In its Saturday editorial, the Los Angeles Times reduced virtually all the civic concerns of the historically neglected South Central to “niceties” and condemned a swath of the district to being a “concrete-and-asphalt” wasteland,“ "a seemingly endless sweep” of “industrial warehouses, packing plants, and junkyards.” It proclaimed that developer Ralph Horowitz must triumph, and the South Central Farm must be razed. The Times was wrong.
Entitled “Los Angeles gothic,” the lead editorial in Saturday's Los Angeles Times evokes the horrific, not the rural. The Times took up for fat-cat developers, industrial sprawl, and backroom deal-making with a ferocity unmatched even by the shirking Mayor’s office or the stolidly silent City Council. Only the California State Appellate and Supreme Courts, in granting the City Council license to violate the City Charter’s to sell off publicly-owned property, has bent over so adamantly to advance the interests of robber barons.
For the Times, industrial dominance, Brentwood greed, environmental racism, and City Hall’s ongoing incompetence trump South Central's need for such "niceties" as green space, racial and environmental justice, and civic protection. As Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine put it, “If Mr. Horowitz proposed to build a warehouse that would replace a community park in Anglo affluent Beverly Hills we would not be having this discussion.”
The Times would have us believe that South Central should give up its reverie of a habitable neighborhood—a dream the Times mockingly calls “magic.”
The world’s largest urban farm is tiny by agricultural standards, only fourteen acres. The land once was an informal dumping ground, a site for drug deals, and earmarked for a massive trash incinerator, when Los Angelenos in 1992 rose up against justice denied. Shaken to its bones, the City granted use of the acreage to the community, a partial reparation wrenched from a City that had condoned police beatings. The Farmers cleared the land of decades of debris and planted food. That’s part of the story the LA Times didn’t mention on Saturday.
And magic it is, to turn off the deliberately zoned urban behemoth of the Alameda Corridor and cruise past a pedestrian peering through the fence into the miracle of the Farm, drawing in a palpably fresher draft of newly-oxygenated air. To see women and men shaded with straw bonnets delicately hoeing around fragile seedlings. To contemplate tired backs resting under tarps sheltering lawn chairs, benches, hand tools, and one tiny blue plastic seat just big enough for a two-year-old. To watch farmers relishing a day’s work done and the day’s work to come. To see toddlers with feigned adult seriousness waddling behind their parents in the furrows, youngsters dashing down narrow dirt paths just because they can, and kids just slightly older learning ancient skills and what it means to contribute to their families. It is magic to see the farmers exchange their surplus with their community in an airy, open marketplace. No natural food store dares open in the area, an otherwise dreary outpost of international commerce, and none is needed as long as the Farmers open their gates.
When the Times mocks this elemental life, it follows the agenda of those who, throughout LA’s history and long before, have inverted essential values, plying us with celebrity intrigue and Disneyland at the price of life and food. Hollywood or the Farm, Brentwood or South Central, these are LA’s choices, and the Times has taken its stance.
Neither did the Times mention that by 1995, the City calculated that the people of South Central had been placated, that they wouldn’t notice a vast industrial zone through their neighborhood, a corridor that portended even more air and noise pollution and the disruption of ancient burial sites, a massive construction project that might eventually threaten King-Drew Hospital, one that would require uprooting the Farm. And so the City Council determined that the land the Farm sat on had no public use and turned it over to developer Ralph Horowitz in 2003 for just over $5M. Two years later, the property was revalued at $16M. A few weeks ago, just as the Farmers had raised $11M from private donors to turn the farmland over to a public trust, Deputy Mayor Larry Frank hinted that the property might be worth $25M.
But good magic cannot be so easily undone by its opposite.
The magic the LA Times names, like the nefarious magic it doesn’t name but instead calls “development,” is not mysterious. The magic the Times scoffs at arises from concentrated will and desire and community action, like the Watts Riots, the Chicano Moratorium, and the 1992 Uprising. When legal justice has disintegrated into a game of mumbly peg, then the magic happens and the community sets right the scales of moral justice.
Nor did the Times take note that every week for two years, the Farmers have marched through City Hall's cavernous corridors to Council Chambers to plead and demand that the Council save the Farm. Still, the Mayor refuses to give his support, and the City Council has yet to put forward a resolution, ask for a committee review, or even so much as ask city staff to research how to the Farm might be saved. Deputy Mayor Frank said he wasn’t sure if there was the “political will,” but the Deputy Mayor can not see glare of summer sunlight outside his draped office windows. Neither can the LA Times.
The Farmers are discovering supporters across the planet--people, urban and rural, of all races and ethnicities, who understand that the Farm is about a small patch of real earth threatening to up-end a megalopolis. Who understand that the Farm’s future signals the direction of humanity: continuing on to massive, global urbanization, or jumping the rails to roots and survival. People from South Central to LA’s Westside, and from every continent, are rising up and adding their voices to the Farmers’.
That is a magic that can turn back bulldozers ripping out shade trees, jackboots trampling food, and enforcers slamming workers against the fence and shackling them for the “crime” of working for themselves. It is the magic that has and will stop the developers, the smoke-spewing industries, and, in the end, the LA Times, when life must face down death.