Municipalities try to offer redress to the descendants of Black families evicted for freeway construction.
In celebration of Juneteenth, this week we're running some of our favorite episodes about the Black experience.
Today, housing and affordability reporter Liam Dillon dives into the historical and continuing impact of the 10 freeway on Black communities in Santa Monica. This episode first aired on Jan. 31, 2022.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times housing reporter Liam Dillon, and Santa Monica native Nichelle Monroe
More reading:
Santa Monica’s message to people evicted long ago for the 10 Freeway: Come home
Freeways force out residents in communities of color — again
Tour Santa Monica’s once-vibrant Black neighborhoods, nearly erased by racism and ‘progress’
Gustavo Hey, what’s up? It’s Gustavo Arellano.
In celebration of Juneteenth, this week we're running some of our favorite episodes about the Black experience.
Today we’ve got one from this past January, which I think will especially resonate while you’re stuck in those summer traffic jams. I’m joined by my colleague, housing and affordability reporter Liam Dillon while he dives into the historical and continuing impact of the 10 freeway on Black communities in Santa Monica. Enjoy…
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Highways and freeways connect us and get us to where we need to go — traffic notwithstanding, of course.
But all that concrete came at a heavy human cost.
Entire communities were separated and displaced..
Most of them…Black and Brown.
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That’s what happened in Santa Monica, California during the 1950s.
City officials evicted families to build the end of the 10 freeway.
But now…in an act of civic penance…city officials are trying to bring some of those families back.
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I’m Gustavo Arellano, you're listening to The Times.. daily news from the L-A Times.
It’s Wednesday, June 22, 2022.
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Today…
We’ll talk about Santa Monica’s attempt to redress a historical wrong.
It comes at a time where municipalities across the United States are reckoning with their racist actions from the past.
And we’ll also talk to a woman whose family was one of many Black households that Santa Monica wants to make right by.
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GUSTAVO: LA Times reporter Liam Dillon covers housing affordability and neighborhood change across California.
Liam, welcome to the times.
Liam: Thank you so much for having me.
GUSTAVO: So I know highway construction was long hailed as this important achievement to open up the United States to all Americans. But you did a project that explored how all these interstates and toll ways and freeways and highways and byways involved a lot of destruction of communities, especially communities of color.
Liam: Yeah, that's right. I mean when you put the interstate highway system in, and it's now 45,000 miles of roadway, they had to go somewhere. And oftentimes when planners put them through cities, they put them through particularly black neighborhoods across the country just some kind of key stats here, more than 1 million people were displaced by freeway construction and just the first two decades of it alone. So from the late fifties to the late seventies and, and in some of my reporting, I talked to some scholars who said this was the largest urban displacement project in all of American history.
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Research shows that many Black neighborhoods were paved over by planners. And in many cases, those areas were specifically targeted. And we're really talking about everywhere across the country. You know, north, south, east, west Baltimore, Birmingham, Nashville, Atlanta, you know, Tulsa, Oklahoma. In all of these places.You can find stories of black neighborhoods that were divided or destroyed.
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One example that really puts a fine point on this is in Miami, Florida for decades, city officials there had been sort of scheming for how to get rid of a black enclave called Overtown, sort of this sort of thriving center of black commerce entertainment in south Florida.
And when city officials got highway money, they decided to route interstate 95 through the community rather than putting the freeway through an abandoned railway. So, you know, again, an example where this neighborhood was specifically targeted and afterwards Overtown lost as much as 30,000 residents, 3 quarters of its population following the construction, the 1960s.
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GUSTAVO: Yeah, stories like that are notorious in ethnic studies. You hear it wherever there's community of colors in urban areas, black brown, even, you know, where working class whites lived. You hear like story after story. Here in Southern California, there's this famous section of freeway called the 4-level interchange, where 4 separate freeways cross each other near downtown LA. And forever, politicians and the press praised it “Oh, this Marvel of modern technology.” But few remember the working-class communities that were pushed out. And not too far away from that, the same thing happened in the immigrant neighborhood of Boyle Heights..
