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More than gentrification: geographiesof capitalist displacement in LosAngeles 1994–1999J. Revel Simsa

a Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University ofWisconsin-Madison, 106 Music Hall, 925 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI53706, USAPublished online: 02 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: J. Revel Sims (2015): More than gentrification: geographies of capitalistdisplacement in Los Angeles 1994–1999, Urban Geography, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2015.1046698

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More than gentrification: geographies of capitalist displacement in LosAngeles 1994–1999

J. Revel Sims*

Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 106 Music Hall,925 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706, USA

(Received 23 April 2014; accepted 24 April 2015)

Little is understood about displacement in urban contexts. While some of the difficul-ties are methodological, the more serious problem is conceptual. Outside of the rentgap hypothesis or the philosophy of property rights, there has been little theoreticalinquiry into the causal dynamics of displacement. In this article, I present a study ofevictions in Los Angeles that addresses these conceptual and empirical shortcomings.A spatial analysis of more than 70,000 georeferenced evictions between 1994 and1999 documents the existence of four distinct geographies of displacement, eachproduced by separate types of causal circumstances. Gentrification explains only oneof the four displacement geographies, while the other three are nongentrifying or pre-gentrifying contexts and more appropriately described through growth machinemodels, global city theory, and financial restructuring. The extent of displacement inpre- and nongentrifying areas reinforces Mark Davidson’s emphasis on Lefebvre’sproduction of space as a crucial framework for understanding displacement processes.

Keywords: displacement; gentrification; eviction

The problem of displacement

The forced displacement of people is commonly understood as the result of extremedisturbances such as natural disasters or armed conflicts. Under these circumstances thesource of displacement is easily identifiable and the displaced quality of forcibly removedpeople is recognized not only in nomenclature—e.g., refuges or internally displacedpersons (IDPs)—but also through formal attempts at measurement, the application ofnational and international laws concerning rights and treatment, and the mobilization ofresources to ameliorate the experience and source of crisis-generated displacement. Withinthe less tumultuous context of everyday urban life however, the evaluation of displace-ment is more uncertain and mediation efforts are significantly less developed.

Research on everyday forms of displacement is problematic for a number of reasons.Empirically, everyday displacement covers a broad array of circumstances and conditionsthat are difficult to measure. Some forms of displacement include various types ofharassment and the extra-legal actions taken by property owners against tenants that arenecessarily underrepresented in analyses. Other forms of everyday displacement aredifficult to track because the instruments needed to identify and quantify them are eitherprohibitively expensive or essentially inadequate given that the surveys commonly usedare not designed to capture the specificity of displacement (Newman & Wyly, 2006).Researchers concerned with displacement have therefore stressed the refrain that

*Email: revel.sims@gmail.com

Urban Geography, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1046698

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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measuring displacement is not unlike trying to measure the invisible because the peoplethey are interested in learning about are, in a sense, no longer in the places researchers goto find them (Atkinson, 2000).

Despite these challenges, researchers have produced a number of important andinformative works on urban displacement that have broadened our understanding of thephenomenon. Many of the earliest pieces emerged out of a concern over the negativeconsequences of urban renewal following the 1949 and 1954 Housing Acts. In addition toaccounting for the magnitude of displacement, this body of work tended to raise theimportant psychological implications of displacement for individuals and communities.Foundational works such as Herbert Gans’ “The Human Implications of CurrentRedevelopment and Relocation Planning” (1959); Marc Fried’s “Grieving for a LostHome” (1966); and Peter Marris’ Loss and Change (1974) helped to establish the intimatelink between people and places. This sociopsychological conception of displacement wassuccinctly summarized by Fried when he observed, “relocation undermines the estab-lished interpersonal relationships and group ties of the people involved and, in effect,destroys the group identity” (1966, p. 366). Urban displacement within this frameworkwas conceptualized as a traumatic and disorientating experience that disrupted socio-psychological relationships such as home and place that geographers have identified as“basic-level geographic categories” (Lloyd, Patton, & Cammack, 1996).

The concept of displacement put forth by researchers of urban renewal shares much incommon with the literature on crisis-generated displacement. This is in no small part dueto several factors, including the fact that the source of displacement was clearly identifi-able; it was similarly devastating in that specific spaces, in this case neighborhoods, wereoften razed in the process; and those displaced were generally poor or racialized popula-tions who were either entirely outside or uncomfortably within the changing boundaries ofwhiteness. Faced with mounting criticism from both the political Right and Left (see forexample Anderson, 1964; Jacobs, 1961), urban renewal eventually lost favor withplanners and policymakers. Yet as it waned, both the concept and measurement ofeveryday displacement became increasingly difficult. Much of this difficulty was due tothe fact that unlike the case of urban renewal, everyday displacement had become closelyassociated with the emerging process of gentrification whose causal forces and patternswere more challenging to identify. It is for this reason that many of the early references togentrification not only treated the phenomenon as a historical anomaly that wouldeventually subside against a more dominant pattern of urban expansion and filtering,but they also tended to overemphasize the origin and peculiarity of gentrifiers vis-à-vis thedisplaced (Laska & Spain, 1980; Zukin, 1982).

The focus on gentrifiers and confusion about the forces behind the gentrificationprocess initiated a sharp debate within the literature that pushed the concept of displace-ment into two directions. On one hand, some authors sought to deepen the understandingof gentrification by placing it within larger theoretical frameworks about urbanization.Neil Smith countered the preoccupation with gentrifiers by furthering the notion thatgentrification should be understood as a “movement of capital, not people” (1979a,1979b, 1982). By positioning gentrification within a Marxist analysis of ground rentsthat were understood to be structured by the process of uneven development in the urbanlandscape, Smith argued that gentrification-induced displacement occurred through theformation of rent gaps that raised the potential return for landowners and developers. Thiscontribution helped to show how displacement could be produced by capitalist urbaniza-tion and in so doing—albeit, somewhat incidentally—highlighted the role of new actors inthe process—e.g., urban policy regimes, financial institutions, and law enforcement—that

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had been underappreciated in previous works that conceptualized displacement as aconflict primarily between landlords and tenants (Grier & Grier, 1978). Other authorsconcerned with the theorizing gentrification questioned the role of capitalist ground rentsand responded by arguing that gentrification was the result of changing consumptionpreferences due to an emerging “post-industrial” society (Hamnett, 1984, 1991; Ley,1986). In their focus on the changing dispositions of new social demographics, theseauthors tended to under-theorize displacement, essentially reducing it to an inevitablebyproduct of rational decisions in land and housing markets. In both theoretical campshowever, displacement was essentially relegated to an outcome of gentrification and littletheoretical space was left for nongentrification forms of displacement.

Paralleling the theoretical effort, a number of important attempts at measuringdisplacement emerged in the literature. Many of the early attempts at quantifyingdisplacement were conducted by municipalities that became interested in mitigatingdisplacement within rapidly changing neighborhoods due to significant pressure fromcommunity-based organizations. The combined efforts from both inside and outsideacademia ultimately led to the only national study on displacement ever conducted inthe United States that concluded gentrification-induced displacement was essentiallynegligible (Sumka, 1979). The report’s controversial findings contributed to a long-standing methodological effort in displacement research to understand the phenomenonby measuring it. On the whole, empirical research on displacement has tended toreduce displacement to what Marcuse (1985) has identified as “last-resident displace-ment” or the quantification of displacement based on measuring only the last residentto be displaced from a single residential housing unit. While the last-resident methodbenefits from expediency, it also tends to ignore the social, temporal, and scalarcomplexity of displacement by excluding a number of key relationships. He identifiedthree that were particularly important: (1) those between tenants of similar demographiccharacteristics who are continually displaced from a unit—what he termed, “chaindisplacement”; (2) “exclusionary displacement” that occurs due to relationshipsbetween economically stratified residential groups who are subsequently denied accessto housing due to increased rents; and (3) changing housing, labor, and commercialmarkets that form a type of sociospatial “displacement pressure” in the urban milieuthat pushes people from neighborhoods voluntarily. The difficulty in capturing theserelationships quantitatively has consequently left the full displacement processunderappreciated.

