First time on the subway in Los Angeles

The first time I took the subway in LA was with greenRELAY’s youth training program this summer. After living in New York City for two years my expectations where high, and to my surprise, the LA subway blew me out of the water. I was genuinely impressed. It was clean and spacious with fabulous art pieces; the trains came on time (and had scheduled times in the first place!); each station has an escalator, and it was cheap! The fare in NY is twice as expensive, the service is awful (I’m not sure that a schedule exists), the stations reek of urine and body odor, are crowded, dingy, dark and filthy. Few stations have an escalator or elevator to make traveling easier or transit more accessible for the handicapped. A friend and I even have a ‘How many rats’ game to pass the time while waiting for the trains. Despite that, nobody that I know, except for people who can afford cabs or monthly parking, hesitates to take the subway. Its a staple, and even though its pretty gross, it works.

I take the subway everywhere in NY. I would never drive there; it would be suicide. However, when I’m in LA my mindset totally flips. I never take public transportation, which is a major glitch in my relatively environmentally friendly lifestyle. So I’m making my transition to mass transit easier by going on random adventures with friends on the LA Subway. It has forced us to leave our Westside routine and explore many underrated parts of LA. My best friend and I decided to take the Purple line to the Red line to Hollywood last week. Because it would have taken too long to take a bus to the purple line on Wilshire, we drove 20 min to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, greenRELAY’s home base, and parked, walked 10 minutes to the subway stop at Wilshire and Normandie and transferred to the red line. It took us about an hour total, but would have been much quicker if the different systems were more efficiently connected.

The whole time I was thinking about how perfect it would be if LA had decided to spend more money on subways than on freeways. This already decent system would be so much more expansive and maybe actually reach its potential. As of now it isn’t that useful because it is only accessible from so few places in LA. I personally would like to see more subways put in. Hopefully this would be done equitably, which, apparently, is asking a lot of the MTA or the DOT. Increased mobility would do wonders for minorities and people dependent on public transit. More subways would make Jobs more accessible, could potentially relieve some of the effects of ghettoization, such as highly concentrated poverty and environmental abuse, and will reduce car ridership. I realize that buses are cheaper to install, operate and maintain, but I admit that I am partial to subways because they’re faster, they are more predictable in terms of scheduling because they don’t have to compete with cars for road space or stop at street lights, and admission is prepaid. A better hybrid system that increases completely grade-separated rail, improves bus efficiency with innovations like Bus Only Lanes, decreases freeway construction and expands bike paths would be an important first step in minimizing environmental injustices in LA because it would reduce the vulnerability of minorities.

As we walked to the Walk of Fame, we overheard someone say, in reference to Hollywood Blvd, ‘this is like the Manhattan of LA’. While I could list a host of reasons why he was very wrong, I think his point was that public transportation was easily accessible and there was a high density of walkers, both of which are common in NY and foreign to a lot of Angelinos. I would definitely like to see LA become more pedestrian and cyclist friendly, particularly in minority communities because it would combat the higher levels of diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. Better transit would reduce LA’s crippling  dependency on cars, and make it a healthier, cleaner and safer place to live.

Cop cars

I waited for my friend at the bus stop on Crenshaw at Stocker (Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall) for about 45 minutes on Sunday. During my wait, I witnessed a living validation of the many theories we have discussed at greenRELAY this summer. Massey and Denton’s discussion of an oppositional Culture of Segregation and the cycle of poverty supported by residential segregation could not have stood out more. People at the bus stop spoke surprisingly loudly; young-looking mothers stood with strollers while saggy-jeaned men sat on the benches,  getting up occasionally to throw their trash away in the bushes behind the benches. These behaviors and styles, except for throwing trash in the bushes, are not inherently bad, but they clearly differ from the normative behaviors of the dominant groups in the US, namely wealthy white people. Massey and Denton would likely refer to loud speech in public, teen mothers, and baggy jeans as ‘oppositional’ because they don’t mesh with the behaviors of socioeconomic and political power, such as traditional families.

While I waited, I counted at least five cop cars that stayed within view for the entire time: one parked itself next to the curb with its lights flashing; another pulled over a car for a reason I could not discern; two others seemed to be circling the mall, and one pulled into the lot in which I parked. I found myself terrified that he would give me a ticket for nothing just because he could. I created stories and explanations in my head in preparation for the potential event, praying that he had no legitimate reason to come over to my car. Fortunately he left without exiting his car, but his very presence instilled fear in me, and I suddenly stopped judging people for making an effort to put trash in bushes. The constant surveillance overwhelmed me. I could leave. I have always been able to escape the gaze, but for people who endure that belittlement everyday, an oppositional culture demonstrates a righteous indignation, a way of asserting dignity in a city that has made legitimate means difficult to come by.