Liam: Yeah, I mean, and you can really tell so many stories about displacement in Southern California through Interstate 10, which had four-level freeways involved. And also, as you mentioned, Boyle Heights, you know, the 10 is part of the 135 acre east LA interchange, which when it was built, absolutely devastated the neighborhoods and freeways in Boyle Heights pushed out more than 10,000 people. Um, and what was at the time, a Mexican and multi-ethnic community now, of course, you know, in part, because of the destruction caused by freeways, Boyle Heights, one of the hearts of Mexican American activism in the U S and then going west on the 10 into south LA, you hit a neighborhood . That was called sugar hill, which was a well-off enclave of black families. You know, Hattie McDaniel, the black actress who won an Oscar for her role in Gone with The Wind. She lived there. Residents had, you know, pushed for ending covenants that prohibited black people from living in certain communities in Los Angeles and across the country. From that neighborhood. Yet, just as those efforts are becoming successful planners, put the 10 freeway through the neighborhood, which, you know, devastating it. Right. And then at the end of the 10 in Santa Monica planners , they're paved over the Pico neighborhood, which was then Santa Monica’s enclave of black and Mexican American residents.
GUSTAVO: I take the 10 at least once a week. And you don't think of the history and the displacement that goes on as you're stuck in traffic and especially in Santa Monica. That's what surprised me about your story was, you think about Santa Monica, at least I do, you know, super rich, super liberal, everything progressive. You don't think displacement and you don't think working-class, but at one point Santa Monica was way more diverse there's books about Santa Monica's past, but I want to hear a little bit more of that past from you.
Liam: In fact in, in 1960, before the 10 came through and some other urban renewal projects that also targeted Black neighborhoods in the city, you know, there were more Black residents in Santa Monica then there are today, even though the city's overall population has of course grown over the past 60 years.// And so through my reporting on what was happening and what's been happening in Santa Monica, I met this woman with deep roots in the city. Her name is Nichelle Monroe.
Nichelle Tape: My mother's father is part of the Brunson family. One of the pioneer black families of Santa Monica. We've been there since the early 1900.
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Charles Abramson, my great-grandfather came to Santa Monica from the Georgia are. And,our family has been there in some capacity ever since in Santa Monica, whether living or working or both…
Liam: And so Nichelle's family is part of a community of other black households that migrated to Santa Monica and other parts of California, you know, this happened early 19 hundreds and forward. // We hear a lot about the great migration where Black families moved from the deep south, where they were facing sort of extreme, brutal segregation to other parts of the country and Santa Monica was one of the places where folks came and settled in the Pico neighborhood…
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Nichelle tape: My grandmother, my father's mother used to enjoy the nightlife. She was a single lady at the time in the fifties and sixties, she says she used to put them up and pick them up and put them down. That was dancing., There was a nightlife, there was a very tight close-knit black community,
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Upwardly mobile people were, were into each other. Racism was still, was very thick in Santa Monica. So in order to have survival units, people cleaved together and they had their own businesses and own churches and their own lives.
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GUSTAVO: You create these bubbles to fight against racism and try to live great lives and also for your children and all of it just torn down to create a freeway.
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We’ll have more of Nichelle and her family’s story…
Right after a quick break.
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Gustavo: Welcome back. …. So, Liam, as you were mentioning in the fifties and sixties, freeway construction was tearing apart communities of black and brown people that they had built and in Santa Monica that happened not just because of freeway construction. And I know you've reported on this also just civic projects like in Santa Monica, the civic auditorium was built. How did that process play out?
Liam: I think it's important for people to know, like it was never a fait accompli for when any of these freeways are going to be placed. People had to decide where they were going to go. And in Santa Monica in particular, you know, the /// powerful business interests in the city wanted to protect commercial and industrial lands. And so the decision was made to slice through this Pico neighborhood that we've been discussing. And that was justified because property values were in fact lower there, but that also is something that's related to kind of our public policy and our government policy. Mortgage redlining efforts discouraged investment in areas with large, poor or nonwhite populations and that of course contributed to the fact that land values were indeed lower in the Pico area.
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Liam: What ultimately ended up happening is this displacement where folks lost at that time and going forward a lot of the ability to build wealth and to be able to go to comparable areas. You know, renters got nothing when they were forced from their homes, only their landlords did. And then homeowners lost the ability to earn the generational wealth that they would have been able to from owning property in Santa Monica, you know, near the Southern California coastline, where of course it's appreciated a tremendous amount over the past decade.