An important aspect of Marcuse’s displacement taxonomy was his effort to center thephenomenon within the process of urban restructuring. Thus rather than being the result ofchanging lifestyle preferences or the natural consequence of a neighborhood’s “life-cycle”—i.e., “the inevitable and constant progression of neighborhood change, someorganic aging process that occurs simply through the passage of time” (1985, p. 201)—Marcuse proposed that displacement should instead be understood as a process rooted inincreased economic polarization and transformations in the spatial economy. “The shiftingpreference,” he argued, “for quiche instead of hamburgers, boutiques instead of discountstores, has its spatial accompaniments. But this is not a useful ‘explanation’ of residentialchange” (1985, p. 202). Accordingly, residential change by means of displacementoccurs because of economic and policy conditions that make certain preferences bothdesirable and realizable. Marcuse lists several factors that contributed to his analysis ofrestructuring-generated displacement in New York City including: a general shift frommanufacturing to services, the increased concentration of control and management func-tions, the multiplying of international linkages between firms, and an increasing economic

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polarization of the population (1985, 1986). In this way, Marcuse’s notion of displacementfinds itself close to neo-Marxist theories regarding economic restructuring typified bySassen’s (1989, 1991) global city hypothesis. Sassen’s analysis summed up these con-nections eloquently when she wrote:

The range of land uses that the new economic core requires carries with it spatially expressedcontradictions and hence potential for conflict. On the one hand, there is an expandedeffective demand for highly priced commercial and residential space. On the other, there isa demand for lowly priced manufacturing, commercial and residential space. If those whodemand space but have less bidding power are either (1) not part of the new economic core or(2) part of it but can locate in more distant areas where prices are lower, then we are merelyconfronting a process of displacement. (Sassen, 1989, p. 89)

Recently, the question of what constitutes displacement has reemerged in a series ofarticles by Mark Davidson (Davidson, 2009; Davidson & Lees, 2005). Davidson’simportant contribution deepens the understanding of displacement through a criticalengagement with the concept in ways that force a reimagining of both the methodologicaland theoretical underpinnings in the field. In a strongly theoretical piece (2009) based onreadings of Heidegger and Lefebvre, Davidson argues that the “within the currentdiscussion of displacement. . .an abstractive empirical battleground has lost touch withthe very meaning of displacement itself” (2009, p. 225). Davidson suggests that empiricalresearch seeking to quantify the “out-migration of individuals from a particular urbanspace” (2009, p. 225)—essentially what Marcuse termed, “last-resident” displacement—has tended to treat space abstractly ignoring both a Heideggerian lived experience ofplace as well as a Lefebvreian production of space. Davidson emphasizes that hisintervention is not intended to undervalue quantitative measures, but is instead intendedto encourage the inscription of place into analyses that investigate displacement fromspace. Spatial displacement, he argues, is not by itself sufficient for understandingdisplacement or why it is important. “People can be displaced—unable to (re)constructplace—without spatial dislocation” (2009, p. 228). Davidson’s analysis thus allows forthe possibility of displacement through a number of unconventional forms. Three exam-ples of nonabstract spatial displacement illustrate his argument: (1) displacement throughMarcuseian chain displacement where those displaced do not relocate outside a neighbor-hood; (2) displacement through the reconstitution of space that change the lived experi-ence of places such as the case of “new-build gentrification” where new construction oradaptive reuse is assumed to lack direct displacement; and (3) displacement through thesymbolic reshaping of spatial characteristics that disrupt the socially produced meaningof place with or without a resulting buildup of Marcuseian displacement pressure. Theeffort to inscribe a notion of place into displacement research has been reinforced in thework of a handful of recent urban ethnographies that tie together lived place with theproduction of space. Books such as Venice (Deener, 2012), Evicted from Eternity(Herzfeld, 2009), and Barrio Dreams (Dávila, 2004) have encouraged a reimagining ofgentrification by raising the importance of struggles over cultural production in theprocess of displacement and neighborhood change that is often missed in quantitativestudies of last-resident displacement. In addition, these works complicate the image ofdisplacement beyond the landlord–tenant relation by including the diverse levels ofprivilege and power that are formed through relationships at various scales includingnational citizenship, access to capital, local political structures, and cultural claims toauthenticity.

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Evictions as displacement

The concomitant methodological and conceptual dilemmas in displacement research havehad the effect of pushing scholars into minimizing their perspectives in terms of bothscope and scale. Displacement, as Marcuse (1985) has argued, occurs in a variety offorms. Many of these indirect moves are difficult to capture methodologically or theore-tically problematic especially if they are deemed voluntary. The general underappreciationof the role eviction plays in the process of urban displacement is illustrative. Housing andcommunity activists understand that eviction represents the tip of the iceberg, so to speak,of a larger displacement process in that only relatively few cases actually make it to court(Hartman & Robinson, 2003). At the same time, many jurisdictions do not maintaineviction records, reifying the belief that a judicial determination of a lease violation on thepart of tenants represents a form of unqualified justice that is undeserving of scrutiny. Thisbelief is further underscored by the fact that most evictions are for nonpayment of rent—aproblem that most would claim falls on the tenant. Yet despite the limitation in extent andthe presumption of guilt that is sometimes inferred from court-ordered eviction cases,evictions offer scholars a number of advantages that make them particularly worthy ofinvestigation in displacement research. Evictions include specific addresses and dates andcan be analyzed using spatial, econometric, and historical methods. Rendered statistically,abnormally high rates and concentrations of evictions can thus be shown to representrestructuring housing and labor markets, and possibly even the strategic action of land-lords, rather than simply the individual behavior of tenants. In this way, spatializedevictions introduce important actors such as landlord associations, property managementcompanies, civil courts, law enforcement, and state agencies that are often ignored byresearch that restricts displacement to the most egregious forms of harassment. Finally,evictions raise important questions about rights and urban justice. For example, evictionsexpose the problem of whose claims are enforced when conflicts emerge betweenproperty owners and tenants over the right to use space. Or taken further, when layeredover historical patterns of spatialized disempowerment, segregation, and displacement thathave targeted certain bodies through what Omi and Winant (1994) have termed “raciali-zation projects,” evictions can take the form of epochal dispossession that is more closelyassociated with the foundational acts of colonial or settler displacement which lie, not sosubtly, below the surface of daily life, structuring spatial relationships between people andplaces (Blomley, 2004).

Analyzed at larger scales, eviction research offers a way out of a form of the local trap(Purcell, 2006) that sometimes complicates gentrification studies. For example, many displace-ment studies tend to focus on specific neighborhoods where gentrification is known or assumedto be occurring. When nongentrifying neighborhoods are taken into consideration, as Freeman(2005) did when he used them to establish baseline measures of displacement, the erroneousview that displacement is ontologically reduced to gentrification opened this approach tounderstandable criticism (Newman & Wyly, 2006). An issue of scale therefore accompaniesthe problem of appropriate methods. That is, in order to understand displacement, wemust openourselves up to the possibility of nongentrification forms of displacement in areas often over-looked by geographically narrow approaches. The analysis of eviction as a form of everydayurban displacement is one way to expose such contexts. Evictions are spatial and temporalevents. Their occurrence can be quantified and referenced geospatially in order that they can beanalyzed, not as arbitrary instances, but as geographically patterned events. By uncovering thepattern of evictions we can thus begin to think about evictions as the function of factors outsidethe courtroom, and thus as a form of displacement with concrete causes and relationships.

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Methodology

Data on evictions were obtained through a LexisNexis search of unlawful detainers for 40zip codes in and around the central region of the City of Los Angeles. LexisNexis’eviction data were only available from 1991 to mid-year 2000. The first three years of thedata—i.e., 1991 through 1993—showed significantly fewer eviction cases than later yearsand thus were dropped from the analysis. The group of 40 contiguous zip codes werechosen in order to achieve an area of study large enough to encompass communities suchas Hollywood and Silver Lake, where it is believed that a style of “weak-center”gentrification (Reese, Deverteuil, & Thach, 2010) particular to Los Angeles first tookhold during the 1990s, as well as other, nongentrifying neighborhoods within the centraland peripheral regions of the city. This search retrieved 84,458 cases that were organizedand cleaned in order that they could be “geocoded” or georeferenced using ArcMap GISsoftware. Over 99 and one-half percent (99.517%) of the eviction addresses were success-fully matched, leaving 408 (0.483%) unmatched points. The point-referenced evictiondata were then aggregated to the 381 tracts1 within the study area, resulting in 70,4602

total georeferenced eviction points. The geographic distribution of these eviction cases aredisplayed in Figure 1.

In order to make the connection between individual eviction cases and displacement Iturn to spatial pattern analysis. Spatial pattern analysis is a general class of techniquesused to interpret spatial data and identify spatial relationships such as clusters or otherforms of spatial abnormality. Spatial pattern analysis works off of the null hypothesis ofrandomness, or technically, Complete Spatial Randomness (CSR). CSR is a function of

Figure 1. Yearly distributions of evictions.

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the concentration of points within a given area and is defined mathematically. In thisinvestigation, I first use ArcMap’s hot spot analysis tool to categorize observations basedon their spatial association. Observations are weighted and then the degree of associationbetween all weighted observations is produced. The procedure returns a statistic known asa Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, named after its developers Getis and Ord (1995), in the form ofz-scores and p-values. The p-value allows us to determine whether or not the nullhypothesis can be rejected based on significance levels. The z-scores are then categorizedby their significance level and displayed accordingly. At a 0.01 confidence level there is aone in one hundred chance that the observed pattern is occurring randomly and thus wecan assume that the pattern is extremely unusual and in all likelihood due to an underlyingsociospatial process. The hot spots of eviction points are displayed in Figure 2.

