Another banger from our correspondent Billie Lyle out gentrifying Los Angeles!
Three towers rose out of the Los Angeles skyline, enclosing Crypto Arena. The sun used to gloriously glare off the sheen of the thousands of windows into your eyes when you drove past them on the ten heading south. You could tell by a glance they were the three newest buildings on the skyline, but up until recently, they were empty and decrepit inside. Gutted, bleeding, and abandoned. They sat dull and unfinished. But Los Angeles is a city of change. From the lobby windows to the unfinished peak, street art now covers every floor. And it happened practically overnight.
While the Graffiti went up in late January of 2024 1, the tagged trio of towers stays tattooed today. And why wouldn’t they be? Oceanwide left these three skyscrapers to rot where they stood when the money drained up and they fled back east, bankrupt. The Plaza, as they named the trio, no longer fulfilled any dream of being luxury apartments and condos. 2 Zoned off by the city, they just stood there as empty canvas space. And like most empty urban spaces, someone has found a use for it. Despite heavy policing and barricading by the LAPD, Angelinos continued beautifying their city by transforming these scaffolded monsters into a street art spectacle. And it’s a refreshing site to see, especially when so much of the space here is underutilized.
California has the second most vacant homes in the United States. Around 1.2 million domiciles sit open, unused, and abandoned. 3 These include whole luxury apartment buildings and McMansions. If the Oceanwide Plaza had not been left to deteriorate there is a good chance that many of its units would sit empty and unused.
As everyone is familiar with, rent is just too fucking high. The first building I rented in LA was a Mid-City 3-bedroom family apartment for $3600 a month. While expensive it was a manageable price tag for SoCal, even as four ex-students fresh out of academia. With the barely sensible cost came two roach infestations, black mold, and backed-up pipes. Conditions seemed much more favorable at the brand-new luxury apartment building across the street, but rent there cost a disgusting $3,300 for a one-bedroom. That high cost is way past the limit for most Americans, and it showed. I saw maybe five people walk in and out of the building during the 14 months I lived there. The remote access roll gate and heavy-duty security cameras protected a nearly empty parking structure. In the city with the second most houseless in the nation, whole apartment buildings sit empty waiting for the bite of those wealthy enough to rent up a spot. Real estate agencies are hell-bent on keeping conditions this way.
On the California Ballot in November was Proposition 33, which would have repealed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995. This act is most known for prohibiting rent control and allowing uncapped rent increases on buildings built after 19954. In response, the California Apartment Association started lobbying against it heavily. No on 33 ads drowned Los Angeles media in the weeks leading up to the election. These ads stated that the proposition would make the housing crisis worse, repeal rent control acts, drive up rental prices, and slow construction on new properties. 5 If these ads seem counterintuitive to what the proposition supposes, it is simply because they are.
The CAA blatantly fucking misled the voting populace to protect their interests. In their quotes
“The California Apartment Association is the nation’s largest statewide trade group representing owners, investors, developers, managers and suppliers of rental homes and apartment communities.”6
Again, as throughout American history, those who own* and purchase land are doing everything in their power to drive people out of a good standard of living to line their pockets. And they succeeded. The proposition failed, and hard. It’s so hard to be an American on a lower income and not feel like people with steady cash flow are out to get you. It’s not just the land development corporations.
People with good intentions for their homes are trying to block the building of new dwellings that don’t fit the single-family category. A new building that is going to go up in my neighborhood, The Cienega Project, is projected to have at least 29 units dedicated to Ultra low-income residents. 7 Every morning I walk past signs posted proudly on the well-maintained lawns of homeowners. In protest, they ask to stop the project to protect the value of their homes and keep traffic flowing. Homeowners are the ones who own the majority of the land here. Los Angeles is a giant sprawling web of ranch houses blended in with the high rises. 75% of the residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. 8 Being here a year, I have not set foot in one of these houses that spread across the city despite them covering some portion of every block outside of DTLA. People need this space houses take up in Los Angeles.
The population continues to grow here. There is more than enough space for everyone to live comfortably. But the space is consistently being used to benefit the few despite the needs of the many. People are getting spaced out by houses, priced out of apartments, denied access to the new buildings that come, and lied to as a way to prevent change from happening. This isn’t a Los Angeles problem. The Mile High City has been going through these problems as well for as long as I can remember, along with the rest of the Urban USA.
Of course people are trying to do something about it, but the measures they take will continue to fail when money is the priority, as the measure to repeal Costa-Hawkins has now failed three times. So people take other measures. They occupy the spaces that they were denied and put their nametag on it for the whole city to see that they aren’t going to put up with that shit. They raze the land of unfairness until all that stands is art, untouched. When Watts burned in 1965 in protest against oppressive housing laws towards Black Californians, the Watts Towers still stood in the aftermath. Will these three towers survive as well when the wealth comes crashing down? Who knows. But for now, if the sight of the graffiti bothers you, don’t be a cop. Take a moment to appreciate it. Really appreciate the ingenuity, the scale, and the context that it took for the walls of writing to come to be. If not that, at least the sun isn’t glaring in your eyes anymore as you drive past downtown on I-10.
1 Summer Lin and Robert Gauthier, “Taggers Openly Add Graffiti to L.A. Skyscraper; 27 Floors Tagged Los Angeles Times,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2024, https://latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-01/taggers-graffiti-more-than-25-stories-of-dtla-skyscraper-acr oss-from-the-grammys-red-carpet.
2 Lin and Gauthier, “Taggers Openly Add Graffiti to L.A. Skyscraper; 27 Floors Tagged – Los Angeles Times.”
3 Fox. “California Has the Second-highest Number of Empty Homes Out of All 50 States.” FOX 11 Los Angeles, March 31, 2022. https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate.
4 “Proposition 33 | Official Voter Information Guide | California Secretary of State,” n.d., https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/33/index.htm.
5 “Vote NO on Prop 33,” No On Prop 33, October 23, 2024, https://noonprop33.com/.
6 California Apartment Association, “About CAA – the California Apartment Association,” November 15, 2022, https://caanet.org/about/.
* The Land Los Angeles resides on was stolen from the Tongva peoples by the Spanish and taken through conquest and war by the United States from Mexico
7 “3401 South La Cienega Boulevard Mixed-Use Project,” Los Angeles City Planning, January 20, 2022, accessed December 3, 2024, https://planning.lacity.gov/development-services/environmental-review/scea/3401-south-la-cienega-boule vard-mixed-use-project-0.
8 Nathaniel Meyersohn, “The Invisible Laws That Led to America’s Housing Crisis,” CNN, August 5, 2023, accessed December 3, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/05/business/single-family-zoning-laws/index.html.
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