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Nichelle tape: My uncle was telling me the other day that when they did the 10, when they were designing the 10 freeway where it was going to be, they could have easily used, uh, what is now Olympic Boulevard, but they chose not to. So this was definitely an effort to move black people out of the, um, of that area of, out of Santa Monica. They've been trying to do it. God knows when they're still trying to do it. Also. Um, my grandfather's family home, which used to be in the Belmont triangle area was also taken by eminent domain. So that's two homes in one family stolen by the government.
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GUSTAVO: So Liam… Santa Monica could have left those communities intact?
Liam: So again, I think it's really important to think here about what the priorities were of the planners at the time. Right. They were thinking about, oh, we want to protect these sort of commercial areas, the business areas. And that was the preference. It was not these folks where they were living and their homes and their neighborhoods. And so, you know, going back to Nichelle, I mean, her family, you know, had a duplex that they had very recently built before it was taken. And, you know, that was gone and not having access to that property in their family, of course affected them for generations.
Nichelle tape: There was a sense of community there was most likely more happiness. My family had a duplex. It was a new building at the time I'm told by my aunt, my two aunts were very young, less than 10 years old. So it was a modern building. and my grandparents owned it. They lived in one part of the duplex and rented out the other part so that they had income property, generational wealth.
GUSTAVO: After the displacements happened, what did life look like in Santa Monica for black and brown people who remained?
Liam: These families were kind of long time residents for the most part. There was a survey of homeowners along the freeway route at the time that found the average household that lives on this property for more than 17 years. I mean because families received a little for their homes . It's hard to buy elsewhere in Santa Monica. And I think there's a really important point here that yes, I mean, there were white people who were displaced by freeway construction in southern California, including along the route of the Interstate 10, and also across the country, but white families had so many more options for what to do when that happened. Their homes and their land were valued more. So they got paid more, which gave them more options. And there were formal and informal restrictions against where black people were allowed to live at the time .
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Liam: The stat came out in my research and found this anecdote and some old newspaper stories. Fair housing activists went door to door in 1966 in Santa Monica, polling apartment managers in white neighborhoods to see whether they would rent a black residents. Only one out of 27 said he would. And then when a black family attempted to try to integrate a white community in Santa Monica a few years earlier, two Molotov cocktails were thrown out onto their front porch. And so again, you have these formal mechanisms and then you have these informal frankly mechanisms of terror that really prevented folks from finding comparable places to live.
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GUSTAVO: And it was legal segregation. We're talking about 1960s California. The state signed into law in 1963 something called the Rumford fair housing act. That banned landlords from rejecting possible tenants based on race or religion. Then, California voters repealed that with a proposition within a year! And That wouldn’t be overturned until 1967 with Reitman versus Mulkey, a Supreme court decision. It took the supreme court to end legal segregation in California. So you still want to live in the city, but now you can't afford a house because now the houses are too expensive and now you want to rent, but you're being denied rent based on the color of your skin.
Liam: And homeownership opportunities too. I mean the same fair housing issues, you know, a homeowner could say, no, I'm not going to sell to Black people. I mean, that was allowed right during this time.
GUSTAVO: After this break, we'll hear how Santa Monica is trying to right their wrongs from the past.
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GUSTAVO: So…. let's flash forward then to today, nearly 70 years after all this displacement, the creation of the 10 freeway in Santa Monica. Now the city says it wants to offer a sort of restitution, rent out apartments at cheap rates to the descendents of those families that were displaced. Why now?
Liam: Yeah. So I think that this program and city officials there characterize it as such as part of this kind of nationwide movement that we've been seeing
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Liam: to compensate residents for racist harms related to housing and property. And these are some efforts that gain momentum. Um, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in spring 2020…
AP TAPE: Black lives Matter chant
Liam: We've seen this elsewhere in California, Justin, September, governor Gavin Newsome signed a law that authorized the return of Shorefront land known as Bruce's beach to the descendants of a Black couple who are run out of Manhattan beach nearly a century ago
AP TAPE: GAVIN NEWSOM: “Let me do what apparently Manhattan beach is unwilling to do, and I want to apologize to the Bruce family for injustice that was done to them.”