Point pattern analysis is revealing; however, in and of itself it is not sufficient.Evictions, represented as points, may actually demonstrate existing concentrations ofhousing or a density of uses rather than an abnormal occurrence of eviction. For example,we would reasonably expect that higher concentrations of housing or commercial useswould also lead to more evictions. To rule out these potential disturbances, evictions wereaggregated to the census tract level and normalized. The hot spot analysis was then rerunbased on tract characteristics for total housing units (Figure 3) and total population(Figure 4) for each tract. Population and housing variables for individual years werecomputed geometrically as straight-line estimates between the two decennial censuses.

Based on these findings I identify four hot spot communities: Downtown, Hollywood,Koreatown, and South Los Angeles. In order to analyze the process of eviction in more

Figure 2. Point pattern hot spot analysis.

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Figure 4. Hot spot analysis normalized by total population.

Figure 3. Hot spot analysis normalized by total housing units.

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detail, I have formed boundaries for the communities based on the census tracts that werestatistically significant hot spots at either the 0.05 or the 0.01 level. These communitiesare then analyzed using property sales data acquired from DataQuick for all years of thestudy, as well as historically as case studies using archival methods to investigate thespecific role of property owners.

Results

The spatial pattern analysis confirms that concentrations of eviction occurred in four com-munities. Easily apparent in the point pattern analysis in Figure 1 are at least three consistentand well-defined hot spots located in Hollywood, Koreatown, and Downtown Los Angeles.In one year, 1994, the single tract that encompasses the Wyvernwood Garden Apartments isalso a hot spot of evictions. There are also a few scattered, but inconsistent and less well-defined hot spots in Highland Park (1994), Chinatown (1995), and Glassell Park (1998). Thepresence of statistically significant cold spots is also interesting in that it seems to shift around,appear, and reappear in South Los Angeles during the earlier portion of the study period.

Normalized by both total population and total housing units, the hot spot analyses reaffirmthe persistent presence of the three communities identified in the point pattern analysis—i.e.,Downtown, Hollywood, and Koreatown—however there are five important differences. Themost obvious distinction is the large hot spot that emerges in South Los Angeles basicallyfrom 1997 through 1999. The South Los Angeles hot spot first appears in 1996 at the 0.05significance level when evictions are normalized by total number of housing units. It thenbecomes a large and statistically significant hot spot by both measures until the end of thestudy period. The second notable distinction is found in the Hollywood hot spot. WhileHollywood was a prominent hot spot in the point pattern analysis, when normalized by totalhousing units it is only statistically significant in two years, 1994 and 1996. When normalizedby total population however, Hollywood is a statistically significant hot spot for all years ofthe study. Third, housing density in Koreatown seems to have reduced the statistical con-centration of evictions in Koreatown—indeed, it almost disappears completely, reduced inextent and significance, when normalized by housing units. Fourth, the Wyvernwood hotspot, visible in only one year of the point pattern analysis, is a statistically significant hot spotin 1994 and 1996 at the 0.01 significance level when normalized by housing units. The sametract is not statistically significant when normalized by total population, most likely reflectingthe low-density, garden architectural style and use of the development. Fifth, the shifting coldspot in South Los Angeles all but disappears in the normalized analyses. It appears insoutheast Los Angeles when population is a factor, and is less significant, but is otherwise aless persistent result. Instead of South Los Angeles, a large cold spot emerges in northeast LosAngeles in both measures and a second cold spot appears in West Hollywood in 1998 and1999 using housing units.

Discussion

Downtown

During the 1980s and 1990s, the greater Downtown region of Los Angeles underwent atransition similar to what Soja has called post-Fordist restructuring (1989). At the tail endof almost three decades of redevelopment led by the Los Angeles CommunityRedevelopment Agency (CRA/LA), Downtown continued to reinvent itself according toa new image. Rather than succumbing to conceptions of a de-centered metropolis,

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planners, government actors, and property and business owners envisioned a “new”Downtown that would act as the center for important capitalist command and controlfunctions as well as greater returns from investment. From a distance, the change could beseen in the altered skyline as a significant number of new skyscrapers and office spaceswere constructed in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Emporis, a private companythat provides information on buildings worldwide, more than half of the high-rise build-ings in the Central Business District were built in a 12-year span from 1980 to 1992(Emporis, n.d.).3 This “new” Downtown was a mix of state-led speculative developmentparticularly oriented toward finance and insurance.

In the midst of the new, high-rise Downtown lay an arguably more important patternof land use and economic activity. A few blocks from the new skyscrapers on Bunker Hillare found various labor-intensive, low-wage industrial districts connected to globalmarkets of production and exchange that exist to this day. Some of these have beenofficially designated and include: the garment and fashion districts, the toy district, theflower district, the seafood district, the warehouse district, the central industrial district,and the produce district. Within these specialized agglomeration economies masses oflaborers, many of them immigrant and undocumented, produce products for an expansivenetwork of firms making Downtown Los Angeles one of the most significant manufactur-ing centers in the country. These agglomeration economies are furthermore connected to abustling stretch of retail and small commercial shops on Broadway that some renamed“Latinoway,” due to the presence of the Latino and Mexican populations that havetraditionally worked and frequented the district (Roseman & Vigil, 1993). It was alsoclear that during the 1990s the area was in a state of transition. Many Latinos who onceoccupied the central core were now moving out into the suburbs and new forces,particularly within the CRA/LA, sought to redefine the area once again through strategicplanning.

The juxtaposition that embodies Soja’s post-Fordist industrial restructuring, combin-ing agglomerations of financial capital and localized state functions next to sites ofsignificant industrial and commercial activity, closely resembles Sassen’s global citythesis. According to Sassen, “global cities are (1) command points in the organizationof the world economy; (2) key locations and marketplaces for the leading industries of thecurrent period—finance and specialized services for firms; and (3) major sites of produc-tion, including the production of innovations, for these industries” (Sassen, 2006, p. 7).The concentration of capital within an increasingly transnational framework exists simul-taneously with a deeper segmentation and polarization of the labor market, including theinformalization of a range of economic activities. Together, the two extremes meet at acentral location forming a new Downtown Los Angeles.

As a description of activity, the global city thesis captures the profile of much of theurban landscape, however it does little to explain how this particular formation evolved.In addition to planners and city officials, property and business owners were at theforefront of directing development and creating the new Downtown around their interests.The first organization representing property owners explicitly organized around revitaliza-tion was started in 1985 as the Central City East Association (CCEA). According to itswebsite, it sees itself as “the principal advocate for property owners, businesses, employ-ees and residents” and currently represents over 1,200 businesses and more than 1,000property owners on 97 blocks in Downtown (Central City East Association, n.d.). TheCRA/LA played a major role in promoting and sustaining such organizations. In 1987 agroup of merchants on Broadway were assisted by the CRA/LA with a $400,000 grant tostart the city’s first business improvement district (BID), Miracle on Broadway, between

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2nd Street and 9th Street. Key figures behind the process were Ira Yellin, a developerresponsible for many projects along the corridor including “the $75-million rehabilitationof the Grand Central Market, the 102-year-old Bradbury Building, the Lyon officebuilding and the Million Dollar Theater Building with its spiffy new apartments”; aswell as Estella Lopez, who was hired by Yellin; Bruce Corwin of Metropolitan Theatres;and John Lopez of McDonalds to head the nascent organization (Oates, 1987; Torres,1995). Miracle on Broadway eventually “opened an office hired street sweepers, got anextra four tons weekly of [sic] trash removal, bought bicycles for police patrols, foundspace for a police substation and persuaded Metropolitan Transit Authority police to patrolthe area because of the volume of bus traffic along the street” (Torres, 1995). Yet despiteits relative success, Miracle on Broadway failed to secure the necessary support from thestreet’s mostly Latino merchants, who felt they were being unfairly taxed for gains thatwould go to developers and speculation.

A second wave of efforts was begun in 1994 when the Los Angeles Fashion DistrictBID was established “following a two-year organizing drive initiated by two prominentFashion District owners” (Morcol, Hoyt, Meek, & Zimmermann, 2008, p. 206). Learningfrom the collapse of Miracle on Broadway, it is notable that the BID was first formed as amerchant-based BID and then was soon transformed into a property-based BID in 1995 toeventually encompass 580 property owners and 1,118 parcels (Morcol et al., 2008).Following the formation of the Fashion District BID, the CCEA4 then moved to createtwo more BIDs to provide security in the form of teams of private security guards,maintenance services such as trash collection, and marketing: the LA DowntownIndustrial District (LADID) in 1998 and the Toytown BID in 1999.5 In addition, theDowntown Center Business Improvement District (DCBID) was incorporated in 1997 andapproved in 1998, making Downtown Los Angeles into a patchwork of officially recog-nized districts each with their own teams of privatized security guards and specializedbeautification efforts, all at the behest of organized property owners.

