December 14, 2017
LAWT News Service
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to revoke the conditional use permit to sell alcohol for the property at 3600 West Stocker Street, also known as the Liquor Bank. For years, residents have complained about the activities at this location, including drinking in public, the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors, attempted robbery, battery, on-site narcotics sales and use, gang activity, counterfeit goods sales and blighted property conditions.
“For nearly a decade, the Liquor Bank served as a hot spot of crime, drugs, and violence,” said Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson. “Today, we said enough is enough, our community deserves better.”
In 2009, after a flood of complaints and a hearing, the Liquor Bank was hit with 28 “corrective” conditions to keep their license and conditional use permit, including bonded guards, security lights, and placard signs for operation. In 2015, the case was reopened based on uninterrupted and unmitigated nuisance conditions and continued complaints from residents and LAPD. In 2017, the Liquor Bank was found to be in violation of 22 of the 28 conditions placed in 2009. Since a hearing earlier this year there were 3 violent crimes on the property among several other calls for LAPD service.
“In my tenure, in working in the Southwest Division one of the constants that have been coming through is the Liquor Bank,” said Detective Dana Harris the Officer in Charge of the Support and Vice Division Nuisance Abatement at Southwest Division.
“We as a community have not felt safe going down to the Liquor Bank for many many years”, said Keith Renty, President of the Baldwin Hills Homeowners Association. “With all the violations and opportunity to correct the nuisances there [and nothing changing], we support the revocation.”
The owner recently filed for bankruptcy, asking a judge to grant a restraining order against the City, undermining the City’s ability to protect the public safety of residents. A temporary restraining order was initially granted, then rescinded on Monday, opening up a path for the City’s actions.
December 07, 2017
LAWT News Service
After being a source of blight for 25 years, a vacant lot spanning two city blocks in Southwest Los Angeles is poised to be transformed into a Los Angeles County facility offering a range of critical services, including housing, transit, job training, retail and a school for underserved youth.
The Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to acquire ownership of the property at the corner of Vermont and Manchester Avenues, which has remained mostly undeveloped since being decimated during the civil unrest of 1992. Over the decades, it has received more than three dozen notices of violations from the City of Los Angeles.
“The County now has an opportunity to construct what will be a catalytic project that would meet many of the needs of the surrounding community,” Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said. “It's on a prominent corridor where it can catalyze additional investments in all directions. With meaningful community engagement moving forward, we can design tremendous amenities that can make the corner of Vermont and Manchester a source of pride once again, rather than a long-standing example of stagnation and even worse.”
The elements of the proposed project reflect the priorities of the recently adopted South Los Angeles Community Plan, as well as recent surveys by the Public Health Department and local community organizations. The proposed project includes 180 affordable housing units; 50,000 square feet on the ground floor to serve community needs, potentially including social services and transit career training centers; a transit plaza and parking lot; a public college preparatory boarding school designed to serve 400 youth from 6th to 12th grades who are currently served by the County’s social safety net; and retail shops. The acquisition is expected to cause minimal disruption as the site is vacant.
Several members of the community, as well as two elected officials, spoke in support of the proposed project. “Over and over, residents have been promised various degrees of redevelopment, resources, jobs and housing on this site, yet there it sits, 25 years later, occasionally filling with trash, periodically hosting trespassers,” U.S. Rep. Karen Bass said in a letter to the Board. “The area sits vacant, and the nuisance created by its disuse and neglect causes problems with health, blight and crime. By contrast, the County proposes to meet multiple needs here and serve the broader community.”
“Having spent the last 25 years in and around this particular set of parcels, this proposal comes as a great relief to me and thousands of other folks,” added Los Angeles City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who noted there have been multiple reports of crime on the vacant lot.
Pastor Aguilar Williams, Jr., a longtime resident, said, “We have no confidence in the developer. The developer has had this property vacant for more than 25 years. It's abandoned and it's really serving no purpose in our community.”
Danielle Strickland, with the Southwest Neighborhood Council, added, “We deserve to have a place where we can enjoy some amenities in our own community, instead of having to look at this eyesore that's been there for forever.”
Following the Board’s unanimous vote, Supervisor Ridley-Thomas declared, “The comments generally underscore the fact that investment is sorely needed at this location. The community has waited way too long, and now is the time for us to move forward.” He called the proposed project an “opportunity to right a wrong for which this community has suffered over decades.”
December 07, 2017
By Niele Anderson
Contributing Writer
The Baldwin, Crenshaw, Leimert area is under serious re-development. You notice it on Crenshaw; from Jefferson to almost Florence. You see The Metro construction you hear about the upcoming redesign of the Baldwin Hills mall, you see and hear about local Churches Community Development Corporations building senior homes and schools and you see the new Kaiser Permanente. With all the great development, many are concerned about the other entities.
The Baldwin, Crenshaw Leimert are a part of the only predominately black community in Los Angeles. While some see it as growth many residents rapidly see Corporate developers, corporate landlords, and Wall Street speculators transform their neighborhoods into high-priced markets at the expense of working-class communities.
On Dec 2 over 700 attendees came together for the Resist Gentrification Action Summit. The event brought together the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s Housing of Human Rights project and over 40 tenant rights, civil rights, faith-based and social justice organizations to discuss the community re-developments.
Event organizer Damien Goodman founder of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition,
noted, ““Sixty percent of the room was black, but the rest was brown and yellow coming together, If I’m a powerful person trying to gentrify the community, I’d be a little bit scared today.”