As I sat there, I thought ‘no wonder so many people have no interest in restoring the environment when the environment in which they have to live cannot possibly foster affection for the earth or the societies that attempt to organize its inhabitants’. The cops made me so frustrated that I found it easiest to give up hope, leave, and blame ‘the man’, ‘the system’. I think this is the mindset to which a lot of academics refer when they speak of cultures of poverty and segregation, ones in which people do the best they can with what they have and only fight it in ways that have few positive impacts. Massey and Denton argue that because of segregation, these oppositional values are passed between generations and their high concentration makes them the norm, preventing large-scale socioeconomic success. But we have seen throughout history that despite high concentrations of poverty and the prevalence of a culture that is not necessarily in sync with the powerful one, minorities have always fought for better and more just conditions. The necessary changes do come through structural revisions, but those almost always start with grassroots movements, like that of Environmental Justice. No doubt, minorities as a whole are still overwhelmingly disadvantaged, and segregation contributes greatly to it, but we have had our Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s, our W.E.B Dubois’, our Rosa Parks’, our Martin Luther King’s, Cesar Chavez’s and Jesse Jackson’s, and we will continue to have countless organizations who may not be as famous, but who work tirelessly to help people care about and fight for their environmental rights despite underprivileged situations.

Yesterday, my best friend came back to LA for a week after moving up to Norcal. I have used her visit as an excuse to explore LA in ways that I haven’t before because she, unlike most of my friends, is willing to cross LA’s segregative boundaries, to use public transportation, and to walk places! After discussing American Apartheid and my tendency to leave my neighborhood to get groceries, we decided to walk to the Leimert Park Village Community Farmer’s Market. The Market is set up in the parking lot of a community theatre and hosts vendors from organic and local farms, professional beekeepers who make their own honey, artisans who craft healthful alternatives to conventional beauty products and many more.

One informative sign posted at the market explained how eating more fruits and vegetables combats diabetes and high blood pressure, both of which are most prevalent amongst Blacks. In addition to the higher concentration of toxic industries in minority neighborhoods, another aspect of environmental injustice that negatively impacts minority health is the notable absence of affordable fresh produce and organic goods in our neighborhoods. At greenRELAY, we’ve discussed the harm caused by segregation, and one of those detriments is the relatively low concentration of amenities and, consequently, jobs. I couldn’t help but notice that attendance at this farmer’s market, compared to the one’s I have attended in Culver City, Westwood and Santa Monica, was low. However, the four year old market has stayed in business, which means that people are supporting it. If it becomes more popular, this sustainable market could serve as an important catalyst to the social greening of the Crenshaw area, which is notorious for its troubles. Just by walking to the market, my friend and I were drawn to other community stores and events, such as the reading hour with Griots at Eso Won Books, the Leimert Park Gallery, and AfroCuban drumming in the nearby park. More walking, more fresh produce, more support for locally and organically grown foods and for community artists and artisans will improve the health of urban Blacks, develop a stronger sense of community and social responsibility, and potentially increase awareness of a more sustainable lifestyle, which is understandably not the priority of many residents who find positive opportunities scarce.

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Pointe Dume Marine Sciene Elementary School in Malibu recently became “the first public elementary school in Southern California to join the Grid,” according to this Examiner.com article. Their $100,000 purchase will lower school utility bills, earn them potential incentive payments and rebates, and allow them the satisfaction that their actions are reducing fossil fuel dependency. Point Dume reaps the benefits of the sun in many ways, but at some schools in LA, the only thing the golden rays help is weed growth.

La Tijera Elementary School in Inglewood  is a “future Measure K project under construction” according to the sign attached to the temporary fencing surrounding the school. Measure K was a bond measure for school improvements, but it seems to have failed at La Tijera. The school has been closed down for years with no sign of renovation. Chain linked fences hold up a ‘student entrance’ sign; weeds veil the writing on reserved parking spots; fireworks adorn the empty lot steps away from a ‘no fireworks’ sign; beer bottles, smashed and strewn across the property, accompany graffiti tags and old cement finger-inscriptions that read “6th grade is the bomb!” The unfortunate irony did not escape me. I received many inquisitive stares from drivers who must have wondered why I stood alone on a apparently abandoned property.

On my way home from the school, I saw this sign which recognizes that an essential part of community pride is a clean, beautiful environment in which to live :

The well-kept neighborhood in which the school resides has tree lined streets  and perfectly manicured front yards. It borders Ladera Heights and Inglewood, and is a predominantly middle-class, Black area. Walking distance from many amenities, including grocery stores, clothing stores and restaurants, it now lacks an easily accessible community school, which is severely disadvantageous because of the essential role that schooling plays in the future socioeconomic success of children.

The discrepancy between the two schools mentioned in this article is appalling. Residential segregation clearly contributes to the issue: one school, in a rich white neighborhood, has no problem raising $100,000, mostly from its PTA, to improve its facilities and simultaneously expose its students to valuable environmental knowledge; the other, in a middle-class Black neighborhood, is shut down with no clear future, and the parents have no choice. Considering the historic position of each group, little room for interpretation exists.

Because schools and neighborhoods are vital centers of social reproduction, they can contribute to how students feel about changing their environment. Aside from the sad fact that La Tijera School has become a hangout place for intoxicated fireworks sessions and other petty crime, it is unjust that its neighborhood children are denied access to a school of their own that teaches them to care about their surroundings and that also has the resources to walk the walk. Children in wealthier communities do not need to depend entirely on district funds and Measure K’s  to improve environmental education. That the quality and frequency of exposure to environmental action and education can be severely limited because of one’s neighborhood or income level puts a lot of LA residents, particularly poorer Blacks and Hispanics who are ghettoized, at a disadvantage in a world that is finally beginning to realize and change the ecological (and social!) damage it has caused.