The stated activities of these BIDs are to promote safety and cleanliness for theenjoyment of the general public. However, on the ground, both of these objectives havebecome especially problematic as many contend that they are a cover to target the area’sstreet people and make way for an atmosphere more amenable to consumption. Theconflict eventually made it to court when in 1999 lawyers from the American CivilLiberties Union (ACLU) and the law firm, Morrison & Foerster, filed a class action suiton behalf of 12 homeless people associated the Skid Row community center, Las Familiasde Pueblo. The group alleged that the private security teams from four of the BIDs hadengaged in a “systematic, concerted campaign” to harass homeless people, forcing them tomove from public spaces, subjecting them to unlawful searches, photographing andinterrogating them illegally, and falsely imprisoning them (Dickerson, 1999). The casewas ultimately settled out of court in 2001 by the Fashion District BID, with the othersclaiming that they would comply to legal practices (Dickerson, 2001; Ehrenreich, 2001).

The BIDs have also created disruption within certain merchant segments. For example, anLA Times writer covering the conflict noted that many merchants were significantly lessenthusiastic about the early BID structure. She noted “the worries expressed by the street-levelmerchants, many of whom are preoccupied with getting landlords to lower their monthly rentsto enable them to survive. Eight hundred square feet of retail space, for example, now rents forabout $4,000 to $6,000 a month. And a cleaner, safer street hasn’t meant any more business,merchants say” (Torres, 1995). One specific merchant, Morris Aghaei, shrugged when askedabout the assessments saying “I’ll pay it. . .But truthfully, I may be out of business byDecember. I can’t afford to keep losing money day after day, day after day” (Torres, 1995).

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The early efforts of property owners to seize control of the development ofDowntown Los Angeles were propelled even further with, what is possibly, themost important project in the area’s recent history, the Staples Center. Planning forthe Staples Center began around 1996 when Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG)and the City of Los Angeles started talks that were formalized in the Los AngelesArena Motion of Understanding By and Between the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Arena Development Company, a subsidiary of AEG, on 15 January 1997. Theagreement declared that the area where the proposed sports complex would be built,known as South Park, was “blighted and in need of economic revitalization” (Parlow,2002, p. 529). Revitalization was central to the city’s justification for the project. Forexample, when the Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA) was finallyapproved in October 1997, “The City Council defended its action by pointing to itsgovernmental duty to encourage economic development. . ..in a manner that willencourage redevelopment in surrounding areas” (Parlow, 2002, pp. 529–530). Theoptimism that these statements embraced was not entirely blind. Instead, they embo-died a larger plan in which the Staples Center was merely the first step. Thus, whileconstruction on the Staples Center was under way, AEG expanded to create an entiresports–retail–entertainment complex, a “Times Square of the 435 West,” that it termed“L.A. Live.” The 4 million square foot, $2.5 billion complex included sports, resi-dential, and entertainment spaces featuring a movie theater, music venues, a museum,media broadcast facilities, restaurant and office space as well as a 54-story, 1,001-room convention “headquarters” (Staples Center, n.d.).

The dual dislocation of Downtown’s street people and low-end merchants servingthe Latino community caused by the formalized efforts of property owners andentertainment-led development is partially reflected in the pattern of property salesand eviction (Figure 5). Commercial sales represented a significant proportion of allproperty sales in Downtown and in fact, commercial sales made up the majority(16.2%) of all sales in the area. These were followed by sales of multi-familyresidential buildings, condominiums, and industrial sites at 13.8%, 13.7%, and13.3%, respectively. Together, the four types of land use made up just under two-thirds (57.1%) of all property sales. The mix shows that despite the centrality of officeand financial activities that Downtown is generally known for, during most of the1990s, development was led by commercial, residential and industrial uses and evic-tions followed suit.

Statistical analysis of the evictions within three of the four BIDs that existed duringthe time period of the study demonstrates that the change in evictions after the imple-mentation of each BID is not statistically significant and there remains a fair amount ofexplanatory noise. While the lack of probability is greatest within the Toytown andDowntown Center BIDs, there was almost a 90% chance that the relative decline ofevictions after the Fashion District BID was established in 1995 was due to the imple-mentation of the special assessment district. Across the Downtown hot spot, higher ratesof eviction tended to occur during the first three years of the study period, suggesting thatwhile increases in eviction may not have been due to the establishment of BIDs per se,there was substantial conflict between property owners and tenants both prior to and afterthe establishment of the Downtown BIDs. It might be argued that this conflict, representedas a hot spot of eviction, may have actually encouraged property owners to establish BIDsin the first place, as a way of promoting externalized conditions more conducive todevelopment and the generation of higher revenues.

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In the end, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise cause of the abnormally high rate ofeviction in Downtown during the 1990s, however it is apparent that certain forms ofproperty development and investment, notably commercial and multi-family residential,were critical to a new group of property owners and planners who sought to transformDowntown. The vision of these early property actors has largely been fulfilled. Not onlyhave more BIDs emerged to cover almost the entire area of Downtown, but through thelobbying of speculative property owners set on transforming Downtown into an area ofincreased consumption as well as production, the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance was passedin 1999. Once approved, the ordinance enabled owners to convert their industrial andcommercial buildings to residential use and consequently set the stage for the significantgentrification that would unfold in the first decade of the new century. The results offerthe possibility that displacement, rather than being the byproduct of gentrification, canalso function as a precursor.

Hollywood

To a greater degree than the other three hot spot communities, Hollywood underwent asignificant amount of state-led, gentrification-oriented development. This developmentwas coupled with other mechanisms led by property owners and business interests torevitalize Hollywood and promote tourism. Using data provided by the Los Angeles

Figure 5. Evictions and BIDs in Downtown.

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Convention and Visitors Bureau, David Gladstone and Susan Fainstein showed thatdespite the relative dispersal of tourism through the county, “Hollywood is the mostvisited area” with many tourists coming from outside the United States (2001, p. 26).During the late 1980s and 1990s however, tourism in the region declined for a variety ofreasons. Gladstone and Fainstein noted that “In Los Angeles a combination of local(earthquakes, floods, fires, civil disturbances) and international events (severe recessionsin Mexico and Japan) discouraged both domestic and foreign tourists; 1998 arrivals were10% below their 1989 peak of 25.2 million” (2001, p. 28). The decline in tourism reifiedthe distinction between the notion of Hollywood and Hollywood the place. A number ofcommentators have observed that, especially within the commercial district, Hollywoodhad become sufficiently underinvested that the place of Hollywood was overtaking theconcept. The duality was captured nicely by Curti, Davenport, and Jackoewicz whoelaborated the problematic:

“Hollywood” is variously treated as an industry, an image, a state of mind, a stigma, apolitical consciousness, a value system, a style, a particular group of the glamorous andbeautiful. . .a catchword for entertainment, or a synonym for megalopolis that is Los Angeles.Hollywood is, through different folds, forces and trajectories of varying degrees, simulta-neously all of these. Yet it is also an enfolding of and enfolded by dwelled space(s) and place(s) [emphasis added]. (Curti, Davenport, & Jackiewicz, 2007, p. 51)

The italicized sentence is particularly important. Since the 1970s, Hollywood the placehad become the home for a large homeless population. It had also become relatively under-invested and poor. By the mid-1980s the area’s average income was estimated to be more thanhalf of average citywide incomes (Fanucchi, 1986a). One LA Times staff writer colorfullydescribed the problem with Hollywood saying: “Hollywood’s major commercial streets, atone time the glittering main boulevards of the thriving film capital, have been in their presentseedy and run-down state since the 1960s, when the so-called “hippies,” homeless people,panhandlers, drunks, drug users and prostitutes began moving in” (Fanucchi, 1986b).

Due to the decline in tourist revenue as well as a belief that “undesirables” and crimehad overtaken the area, efforts materialized among city officials and business interests to,as one author put it, “realign the place with its social representation” in the form of anambitious $922-million redevelopment plan led by the CRA/LA (Hyde, 2000, p. 76).Immediately after the Hollywood Redevelopment Plan was approved in April 1986 it wasmet with significant protest, primarily over the affect it would have on local residents andfears of eminent domain. The plan was halted by two legal challenges. The first challengecame from a coalition of Hollywood businessmen led by David Morgan, a camera shopowner on Sunset Boulevard, that objected to the Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Asecond suit was brought by a coalition of residents, business people, and environmental-ists called Save Hollywood Our Town (SHOT), which challenged the legality of theredevelopment plan itself. Members of SHOT were concerned with increased densitiesand the lack of resident participation in the planning process, particularly on the official25-member community advisory group to the CRA/LA, the Project Area Committee(PAC). The group argued that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and outsidecommercial interests unfairly dominated the PAC, with only four seats given to thearea’s tenants. One of the group’s members, Susan Nelson, was vocal in her proteststating, “We believe that Hollywood residents, who, after all, will be impacted most byredevelopment, should have the majority voice on redevelopment. . ..To this day, residentshave been under-represented on redevelopment matters” (Fanucchi, 1986a). The conflict

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between business interests and SHOT often became rambunctious and at one point BrianMoore, a member of SHOT and the Hollywood Coordinating Council with a seat on thecommittee, was removed due to his statements that the committee was overwhelminglydominated by big business interests that silenced resident participation. Difficulties withinthe committee, as well as increased representation from critics of the plan, eventually ledto it being dissolved by City Councilman Michael Woo, who replaced it with a new 36-member Hollywood Advisory Council in 1989.

