Before Chavez Ravine became the sun-drenched baseball field of the Los Angeles Dodgers, It was a different field of dreams for the homeowners who formed a community there.
In the hills north of downtown Los Angeles, mostly low-income Mexican-Americans also while other immigrant and non-white families bought houses in the neighborhoods of La Loma, Bishop and Palo Verde. Prevented by racial covenants and other discriminatory practices from living and shopping elsewhere in the city, they turned the 315 acres of Chavez Ravine into a prosperous, close-knit enclave with shops, churches and a school.
To Los Angeles city officials, the neighborhoods appeared poor and blighted. (It would have helped if the city had provided better services.) Los Angeles Housing Authority official Frank Wilkinson came up with the idea of turning the area into a shiny new public housing project to be called Elysian Park Heights. In 1950, to give way to this vision, the city began an arduous, decade-long process of moving people out of their homes by offering what were considered below-market cash offers or acquiring properties through eminent domain proceedings.
Even before the last residents were evicted, the public housing project was abandoned. In 1957, the city agreed to trade Chavez Ravine land to Walter O'Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for a minor league baseball field he owned in Los Angeles. The destruction of the community and the unfair treatment of its residents is a plague. in the history of Los Angeles much worse than the condition of the demolished neighborhoods.
Now, a state bill would give the city a chance to address what it did to Chavez Ravine residents. Assembly Bill 1950, the Chavez Ravine Accountability Act, authored by Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles), would give descendants of affected families – and surviving residents – what she says is “fair and equitable compensation.” The bill is part of a growing movement for reparations for people whose property was unjustly seized for decades. In this case, Carrillo said, “communities have been stripped of their generational wealth” by taking away their homes.
The bill would require the creation of a task force to determine how many descendants are owed compensation, what is fair compensation for each depending on what they received at the time, how they should be compensated now, and how much they could pay. the city in compensation. An estimated 1,800 families, or 3,600 people, were displaced. But it's unclear exactly how many people this will affect or how much it would cost the city.
The fact that the task is daunting should not stop the city of Los Angeles from making reparations to the displaced families of Chavez Ravine. The fundamental question is what responsibility the city and state have to do right by anyone from whom the government has taken land, wages and opportunity, ostensibly for the public good. The return of Bruce's Beach to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, a black couple whose Manhattan Beach resort was taken from them through a ridiculous eminent domain claim in 1924, is an example of what a government should do. Additionally, last year, Orange County returned 6.2 acres to the Acjachemen and Tongva tribes for conservation and cultural use. The only thing we can do is address these situations on a case-by-case basis. Governments should be held accountable for their past misdeeds and make amends with more than just apologies.
The Chavez Ravine families are believed to have received mostly below-market cash offers for their homes. Kamren Curiel, granddaughter of Palo Verde landowners, wrote in a 2021 article for LAist that her family was offered $6,450, for two houses they owned. That was in 1952. She calculated that it would be $63,398 in 2021 dollars, and today the houses would be worth a million dollars. Whatever the correct price was in 1952, forcing the family to sell deprived them of the ability to hold onto the property and generate wealth from it. “It was totally unfair,” he told an editorial writer. “They totally took advantage of everyone because they were Mexicans. “I don’t think they felt empowered or educated enough to speak up for themselves.”
Some had to accept what they were given through the eminent domain process, which allows the city to take property for public use as long as the owners receive fair compensation. Some refused to leave their homes until authorities literally executed them. Some got nothing. They had all been told that they would be the first to return to the newly created homes.
One reason the compensation seemed low was that it was possibly only for a temporary relocation, since everyone had been promised to return to the new housing development in exchange for giving up their homes, according to Eric Avila, a history professor. and Chicano studies at UCLA. .
In addition to the task force, the bill requires the city to create a permanent memorial and database of displaced residents, along with government notices and documentation of payments people received. The bill specifies several ways to compensate people: offering city land or money to descendants of former owners, or various services, health benefits or compensation to residents who were not property owners. Carrillo says it will be up to the city and the task force to determine what repairs are possible.
The attack on Chavez Ravine was racist in its basic premise: they were poor Mexican Americans whose community was considered deficient and needed to be torn down. However, there are many cases of eminent domain used throughout the city where low-income communities, usually black or Latino, were torn down for some type of public use: a school, public housing, a highway. The city is crisscrossed by freeways that uprooted numerous communities of color, while wealthy, white neighborhoods successfully fought such projects.
What made this case particularly egregious is that the “public good” was never built. Instead, a community was uprooted for land that was designated for a private baseball stadium. Carrillo points out that the displacement was the work of the city. But the Dodgers, he points out, were the beneficiaries. And Dodger officials certainly knew about the displacement at Chavez Ravine. The city should take responsibility for making amendments. But the Dodgers should find a way to give back to the families who sacrificed the land that became the home of the Dodgers.