The summit sought to address the issue of gentrification through plenaries and breakout panels focusing on combating gentrification, promoting community wealth building, and demanding development without displacement. The all-day summit was held at Audubon Middle School located in Leimert Park. The summit tackled three key objectives:
1.) Unite behind the ongoing effort to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Act, allowing localities to strengthen protections against rent increases.
2.) Share protective strategies to keep residents in their homes and neighborhoods, such as building tenant power, stopping criminalization as a tool of gentrification, countering real estate speculation, and more.
3.) Share community wealth-building tools to improve communities without displacement, such as community land trusts, cooperatives, quality community-controlled public housing, and more.
Convening groups of the historic summit include: AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment - Los Angeles, Black Community Clergy & Labor Alliance, CDTech, Crenshaw Subway Coalition, Eviction Defense Network, Fannie Lou Hamer Institute, and Los Angeles Community Action Network.
Supporting organizations include: Advocates for Black Strategic Alternatives, African American Cultural Center, A. Philip Randolph Institute, Association of Black Social Workers-Greater Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, Black Women for Wellness, The Church Without Walls, Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Coalition to Preserve LA, Community Coalition, Creating Justice, Democratic Socialists of America-Los Angeles, Glendale Tenants Union, Holman United Methodist Church, Housing Long Beach, Housing Now, Hyde Park Organizational Partnership for Empowerment, Inquilinos Unidos, Labor/Community Strategy Center-Fight for the Soul of the Cities, LA Voice, Los Angeles Black Worker Center, Los Angeles Council of Black Professional Engineers, Los Angeles Tenants Union, National Action Network-Los Angeles, NAACP-Beverly Hills/Hollywood Branch, Pico Neighborhood Association, SoLA Food Co-op, Southern Christian Leadership Conference-Southern California, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Union de Vecinos, Uplift Inglewood, Venice Community Housing, and Youth Justice Coalition.
For more information visit: www.housinghumanright.org.
December 07, 2017
By Freddie Allen
NNPA Newswire
Faith leaders in the Black community are encouraging members of their congregations to sign-up for healthcare coverage during the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period that ends on December 15.
Reverend Edwin Sanders, the senior pastor and founder of the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville, Tenn., said that supporting positive dialogue about healthcare is a part of the faith tradition.
“We lift up healing as a benefit of our relationship to the God that we serve; we talk about the God who is a healer,” said Sanders. “There is a way in which those of us who are disciples, especially in the tradition of Jesus Christ, have a commitment to trying to make sure that we sustain these kinds of opportunities for people to get healed in our communities.”
Sometimes, that commitment means working with political leaders.
Congressman James Clyburn (D-S.C.) helped to launch the “Soul 2 Enroll” campaign, a national healthcare initiative aimed at mobilizing faith communities during the open enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.”
During a recent press conference on Capitol Hill, Clyburn said that faith is about much more than a relationship between you and the God you serve.
“We are instructed that ‘faith without works is dead,’” said Clyburn. “If your brother or sister comes to you hungry or naked—and I believe if James were writing his epistle today, he would add sick—you feed them, you clothe them and provide them with healthcare.”
Pastor Marquez Ball of Uplift Church in Laurel, Maryland said that healthcare is not a game to score political points.
“Healthcare is a whole life issue,” said Ball.
Uplift Church is just one of the organizing faith partners for the “Soul 2 Enroll” initiative.
That group also includes: the National African American Clergy Network, Joseph A.C. Smith Ministries, the National Action Network, the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, the Skinner Leadership Institute, The United Church of Christ and Values Partnerships.
During a discussion about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) between congressional and faith leaders, Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, the co-chair of the National African American Clergy Network, said that despite the budget cuts imposed on the ACA by the Trump Administration, the faith community is marching forward.
“The faith community knows how to do one thing: we know how to make bricks with no straw and we’re going to do it again,” said Williams-Skinner. “Healthcare is not a privilege; it is a right of every child of God.”
Williams-Skinner continued: “My Bible teaches that Jesus’s ministry was about healing and helping the afflicted and lifting up those that are wounded…we must do that with the Affordable Care Act.”
Reverend De-Ves Toon, the national field director for the National Action Network (NAN), said that NAN has helped to sign people up for healthcare coverage through the ACA since 2013 in more than 100 cities.
“All of our chapters have health and wellness committees that are doing on-the-ground outreach in their perspective cities,” said Toon. “We just don’t focus on this during the open enrollment period, we do this year-round.”
Toon added: “We will continue to do outreach to encourage people who might be afraid of the process to enroll for healthcare under [the Affordable Care Act].”
Sanders said that because of the rich oral tradition of the Black community, everyone from the American Heart Association to local community health centers comes to the doorsteps of the church to promote answers to health problems.
“God is the one that gives the intellect, God is one that gives the wisdom to doctors and to researchers to help them to develop the modern day cures that are increasingly available, but we need to make sure that more is done to make sure those cures and those medical responses are available to [our congregations],” said Sanders. “So, I believe that God is working miracles through the researchers, who are developing new ways to treat diseases and to address health problems.”
Sanders continued: “As far as the open enrollment period, I think it ought to be a message that we are including in every worship experience that we have, as a people. For indeed, it is through our efforts and our tradition that we don’t let these moments pass us by.”
For more information about signing up for healthcare coverage, visit Healthcare.gov.