After successfully defending the project in court, millions of dollars in funds thatwere held in escrow were released for use in 1991. Redevelopment efforts soon began,including $750,000 for a security detail to assist tourists, uprooting 24 mature trees,painting stars along Hollywood, and a $4.3-million experimental beautification projectinvolving “glassphault.” The first real major project taken up by the CRA/LA was amassive retail–entertainment complex, inspired by D.W. Griffith’s Babylon scene fromIntolerance, on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue with a $90million subsidy from the city. A majority—$60 million—of this would go to theconstruction of a parking garage and the rest to a theater that would host the AcademyAwards’ annual presentations. An LA Times reporter outlined the details of theagreement:

Under the CRA agreement, the city would own the parking lot and the 3,300-seat theater.TrizecHahn [a Toronto-based real estate firm] would operate the theater, pay the city a $12.5-million licensing fee over 20 years and guarantee the theater debt for at least 11 years. TheCRA expects to pay the theater debt with overall revenue from the project and use parkingfees from the site to repay the garage debt. (Boxall, 1998)

In a stereotypical Hollywood approach, musical performances, red carpets, confetti, andbreakfast catered by Wolfgang Puck accompanied more than 800 guests when construc-tion on the project began in October 1998.

A second major project within the redevelopment plan’s area was undertaken byproperty owners who collaborated to form the Hollywood Entertainment District BID(HED BID). The HED BID currently “spans an 18-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevardand is funded by 240 property owners (Figure 6). The district provides security, cleaning,and marketing services. It is generally intended to make the area a visitor destination andan inviting location for business investment” (Mitchell, 2001, p. 117).6 Rather thanemerging all at once, the BID developed over phases. According to information providedby the BID, a small group of about 40 property owners along a small stretch ofHollywood Boulevard were inspired by other BIDs and “agreed to spend $600,000annually for five years to improve Hollywood” in 1995 (Hollywood EntertainmentDistrict, n.d.). Based on the perceived success of “Phase I,” a second BID known as“Phase II” contiguous with the first, was formed with the support of an additional 150property owners in 1998 and commenced in 1999. Phase II was given a three-yearlifespan so that it would expire along with Phase I in 2001, both of which were eventuallyrenewed under the management of the nonprofit organization, Hollywood PropertyOwners Alliance in 2001. Like the redevelopment plan, the HED BID prioritized security.The BID spends almost half of its operating budget (47%) on private security guards thatpatrol the district “seven days a week during evening hours, initiate citizen arrests whenthey observe violations of the law and work closely with the Los Angeles PoliceDepartment (LAPD)” (Cook & MacDonald, 2011). It also installed closed circuit camerasat major intersections for use by the LAPD.

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In many ways, the development areas succeeded in transforming the commercialdistrict of Hollywood and facilitating the conditions for increased revenue. Propertysales both inside and outside the different development areas increased during the period.Many significant redevelopment projects followed, including the Warner HollywoodTheater that was reopened in 1997 and the Egyptian Theater, which was renovated bythe City of Los Angeles and reopened in 1998. Community development groups alsocelebrated the redevelopment project in particular given that through a grassroots organiz-ing campaign spearheaded by the Los Angeles Alliance for New Economy (LAANE), thenation’s first Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) was launched establishing localhiring processes, a Worksource Center to help local job-seekers find employment in theproject, and living wages for half of the permanent jobs created (Wolf-Powers, Reiss, &Stix, 2006).

Others are less convinced of the success. Curti and his coauthors argue that theHollywood and Highland Babylon Center represents an “attempt to match the materiallandscape to that of the ‘social imaginary’ through the gentrification of spaces andplaces. . .. Buildings are being demolished, small businesses displaced, and rentsincreased” (2007, p. 57). Some reporters seem to agree, citing the mass displacement oflow-income tenants and Latinos in particular. In a recent article, Patrick McDonaldsuggested that over the last two decades, Hollywood had experienced the largest exodusof people since the “black exodus” from South Los Angeles during the 1980s. He notedthat the “Hollywood Redevelopment Project Area helped fueled [sic] a Wild West of landspeculation, building flipping, profit-seeking—and skyrocketing rents” (2013). He quotes

Figure 6. Hollywood evictions, BIDs, and property sales.

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long-time community activist Larry Gross, Executive Director of the Coalition forEconomic Survival (CES), saying that what happened was in effect “an economic tsunamithat pushed low-income people out. There was massive displacement” (2013).

Some evidence supports this view. Hollywood did in fact experience a decline inpopulation throughout the 1990s, and was in fact the only area considered here to do so.Latinos were overrepresented in this drop as the community hot spot area lost 2,378Latinos between 1990 and 2000. Latinos were also the only racialized group inHollywood to decline in both absolute and relative terms. The trend would continueinto the next decade, as the larger Hollywood region would see a net population plunge of12,878 people between 2000 and 2010 (McDonald, 2013). And yet, while Hollywood wasa hot spot for eviction in general, on the whole, evictions tended to decline in the areaduring the years of the study. In fact, there is some suggestion that the redevelopmentareas and Phase I of the HED BID might have actually contributed to the declining patternof eviction in Hollywood. We see, for example, that the decline in evictions after theimplementation of the HED BID Phase I, both inside and outside this area, was statisti-cally significant.

The pattern of eviction suggests a complicated, interrelated process between propertyowners and economic conditions. On one hand, property investment seems to be tied toredevelopment efforts. As evidenced in the increase in property sales, organized propertyowners with the help of the state can create the conditions for less speculative investmentboth within special development areas as well as in the neighborhoods that surround them.At least in temporal terms, evictions seem less tied to the implementation of developmentareas in Hollywood. They do however show both a strong spatial association both withinHollywood generally and in terms of their proximity to the redevelopment project area.This is especially true of many of the area’s serial evictors who own large, multi-familyunits and can be seen to be the major force behind the de-Latinization of the area.

Koreatown

Koreatown is a place that defies many conceptualizations. For example, despite what thename might suggest, Koreatown is not a typical ethnic enclave. Originally, Koreans didnot cluster in what we now call Koreatown. Nor have Koreans, until only very recently,ever made up the dominant ethnic group.7 Indeed, when Koreatown was officiallydesignated in 1980, Koreans only made up 7% of the area’s residents (Light &Bonacich, 1988). Koreatown, as Lee and Park describe, “is more of a commercial districtthan a neighborhood community” (2008, p. 249). In 1969 the first Korean grocery storeopened and this was followed by the first Korean restaurant in 1971 (Park & Kim, 2008).“By the late 1970s, Koreans were operating the majority of businesses an OlympicBoulevard and 8th Street, between Hoover Street and Western Avenue” (Yu, Choe, Han,& Yu, 2004, p. 29). Thus, Olympic Blvd became the center of Korean commercialactivity, eventually expanding its borders to the nearby 8th Street, Western Avenue,Vermont Avenue, and other major streets” (Park & Kim, 2008, p. 129). This trendcontinued such that by the beginning of the 1990s, Koreans were operating a majorityof the stores on Wilshire Boulevard and 6th Street between Hoover Street and WiltonPlace (Yu et al., 2004). By the early 2000s it was estimated that there were at least 3,200Korean-owned small businesses in Koreatown (Park & Lee, 2007).

Koreatown, it has been argued, was built by “immigrant entrepreneurs” whoaccessed South Korean capital through local organizations such as the KoreatownDevelopment Association (KDA) and the Korean Association of Southern California

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(KASC) (Light, 2002; Light & Bonacich, 1988). These organizations used publicrelations, marketing, and government relations to secure investment from predomi-nately South Korean banks as well as other, less formal, means such as social net-works. Because of this, some authors have found value in the concept of growthmachines to describe the formation of places like Koreatown (Light, 2002; Park &Kim, 2008). “Growth machines include more constituents than only entrepreneurs.Growth machines enroll labor unions, insurance companies, newspapers, churches,universities and businesses around a common, heavily promoted program” gearedtoward population growth and economic development (Light, 2002, p. 216). Themodel argues that Koreatown did not emerge from “the leaderless process version ofneighborhood formation that Robert Park endorsed in 1916” (Light, 2002, p. 222).Thus, immediately after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 openedimmigration to Asians, Korean organizations began to form in order to create aKoreatown for the anticipated immigrants. The KDA, a group of Korean immigrantreal estate promoters led by Hi-Duk Lee—owner of the first Korean restaurant inKoreatown—and the KASC, a group of Korean merchants, promoted the areas throughstrategic actions. The KDA bought land and promoted it as a Koreatown in Seoul(Light & Bonacich, 1988). The KASC and the KDA both offered to put up signs forfree for any Korean business that wanted them, essentially creating Koreatown on theirown (Light, 2002; Light & Bonacich, 1988; Smith, 1976). The KDA also promoted thearea by hosting the first annual Korean Street Festival in the mid-1970s, offeringgreater security for Korean consumers through private police forces, and raisingfunds to finance a sheriff’s substation in Koreatown (Light, 2006; Yu et al., 2004).8

The 1992 uprising would prove to be especially important to this process. On onehand, the riots were particularly destructive to Korean-owned businesses. One estimatefigures that 1,867 Korean-owned businesses were destroyed causing $347 million indamages (Min & Kolondy, 1994).9 Another article reported that up to half of allKorean-owned businesses were either looted or destroyed, many of them located inKoreatown (Lee & Park, 2008). In the aftermath, much of the property in Koreatowntemporarily lost value and many Koreans fled the area for locations in the suburbanperiphery. This situation proved to be a unique catalyst, accelerating the process ofdevelopment and ownership that began in the 1980s. It was during this downturn forexample that “Korean property developers expanded their holdings. By 1999, Koreansowned an additional 3.5 million square feet of commercial property in nearby mid-Wilshire, of which the Korean and Korean American businesses occupied only 40%”(Light, 2002, p. 223). Between 1990 and 1999, Korean investors purchased more thanhalf of the buildings along Wilshire Center—between Hoover Avenue and Wilton Place(Fulmer, 1999).