Liam: And specifically in Santa Monica, you know, discussions about this sort of housing program began a few years ago in 2019 when politicians and city council members were deciding how to commemorate the city's historic Black communities during construction of an athletic field. And what was once another black neighborhood known as Belmar Triangle.
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GUSTAVO: Yeah this is happening all over the country. I know in Evanston, Illinois, that they're actually offering reparations for residents whose ancestors were redlined against.
Liam: Right. And so that is happening in Evanston nations, first city for an explicit reparations program that providing black residents who faced housing discrimination through , much of the 20th century or their descendants of they are able to get money for down payments or home repairs./// Santa Monica is program, I guess it's among the first of its kind in the country. The only one that. I find that's really substantially similar as one that's existed for the past few years in Portland, Oregon. And that offers preference in the city's affordable housing programs to families and descendants who were forced from a historically black neighborhood there by the construction of interstate five and urban redevelopment.
GUSTAVO: So back to Santa Monica, how many people might get to move back into the neighborhood or through the city, through this program and how exactly does it work and who gets to work and who gets to apply?
Liam: This is a pilot program. The city is saying, look, if you yourself or your descendants or your family were displaced by urban renewal in Santa Monica, or were displaced by the 10 freeway, then you can apply and up to a hundred people or a hundred households in this situation would have the ability to get into the cities, you know, into low-income housing in the city.
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Nichelle tape:. For me personally, something about being in proximity to the beach, something that lifts your spirits, something that opens your mind, something that raises your happiness quotient, having that water next to you, does something for you. It, it. It's good for mind, body and soul. Also, Santa Monica has been my home since I was a child and I have a lot of wonderful. Some of my happiest life memories took place in Santa Monica with my family. And I like having that around me as well. That's where I, I lovingly say where I fell to earth, and that is where I will be put in the earth. If I'm lucky.It’s home. There's no place like home. Click my heels three times.
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GUSTAVO: Yeah, who doesn’t want to be home, especially go back to a home that was taken away from you from your parents and grandparents.
And Liam….OK so…it’s a small amount…just 100 families who might get to move back home into Santa Monica through this new city program….and Nichelle wants to be one of them. But the families that you talked to, those affected by the displacement from so long ago, how do they feel about this program?
Liam: In the one hand, I mean, it is an effort and attempt to redress this wrong, right? It's a recognition of the harm to the past; an attempt to provide something tangible for folks to have. But at the same time, and even the city, you know, recognizes this it's hardly a replacement for what was taken. And we've talked a lot about generational wealth building in the United States frequently comes through home ownership and many of these folks, including Nichelle’s family, You know, they owned homes, they owned property, and that's gone now and they'll never be able to get that back. At the very least this program does not provide any redress for that.
And so I know that, Nichelle and others really feel like to, to actually make up for the wrongs of the past. You need to do things like provide some down payment assistance or other ways to encourage or allow for people. Who've lost homes in Santa Monica to be able to buy them again.
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Nichelle tape: I love my city, but it has to do right by me and many others when something's taken from you? Don't you want what was taken back? Or don't you want something comparable in its place? That's the hard part that I think that people are not willing to look at. They just kind of want to throw some little consolation at the city at the situation. Although it's an effort, what does that, what is this effort?
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Nichelle tape: If you're trying to be equitable and give back to people who have done nothing wrong. Who've worked hard. Their entire lives played by the rules, done. Everything is requested and then are robbed. Do you then come back to their descendants and say, here's a discount on an inflated property that is not yours.
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Nichelle tape: I think that there's a big fat hole there that needs to filled.
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GUSTAVO: Thanks so much for this interview and thank you Nichelle, for sharing your story.
Liam: Thanks again for having me.
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OUTRO:
And that's it for this episode of the times daily news from the LA times…
Ashlea Brown was the jefa on this episode.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, Ashley Brown, David Toledo. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our intern is Surya Hendry. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin, our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera, and Shani Hilton. Our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
And do your humble host a favor... Take a minute and go to latimes dot com slash podcast survey and answer a few questions for us about what you like about The Times, what you want to see more of, less of — whatever’s on your mind, we wanna know.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadres. Gracias