chosen with the intention of tracking demographic change in the area around the site since its initial taking through eminent domain. The boundaries chosen approximate the “area of concentration” identified by the CCSCLA (Santa Monica Freeway to the North, the Harbor Freeway to the West, Slauson Avenue to the South and Alameda to the East), and encompass census tracts within 2 miles of the site. This allowed us to examine how the racial and ethnic make-up of the organization’s constituents, the “neighborhood” around SCF, has changed since its inception.

5 The social upheaval of 1992 Los Angeles is more commonly referred to as the 1992 riots in popular media, given the fact that it involved the damaging of property and other acts of violence. However, the term rebellion has been preferred by many analysts and community members who considered that a majority of participants in the street activities were rebelling against systemic conditions of racism, poverty, and police brutality prevalent in poor and minority neighborhoods of Los Angeles that had received their ultimate, blatant expression in the acquittal of four police officers accused of brutalizing Rodney King, an African American (see Costa Vargas, 2004).

6 As an example, the authors of this article led a day-long community service workshop to freshman college students in August 19, 2006, at the SCF site, in collaboration with the South Central Farmers.

7 In fact, the company Forever 21 has advanced a project for a trucking and distribution center on the site. There are many warehouses in the area, some vacant and underutilized. Meanwhile, there is an appreciable deficit of parks and recreational services (Sister et al., 2007).

8 There is video-taped evidence of Perry checking her e-mail and performing other distracting activities while the farmers and supporters spoke at City Council meetings.

9 In South LA, the black population was 55.0% in 1990 and 39.8% in 2000. In comparison, LA City was 14.0% blacks in 1990 and 11.2% in 2000. In South LA, the Latino population was 45.5% in 1990 and 58.0% in 2000. In comparison, LA City was 39.9% Latino in 1990 and 46.5% in 2000. There was, then, a 24.5% decline in black population from 1990 in South LA, relative to 14.9% decline in Los Angeles City, and 6.2% decline relative to Los Angeles County (Myers, 2002).