Korean property owners and developers were aided by favorable factors outsideKoreatown as well. As major American firms abandoned many of the high-rise officespaces along Wilshire Boulevard, conditions opened that facilitated the flow of transna-tional capital into Koreatown, especially along this corridor. Park and Kim (2008) arguethat the transnational flow of South Korean capital into Koreatown represents a moregeneral pattern of foreign capital investment that is partly due to the relative decline ofAmerican economy vis-à-vis other economies. However, while this may be true, invest-ment was not distributed evenly and places like Koreatown became special locations forforeign capital seeking higher and more secure returns. One crucial factor was the changein immigration regulations that encouraged speculative investment. Among a number ofimportant alterations to federal immigration policy, the passage of the Immigration Act of

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1990 and an amendment in 1997 called the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)created new opportunities through the formation of a new visa. The new E-2 visa allowedimmigrants who make a “substantial investment”—between $150,000 and $250,000—toremain in the United States with their immediate families under “non-immigrant status”—a significantly lower threshold than the EB-5 visas which required a minimum investmentof $500,000 but which allowed permanent residency (Park & Kim, 2008). A realtor inKoreatown revealed a story of one South Korean investor that summed up the impact thatthe immigration reforms created, saying that this investor purchased a small coin laundryshop in Koreatown. The average market value of the shop was around US $160,000,generating around $2,500 net profits per month. But the Korean investor requested to payover $200,000 for the shop, saying that he didn’t care about the amount of sales of thelaundry shop. Later the agent found out that the Korean investor was planning to apply foran E-2 visa and the lawyer advised him to invest over $200,000 in order to assure theissuance of the E-2 visa (Park & Lee, 2007, pp. 209–210).

The Asian financial crisis during the latter half of the decade further incentivizedforeign investment. As living costs soared in the aftermath of the InternationalMonetary Fund’s (IMF) structural adjustment policies, South Koreans increasinglybegan to look elsewhere for opportunities. Park and Kim describe how higher livingcosts, the strength of South Korea’s foreign exchange, and a liberalization of lawsgoverning the transfer of funds combined to promote foreign investment and emigra-tion (2008, p. 134). By the middle of the first decade of the new century, South Korea’sdirect overseas investment amounted to $40 billion and was estimated to account for upto a third of assets of the eight Korean banks in Los Angeles (Kang, 2004; Park &Kim, 2008).

Korean organizations were pivotal in securing local government participation indevelopment. For example, organizations such as the Korean American Chamber ofCommerce and the Koreatown Youth and Community Center played important roles inconvincing the redevelopment agency to turn a sizeable amount of Koreatown into aspecial project area in 1994. The project was ultimately approved by the City Council inDecember 1995 and encompassed 1,200 acres of land in Koreatown—roughly a quarter ofthe land in this hot spot—with the specific goal of increasing investment and intensifyingland use in the larger community. Indeed, CRA/LA not only altered existing zoning codesto encourage investment, but it also broadened its scope to include large-scale, high-endprojects outside of the project area like the Aroma Wilshire Center, which the agencybelieved would benefit the overall development of the area and boost the local economy(Park & Lee, 2007).10 Other people like Gary Russell were also important. As the directorof the BID, Gary Russell, elicited the help of then mayor, Richard Riordan, to rename the“Mid-Wilshire” district “Wilshire Center” in order to avoid the stigma of the riots.Through property assessments, the organization rebranded the area with signs and spentnearly $6 million on improving the medians along Wilshire Boulevard (Fulmer, 1999).These infrastructural improvements were augmented by other transportation-oriented devel-opments. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) opened some of its first sub-way lines in Koreatown, extending from Downtown Union Station to Westlake/MacArthurPark in 1993 and three additional stations in Koreatown that opened in 1996. The SouthernCalifornia Association of Governments (SCAG),11 a major proponent of increased densities,commented on the effect of many of the projects which they championed: “The newsubway and rapid bus lines also reinforced Koreatown’s proximity to Downtown LosAngeles, sparking a building boom. Taking advantage of the neighborhood’s central loca-tion, transit access, and high-density zoning, developers began proposing high-end

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residential, mixed-use, and commercial projects in the late 1990s” (Nemirow & Thorne-Lyman, 2008, p. 5).

The change in land use and development brought about by the Korean “immigrantgrowth machine” significantly altered the situation for low-income renters and low-revenue commercial spaces. On the surface, it was hard to miss and many, like SCAG,celebrated the transformation, stating: “Since the late 1990’s, Koreatown has experiencedan unprecedented building boom. The neighborhood’s prominent location and excellentaccessibility have started to attract new luxury condominiums, high-end retail and enter-tainment centers, and trendy restaurants and nightlife” (Nemirow & Thorne-Lyman, 2008,p. 4). Other commentators have been less enthusiastic. Lee and Park have argued that thehousing market in Koreatown is divided into three submarkets which experienced thedevelopment process differently. These are: “(1) the Latino-occupied inexpensive oldapartment buildings; (2) the Korean-occupied refurbished apartment buildings and reno-vated rooming houses whose rents are recently skyrocketing; and (3) the gentrifiedmiddle-class houses whose market price amount to at least $400,000” (2007, p. 212).

Given that the new development has specifically targeted higher-income groups, muchof the housing that is primarily oriented toward working-class Latino families has comeunder threat. Lee and Park observed for example that from 1997 to 2000, rents increasedfrom 60% to 120% in Koreatown (2007). As a result, both housing and office vacancyrates in Koreatown dropped during the latter half of the decade, with office vacancy ratesdeclining 11% points from a high of 34% in 1994 to about 25% in 1999 (Fulmer, 1999).As Figure 7 shows, property sales and evictions with the Koreatown redevelopment

Figure 7. Koreatown evictions, property sales, and redevelopment area.

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project area in particular seem to have been positively influenced by its implementation.By the beginning of the 2000s, prices for homes and such businesses as gas stations orliquor stores had doubled (Newsweek, 2004). For property owners, the change wascertainly a boom. Rather unabashedly, SCAG showed its bias toward property-orienteddevelopment commenting that:

The community has largely welcomed the new development and the wealthier demographicattracted by the new luxury condos and high-end shopping centers. Most of the newprojects are adaptive reuses of old office buildings, thus few if any community membershave been displaced. And while the upper-end projects may eventually cause rents andhousing costs to rise throughout Koreatown, gentrification has not been a problem to date.(2008, p. 6)

The magnitude and concentration of displacement demonstrated in this research showsthat such investment was not universally welcomed, nor was it distributed equally. Single-family homes and multi-family units in areas directly surrounding investment corridorswere especially hit by eviction. The situation was magnified by the increasing disparitiesbrought about through investment that reached beyond the home. One fifty-year-oldimmigrant Korean worker who has “held a variety of unskilled jobs in Koreatown grocerystores and makes about $6.75 an hour” commented to an LA Times reporter: “It did nottake much time to figure out that my income is not even close to what it needs to be tocover the basic needs of my family….It was impossible to make a living with this lowhourly wage” (Simmons, 2005). Such transformations across all areas of life inKoreatown, from the labor to the housing market, found their way in the form ofdisplacement that was partially captured in a survey by the Koreatown ImmigrantWorkers Alliance, which documented that 10% of respondents said they had been evictedor faced eviction threats through no fault of their own (KIWA, 2007).

These findings complicate the image of gentrification-induced displacement. Certainaspects of the process are more or less familiar —e.g., the relationship between devel-opment and displacement—however the conflict between two immigrant populationsover space makes this form of displacement an uneasy fit within gentrification modelsthat stress racial privilege rooted in historical forms of segregation and exclusion withinurban America. The influx of foreign capital and the specific conditions created by urbanunrest suggest that the form of crisis-generated displacement in Koreatown is a strategicresponse to opportunities created by uneven development, both locally and internation-ally, and less about gentrification per se in the way that Smith first articulated theformation of rent gaps.

