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Lori Gay, President and Chief Executive Officer
Michael Chamness, Grants Manager
Alex Viotzky, Policy and Development Analyst
Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County
Challenge: Southern California is divided economically. Some areas boom with investment while others feature blight, vacant lots and limited access to healthcare, fresh food and transit links to job centers. It is an urgent priority to bring these needed amenities to underserved communities.
After a grocery store closed 25 years ago, the property sat vacant and undeveloped, an eyesore. The Compton community also no longer had access to fresh, healthy food as there were few shopping options left. The site had the potential to be a transformative one, turning the intersection of Rosecrans Avenue and Dwight Avenue into a vibrant corner. The empty lot was located across the street from a tranquil park, adjacent to the Compton Creek and a few hundred feet away from a fire station, a neighborhood church and a senior center. Instead, the lot was a blighting influence, cutting off Gonzales Park from busy Rosecrans Avenue and effectively holding back the neighborhood from becoming the lively hotspot that it could and should have been.
Place matters. It matters to families, to children, to people looking for jobs and to people seeking to better themselves. Research tells us that a region’s larger economy matters to individual outcomes, as do unemployment rates, school accessibility, health systems and transportation networks.
But what’s on your block matters just as much. Children struggle in schoos if they have to walk by abandoned properties riddled with crime just to get to the bus stop. Teenagers will have a harder time finding work if there aren’t any good, well-paying jobs in the neighborhood. Kids, adults and elderly people have more health problems and worse outcomes when they deal with the daily stress of living on a crumbling street that lacks amenities like fresh food, adequate transit and accessible green space.
When Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County (NHS) took a look at the corner, we saw an underused asset dragging down the surrounding area. We saw a partial explanation for why median income had stagnated in that census tract, declining from $52,800 in 2000 to $47,975 in 2014. We saw an explanation for why the child poverty rate in that tract had risen from 19 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2000 to 33 percent in 2014, and why unemployment in that tract had risen from five percent in 2000 to over 10 percent in 2014. We saw an explanation for why the homeownership rate in the surrounding area had fallen 20 percentage points over the last three decades.
At NHS, we have seen in Compton, in Los Angeles and in small cities throughout Southern California how booming regional economies can still leave many neighborhoods behind. Too many places that should have been diverse, walkable, sustainable neighborhoods were instead abandoned, blighted and depressed. But we also saw promise and hope in the Rosecrans property. The convergence of a park, a local fire station, a church, the Compton Creek and a senior center made the site a great location for placemaking. From this, the Center for Sustainable Communities was born.
What makes a great community is more than just housing. It’s more than just good transportation and walkable neighborhoods. It’s more than access to jobs. It’s more than health. What makes a community great is all of those pieces working together. So we at NHS didn’t seek to simply put up affordable housing at the corner. We sought to build an institution that would address the whole range of Compton’s needs.
The center will offer the community an array of services. The building will include a community health clinic, a financial opportunity center to offer counseling and affordable loans, a small business development center and incubator, a job training organization offering workforce solutions and a healthy living cafe. Youth entrepreneurship and conservation programs will be offered through partner organizations, along with a 4,000 square foot community garden and a local farmers market that will provide the community with opportunities to grow and sell fresh vegetables and fruits. NHS plans to partner with the City of Compton to provide a Public Safety Center that will help reduce crime.
Taken together, these services will improve options for the residents of Compton. Yet in a housing market like Los Angeles, with sky-high land values and rents and prices that the vast majority of residents cannot afford, new amenities and placemaking create a paradox. Will improving services exacerbate high housing costs and create gentrification and displacement of the very residents that those amenities are targeted to serve?
To address this, NHS plans to build an affordable development adjacent to the center, along with one less than a mile away on Compton Blvd, while also developing affordable townhomes just south of that. All the while, NHS continues to create and preserve affordable homeownership opportunities through financial education and lending services.
