“This is our ’hood. If you move us out of here, we’re lost.”
He's lived in his Inglewood apartment for 23 years. Then his rent doubled. Now, at 69, Major Stewart is moving into his family's home.
Donald Martin, 67, lost the roof over his head after a new landlord evicted him with just 60 days’ notice from the building he had lived in for almost a decade. “Inglewood is the ‘City of Champions’ and like all good champions, Inglewood is rising again,” said Daniel Tabor, a former mayor and councilman. “But it has been a missed opportunity for economic participation by the residents and local businesses.”Cars pass a city sign on La Brea Avenue. Inglewood has seen a surge in economic development.
“We all know when the Girl Scouts come, it’s all over,” Mayor James T. Butts Jr. joked to a group of homeowners last year. In his view, the Scouts’ arrival pins a badge of safety on his city, in turn luring still more investment.$2-billion, 8.5-mile Crenshaw light rail lineBut activists are pressing City Hall, demanding officials do more to protect residents against ballooning rents. In March, the city adopted a temporary cap on increases and evictions.
“We wanted to be a model for investment without displacement,” Scorza said. “We didn’t want that capital to come in and flood out the folk who live here.” At the March 5 City Council meeting, Butts proposed — and the council unanimously voted to adopt — a 45-day moratorium during which rent increases would be capped at 5% annually and evictions would be halted as the city tried to find a permanent solution to the rent problem. There’s an option to extend the measure to a full year.
Years before the stadium plan came into being, the same developer had proposed building a retail and residential community with 3,000 housing units — 450 of which would be affordable — at the racetrack site. The project would have included upscale, market-rate housing to attract high-income earners and raise the city’s tax base.
Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the state Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, said many communities had failed to meet their targets.With a median household income of $46,000, roughly $15,000 below the county’s median, Inglewood has joined a growing list of urban areas nationwide, from Baltimore to Oakland, where African Americans have historically clustered — for comfort or because of race-based redlining policies — but now feel they are being pushed out.
“California was never a slave state,” he said, “so all of those things made it attractive for blacks coming from places where racial segregation and oppression was in your face every day.” The Lakers and Kings moved to downtown L.A. in 1999. Efforts to revitalize Inglewood’s Market Street failed. The state took over the city’s troubled schools in 2012. Hollywood Park held its final race the following year.Rams quarterback Jared Goff tosses a football to workers while touring the under-construction Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park in June 2018Then with the NFL stadium plans came a surprising revival.
When he moved to Inglewood in 2011, he said, parts of the city resembled a rap video — people with intimidating stares clustered on street corners. When he used to tell people where he lived, they replied, “You can always move. Inglewood is a good start.”Butts has admitted to underestimating the rent-increase problem, once thinking it could be solved on a case-by-case basis.
He met days later with Adrian Malin, the head of Regents 99 LLC, and crafted an agreement that gave renters in the two apartment buildings several choices, including gradual increases or a $10,000 lump sum to move out by April. “Everybody can agree that these 120% rent increases are astronomical and ridiculous,” said Scorza, of Uplift Inglewood. “I think we can start there.”Golden Bee Properties took over his 10-unit building last year. The new landlord never issued a notice about raising the rent. Instead, Martin was evicted with 60 days’ notice.
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