South Los Angeles

Both de facto and de jure forms of racial segregation historically forced non-whites, andespecially African-Americans, to concentrate in South Los Angeles in the period follow-ing World War 2 (Avila, 1997; Nicolaides, 2002; Straus, 2014). As these inner-ringsuburban communities became more integrated into the urban regional landscape, red-lining and racialized spatial segregation produced a situation where these communitiesbecame relatively property-rich, but credit-starved. Deindustrialization and a rapidlychanging global division of labor during the 1980s further destabilized South LosAngeles, making it one of the poorest communities in the region. Much attention hasbeen given to deindustrialization and its effect on South Los Angeles, yet relatively little

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has been paid to financial restructuring and its consequences during the pivotal decade ofthe 1990s. Through a series of reforms in the financial industry, many residents in SouthLos Angeles who were excluded from other neighborhoods and systematically deniedaccess to credit, being pushed into predatory and secondary mortgage markets that furthercontributed to the history of dispossession and loss of opportunity these communitymembers faced.

Financial restructuring originated from increased competition and rising inflationduring the 1970s that decreased the profitability of U.S. financial institutions. In thiscontext, banks lobbied for a strategic restructuring of the financial system throughderegulation. For almost half a century from when it was created during the NewDeal, the housing finance regulatory framework was relatively stable and relied onsegmenting real estate from other capital markets. Beginning in 1980 the FederalHome Loan Banks changed their regulations and Congress enacted several laws12 thatderegulated the banking industry by removing interest ceilings, introducing adjustablerate mortgages, allowing investment in non-housing activities, and permitting cross-stateacquisitions that together encouraged more speculative financial behavior. The previoussystem that separated and delimited banking activities was effectively replaced by onewhere banking institutions, rather than holding loans into maturity, could originate avariety of home loan products in order to sell them in an evolving securities market.13

Securitization, argues Dymski (2009), was curious because while on the one hand it wasorganized around estimating risk and a certain amount of risk aversion, at the same timeit created mechanisms that increased risk through the process of commodification and anexpanded sphere of exchange with new actors who were less concerned with thefinancial stability of individual mortgages. The transformation of the financial systemcreated a lending environment where micro-level decisions about liquidity- and default-risk were supplanted by procedures intended to facilitate a growing market for bundlingand servicing loans at the macro-level both nationally and internationally. The greatercommodification of securitization not only brought in federally chartered agencies suchas the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home LoanMortgage Corporation (FHLMC), but it also created a demand that was met by privatemortgage insurers which specialized in non-conforming loans. This combination ofderegulation and securitization accomplished two things. First, it allowed the U.S.housing market to become an important source for international investors seeking higherreturns than what could be obtained in their own slow-growth economies, as well asrelative stability from political insecurity. Second, it fundamentally altered the incentivestructure regulating lending practices. Kathleen Engel and Patricia McCoy explain thiswithin their concept of a structured financial model where “Lenders have incentives tocherry-pick their loans and sell the worst ones to investors. And knowing that they canunload the worst loans onto investors, lenders have less reason to underwrite loanscarefully. Thus securitization gives rise to the problem of adverse selection” (2007, pp.2048–2049).

The commodification of mortgage finance and deregulation exacerbated conditions forareas like South Los Angeles by introducing high-risk loan products and predatorylending practices. “Banks have moved into these markets,” observed Dymski, “by acquir-ing subsidiaries and then designing special instruments aimed at lower-income andminority-customers” (Dymski, 2009, p. 162). The 1992 Federal Housing EnterpriseFinancial Safety and Soundness Act (FHEFSSA) further deepened the impact of thisshift by establishing (and increasing) the proportions of loans purchased by theGovernment Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)—specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

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—from low-income and “high minority” neighborhoods. These efforts, that in some wayswere meant to counter decades of redlining and racial discrimination, had the effect ofencouraging the proliferation of subprime lending. Subprime and predatory lending tookon many forms including exotic mortgages, zero-down-payment mortgages, loan flipping,excessive fees and “packing,” lending without regard to the borrower’s ability to repay,and outright fraud and abuse (Immergluck, 2008). To this list, Engel and McCoy (2007) intheir review of the subject add loans that require borrowers to waive their right to legalredress, intentional discrimination against protected groups, and abuse that originates fromservicers once the loans have been securitized. For this reason, their definition addsculpability to the issue insisting that predatory lending is designed to benefit actorsinvolved with the exchange of mortgages at the expense of borrowers. The result hasbeen that because subprime borrowers are more likely to become delinquent in theirpayments, “borrowers, neighborhoods, and cities bear the brunt of abusive lending, whilesecuritization insulates investors from having to internalize those costs” (Engel & McCoy,2007, p. 2076).

Nationally, subprime lending rose dramatically during the 1990s. The joint HUD–Treasury Task Force estimated that between 1993 and 1999, subprime refinances grewtenfold from 104,000 to one million. Likewise, in 1994, subprime mortgages represented5% of all originations and by 1999 subprime mortgages represented 13% (2000). Homerefinancing made up a majority of subprime lending and also grew during the same periodfrom 80,000 in 1993 to almost 790,000 in 1998 (2000). A number of studies have alsoconcluded that subprime and predatory lending disproportionately occurred in low-income, African-American neighborhoods (Immergluck & Wiles, 1999; U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000b; Wyly, Atia, Lee, & Mendez,2007; Wyly & Holloway, 1999). For example in 1998, 11% of refinancing loans weresubprime, but in low-income neighborhoods subprime refinances were 26% and in thepoorest communities, where families make only 50% of the median income, subprimerefinances were 44% (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000b). “Inpredominantly black neighborhoods, the high-cost subprime lending accounted for 51%of home loans in 1998—compared with only 9% in predominately white areas.Comparable 1993 figures were 8% in black neighborhoods and 1% in white neighbor-hoods” (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000b, p. 2). When raceand income were combined, the results were magnified.

Combining the income and race of the borrower showed that more than half of low-income Black borrowers refinance in the subprime mortgage market. In 1998, subprimelenders provided approximately 50% of all refinance loans going to low-income Blackborrowers. Low-income Black borrowers accounted for 8% of subprime refinance mort-gages, compared with only 1% of overall refinance mortgages (U.S. Department ofHousing and Urban Development, 2000, p. 35).

Statistics in Los Angeles showed a similar trend with those at the national level. Thenumber of subprime refinance loans in Los Angeles increased by 170% from 9,351 in1993 to 25,384 in 1998 (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000a).Low-income communities were overrepresented in this growth. In 1993, 7% of refinancemortgages in low-income neighborhoods were subprime, however by 1998 this would riseto 23%; and in the poorest communities where families earned 50% or less of the areamedian income, subprime refinances accounted for 31% of all refinance loans. Subprimeloans also accounted for one third of all refinances in Black neighborhoods compared withonly 9% in predominately white neighborhoods (U.S. Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment, 2000a).

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Using data obtained through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), RandallScheessele (2002) was able to show that predominantly low-income and Black andLatino neighborhoods were statistically correlated with subprime lending. In LosAngeles, the proportion of subprime refinance lending to Blacks was more than twiceas much as the proportion of the same lending for whites in all income groups. Inaddition, Scheessele was able to map subprime refinance lending for 27 individualmetropolitan areas. His analysis shows that subprime lending was heavily concentratedin Central and South Los Angeles. The results of his analysis are adapted to the SouthLos Angeles hot spot community and represented in Figure 8. Neighborhoods whereBlacks comprised at least 50% of the population and where subprime lending made up atleast 25% of refinance loans are represented in blue. The same is shown for Latinos, ingreen.14

The maps show that the South Los Angeles eviction hot spot community was alsoan area of almost uniformly high rates of subprime lending to Blacks and Latinos.They also show that GSEs and other state agencies like the U.S. Department ofVeteran Affairs were also especially active. My research furthers this analysis showingthat in all, repossessions by banks, consumer credit agencies, and the GSEs accountedfor 32% of all evictions in the South Los Angeles hot spot. Single-family home sales,which comprised the majority of all property sales in South Los Angeles, are alsodisplayed, demonstrating the connection between refinancing, subprime lending, anddisplacement that was characteristic to this community during the 1990s. The prolif-eration of subprime and predatory lending in South Los Angeles is only partiallyexplained by forms of financial susceptibility. More recent research has shown thatracial segregation is a significant predictor of subprime lending “even after controllingfor the percent of minorities, credit score, median home value, poverty, and education”(Squires, Hyra, & Renner, 2009, p. 4). Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey support thisclaim, arguing that structural forces created the context for displacement in places likeSouth Los Angeles, “ongoing residential segregation and a historical dearth of accessto mortgage credit in American urban areas combined to create ideal conditions forpredatory lending. . .racializing the ensuing foreclosure crisis and focusing its negativeconsequences disproportionately on Black borrowers and home owners” (Rugh &Massey, 2010, p. 630).