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Lately I have been reading a book by John Hannigan called Fantasy City, subtitled pleasure and profit in the postmodern metropolis.  The subtitle largely explains the content of the book as it is about entertainment and the business surrounding it in cities.

The first chapter of the story is titled “At Prices all can Afford”.  The topic of this story is the so called “golden age” of entertainment which supposedly took place 1895-1930.   Prior to this time the entertainment was segregated by class.  The upper class went to social clubs and cultural institutions like art museums and opera houses. The working class’s entertainment revolved around the saloon and cheap variety theater.  These included restaurants, lecture halls, fraternal lodges, beer halls, billiard parlors, bowling alleys, picnic groves and pleasure gardens. The middle class’s entertainment was generally very private but sometimes included trips to libraries, concerts and other church sponsored activities.  There was almost no crossing of class barriers when it came to entertainment.  The one exception may have been sporting events.  Although some working class people could attend sporting events baseball clubs scheduled afternoon games, kept tickets prices high and the number of seats low so as to limit the number of working class people that could attend.

Also there were people being called “merchants of leisure” that were entrepreneurs.  They had to think of, and create a new public culture that was affordable, non-threatening, and attractive.  Later the working class had both a little money and time to spare on entertainment but these entrepreneurs did not trust them as a reliable or very profitable market.  The middle class had its fears of the working class, believing them to be a rowdy and drunken crowd.  The entrepreneurs had quite a job set out for them.  They had to appeal to both parties, the working and middle classes.  They needed to convince the working class that they were getting something magical and great while getting the middle class to believe that these places were clean and safe.

Another misconception about this time period was the idea of “democracy’s theater”.  This was the idea that entertainment was not segregated.  This may have been true for a short time but when they were no longer needed they were not included.  They tried to include all by creating theaters with no reserved sections, cheap ticket prices, and many seats.  People have studied before where movie theaters were built and they were never built in working class neighborhoods.  They were built in traditional entertainment districts, high density ethnic areas, such as Little Italy and Jewish Harlem, and sometimes in upper and middle class areas.

In my freshman year of college, I wrote a term paper about integrative school busing in Los Angeles and its relationship to urban sprawl and residential segregation. Part of it discussed two decisive Supreme Court cases, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Miliken v Bradley, both of which argued that American neighborhoods were inherently segregated; the former used that argument to force integration by bus in public schools  and the latter to end it. Either way, our most powerful judicial body has declared more than once that residential segregation is a natural aspect of American society, and that all of its symptoms, such as segregated public schools, have resulted from this apparently immutable social fact.  I argued that minority schools, and neighborhoods in general, are disproportionately burdened by this segregation because it denies them easy access to invaluable sociocultural capital, to connections to the more affluent world, and to the values, behavior and ideologies of power, an understanding of which is required to transcend the limits of structural, racial and socioeconomic marginalization. I now realize that the maintenance of segregated neighborhoods has made environmental, industrial and transportation injustice almost too easy to achieve and easier to ignore.

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, clarifies how segregation, federally financed or not, is an institution that has supported “other racially discriminatory processes and binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial subordination” (8). Contrary to our Supreme Court’s rationale, Massey and Denton point out that “America chose to strengthen the walls of the ghetto,” and that, for a pair of decades after emancipation, black segregation was minimal (19). With the new century came a very deliberate new urban order that physically separates the dominant groups from the monorities, magnifying and naturalizing the harmful effects of other types of discrimination. An “oppositional” “Culture of Segregation” has consequently developed in urban ghettos, one that often clashes with the values of power, making integration extremely difficult (8). American neighborhoods are not intrinsically segregated, and their separation has not only prevented any significant number of minorities from achieving sustained upward social mobility, it has created a path of least resistance down which decision-makers can march to the beat of an exploitative drum, concentrating environmental hazards in ghettos.

Because minorities remain economically disempowered and politically underrepresented, their neighborhoods are targets for the placement of polluting industries. Los Angeles is no exception; it is divided first by race and then by socioeconomic class. With minorities ghettoized, dirty industry thrives conveniently out of sight and out of the minds of the people who have the politico-economic power to change and prevent environmentally unjust practices. Well shielded from the brunt of the problem by physical and imaginary color lines, the city’s elite have allowed and encouraged freeways over clean and efficient public transit, corporate development over community gardens, police over education, over the environment, over everything:

2008-09 LA City Budget Summary, p.8

Los Angeles Apartheid structures the city so as to force the heaviest social and environmental burdens onto minorities by maintaining enclaves of poverty and unemployment, violence and incarceration, instability and hopelessness. The environment includes more than issues of air quality and global warming: quality education, clean streets, green space, a sense of freedom, mutual respect, reasonable control, and honest representation contribute to the community health and safety that encourages residents to want to care about their environment, a feeling that is notably absent from LA’s poor black and hispanic ghettos.