Ultimately, the proliferation of subprime and predatory lending in South Los Angelesduring the 1990s not only influenced the process of displacement through bank repos-session, but it also aggravated historic wealth disparities by contributing to a significantloss of wealth for Latinos and Blacks. For example, one study showed that the averagevalue of assets for Black and Latino households in the country increased dramaticallyfrom 1989 to 1998. However, while the average value of assets increased, Blackhouseholds actually saw their average housing equity decline 17.8% from $33,700 to$27,700 during the same period (Mishel, 2012). The same source shows that the medianBlack household debt increased dramatically during the 1990s from $1,400 in 1989 to$7,400 in 2001, an increase of 429%. The fact that a majority of Latino and Blackhouseholds’ assets are almost entirely in their homes means that dispossession isparticularly harmful—a point that was made poignant during the Great Recession(Kochhar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011; Wolff, 2010). The significant loss of wealth and thetransfer of property from Black and Latino homeowners in South Los Angeles to newowners, many of them investors, during the 1990s lends itself to a notion of displace-ment that combines historical racialization processes with structural forces rooted infinance and capital.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 8. Evictions, subprime lending, and property sales in South Los Angeles. (a) Northern;(b) Southern.

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Conclusion

The four geographies of eviction demonstrate patterns of displacement in Los Angelesthat are more than the result of gentrification forces. The research supports certain aspectsof the notions of displacement put forward by Marcuse and Davidson; however, it alsoraises specific tensions that expand these conceptions of displacement into new theoreticalterritory. In terms of Marcuse’s schema of displacement, we can see how displacementthrough eviction is tied to larger changes in a spatialized political economy in LosAngeles. However, while Marcuse envisioned the gentrification–abandonment–displace-ment dynamic to be rooted in increased socioeconomic polarization and economicrestructuring, similar restructuring processes produced very different results in LosAngeles than in New York City. One of the most important of these is the characterand geographic behavior of important actors both within and beyond the field of housingthat contributed to landlord decision-making and tenant difficulties. Four groups whichcontributed to the creation of eviction hot spots in Los Angeles are identifiable in thisanalysis: (1) financial institutions and investment funds—e.g., the influx of foreign capitalin property markets; (2) local development-oriented growth machines—e.g., the formationof immigrant growth machines which actively organize local and transnational resources;(3) property-based organizations and self-assessment mechanisms; and (4) real estatefinance intermediaries—e.g., the rise of predatory lending agents. These actors speak toa more nuanced version of Marcuseian displacement. Moreover, in his political economyof displacement, Marcuse emphasizes the importance of public policy in the developmentof local housing markets. However, not only is this under-specified in his analysis, but italso ignores the specific groups of actors that that (re)produce property markets as well astypes of policy formation at higher scales that condition the field of local propertymarkets. For example, in the case of Los Angeles, financial restructuring played a crucialrole in the incentivization of predatory lending practices and the moral hazards thatincreased risky financial behavior. In this process new actors were generated in thehousing market at both the origination end of lending as well as in the sphere of exchange.The formation of BIDS as a response to disinvestment further demonstrates the role thatorganized property owners play. In these circumstances displacement, rather than follow-ing the gentrification process, may actually precede it as a sign of increased conflict overspace. The case of eviction in Los Angeles demonstrates that these actors take on differentroles in different markets, some of which lead to displacement. An important role forpolicymakers then is to distinguish the type of actors in specific areas and their role in theprocess of displacement.

Second, this research shows that Marcuse’s notion of “chain” displacement—or thecontinued displacement of tenants from a single unit—can be expanded geographicallyto encompass a conception of the collectivized action of landlords in particularneighborhoods or areas. In this research, this was exemplified as the formation ofeviction hot spots. This type of eviction-based displacement can thus be thought of asa spatialized susceptibility to eviction by property owners that affects tenants withincertain neighborhoods. Susceptibly has the further effect of not only increasing thelikelihood that tenants in certain neighborhoods will face eviction, but it also modifiesMarcuse’s notion of exclusionary displacement. In the case of eviction, displacementeffectively marks a tenant through public records that make it more difficult for anevicted tenant to rent a unit in the future. This form of continued displacement carriedby the tenant through a previous legal judgment can subsequently be seen as a newform of legally exclusionary displacement that brings together chain displacement in

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particular places and exclusionary displacement through juridical records that areaccessible to landlords.

The fact that most of the eviction hot spots in this analysis occurred in locations thatcan be considered nongentrifying or pre-gentrifying reinforces Davidson’s emphasis onrevisiting Lefebvre’s production of space as a crucial foundation to understanding dis-placement processes. The ontological de-linking of displacement from gentrification thatthis calls for therefore opens researchers to other forms of displacement that operatewithin the normal process of capitalist accumulation but which are seldom appreciated.For example, when Marcuse articulated a vision of displacement that resulted from theactions of landlords who were responding to the changing urban economy, the displace-ment that he conceptualized produced a binary between abandonment and gentrification.While useful for linking two distinct types of displacement together, the approach doesnot fully explain displacement due to non-payment of rent, which comprises the vastmajority of eviction cases. On one hand, eviction due to nonpayment of rent can beunderstood as a form of gentrification-induced displacement. However, when concentra-tions of evictions, many of which are due to nonpayment of rent, concentrate in areas thatare not gentrifying or suffering abandonment, then other alternative explanations arise.Increasing precariousness in the labor market can of course cause concentrations ofnonpayment of rent cases, but they can also be produced structurally through intentionalsubterfuge or the absence of mechanisms to mediate disputes between landlords andtenants that property owners can practice strategically.

In conclusion, while I am sympathetic to Davidson’s claim that an overemphasis onspatial displacement tends to push displacement research in directions that sometimesundervalue place, I believe that this research shows that identifying the locations ofdisplacement is still relevant. Expanding the sphere of what constitutes displacement toinclude evictions is an example that demonstrates how analyses of spatial displacementcan deepen our understanding of place in the process of displacement and at the sametime link to structural forces that produce space. The varying typology of eviction-based displacement in Los Angeles during the 1990s subsequently reveals localizedstructures of capitalist urbanization that shift between a changing class-monopoly rentstructure in South Los Angeles that is reminiscent of Harvey’s notion of “accumulationby dispossession” to a more traditional gentrification-induced form of residentialdisplacement in Hollywood. The very meaning of displacement, it seems, is stillopen for exploration.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the three referees who took the time to carefully review a previous draft of thiswork. Their critiques and suggestions strengthened the final version and I am indebted to their effort.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes1. Four hundred and forty-one tracts were originally included within the area of study; however,

some tracts around the boundary were clipped so that only a portion of their areas residedwithin the area of study. Those tracts with a majority of their total area residing outside thearea of study were removed from the analysis.

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2. Due to a lack of confidence in the data from 1990 to 1993, these evictions were removed fromthe analysis resulting in 70,607 evictions from 1994 through to the end of 1999.

3. After 1992, no high-rise buildings were built until 2003 when the Constellation Palace wasconstructed.

4. After Miracle on Broadway collapsed, Estella Lopez would then move on to become theexecutive director of the CCEA.

5. While the Toytown BID eventually expired on 31 December 2009 after property ownersrefused to renew it, other BIDs have been established in the area including the Chinatown BIDin 2000, the Little Tokyo BID in 2003 (the only merchant-based BID in Downtown), the SouthPark BID in 2005, the Arts District BID in 2006 (which was recently forced to dissolve in2013), and the Historic Downtown Los Angeles BID also in 2011.

6. As of January 2014, the website for the Hollywood Entertainment District reported that only225 property owners fund the BID.

7. Using Integrated Public Use Microdata (IPUMS), a recent report states that Koreans makeup the single largest national origin group within Koreatown (Sanchez, Auer, Terriquez, &Kim, 2012).

8. Light places the date for this parade in 1975 while Yu and his coauthors in 1974.9. These figures, cited by Min and Kolondy as well as many other authors, were compiled by

Radio Korea and published in Korea Times Los Angeles on 11 May 1992.10. Park and Lee add that “Interestingly, Christopher Park, Chief Designer of Aroma Wilshire

Center, was not only the owner of the Archeon international, a private development andplanning company located in Koreatown, but also the Lead Planner for the WilshireCenter/Koreatown Redevelopment and Revitalization project. He is also the Chair ofthe Board of Zoning Appeals in the City of Los Angeles, which frequently put pressureto convert residential zones in Koreatown into commercial zones” (Park & Lee, 2007,p. 213)

11. SCAG is also the largest metropolitan planning organization in the country.12. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn-St.

Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982.13. The secondary market for mortgages was created in 1938 when the Federal National Mortgage

Association (FNMA) was established to provide liquidity in the housing market. In 1968,Congress split FNMA into two organizations, the Government National Mortgage Association(GNMA) and FNMA, with the latter becoming a private corporation with a special line ofcredit with the US Treasury. In 1970 Congress further expanded the secondary market byempowering FNMA and FHLMC to buy and sell both conventional and federally insuredloans. In the same year, GNMA began a program for purchasing pooled FHA-insured loans,thus initiating the securitization of home mortgages.

14. Scheessele’s analysis was based on 1990 Census tract boundaries. Although the tract bound-aries represented here from the 2000 Decennial Census are not the same, a close fit wasachievable given the minor modifications between 1990 and 2000 in this area.

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