Mega Watts
Fifty years after rioting left it in ashes, the South Central L.A. community is poised for a major — and sustainable — comeback.
On August 11, 1965 — 50 years ago this Tuesday — America got a horrifying glimpse of what can happen when mass desperation collides with mass frustration.
Early that evening, in the largely African-American Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, a young black motorist was stopped by a white police officer on the suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Though accounts of what happened immediately afterward vary, all of them follow the same basic trajectory. A crowd of onlookers gathered. An arrest was made. There was some shouting, some shoving, maybe some spitting.
And then: 144 hours of chaos, destruction, and spilled blood. Before they were over, the Watts Riots, as the six-day conflagration came to be known, would end up taking 34 lives. More than 1,000 people would be injured — three-quarters of them civilians, one-quarter of them a mixture of LAPD officers, firemen, and other law-enforcement officials. Property damage was estimated at over $40 million, with more than 600 buildings damaged, one-third of them left beyond repair.
There wasn’t a single root cause of the Watts Riots; the endemic poverty of the neighborhood’s residents, twin legacies of municipal neglect and police harassment, and the repeal one year earlier of California’s fair-housing laws have all been cited as contributing factors. But with the aid of 50 years of hindsight and reflection, we can safely conclude at least one thing: People don’t willfully set about destroying their own communities when they feel like those communities are working properly. Riots are a direct function of despair.
Today, of course, we’re able to identify yet another factor that contributes to this degree of despair: the environmental degradation routinely visited upon our cities by the effects of urban pollution and climate change. The fact that climate change is a global phenomenon doesn’t mean it affects all communities equally; in fact, numerous studies indicate that it affects the urban poor with disproportionate severity. Low-income neighborhoods, for example, are much more likely to be located in flood-prone flatlands than on hillsides. Poor children living in cities have been shown to suffer from asthma and other respiratory ailments made worse by climate change at rates far higher than their rural and suburban counterparts. And for an elderly apartment dweller on a fixed income, running the air conditioner at the height of summer may not always be an affordable option.
Climate change, in short, is as much of a social and economic issue as it is a scientific one. As Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, recently put it: “Climate action belongs in the national conversation we’re engaging in across the country — around kitchen tables and in the halls of the White House.” As the unveiling of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s historic Clean Power Plan earlier this week made clear, the Obama administration is taking climate change seriously at the regulatory level. But it’s comforting to hear from top officials like Donovan that this seriousness has also permeated discussions at a wide swath of federal agencies and Cabinet-level departments.
In part to answer a provocative question posed by Donovan himself — “Why do those who have the least stand to lose the most when the storm comes through?” — OMB recently hosted a presentation in Washington, D.C., titled “Building Climate Resilience for Equitable Communities.” In it, Donovan helped lay the conceptual groundwork for a new way of looking at climate action, not simply as a means of mitigation or triage but as an actual opportunity to be seized: a way of growing the economy and allowing for everyone to share in the growth. “Especially,” he notes, “those who have historically been left behind.”
As director of NRDC’s Urban Solutions program, I’m made newly aware each day of the ways that our cities still manage to fall short. Sprawl, neglect, pollution, few transportation options, the lack of public green space, and the small number of jobs are just some of the problems that continue to befall our urban centers and that can easily lead to frustration, cynicism, and social unrest.
But at the same time, I’m also made aware each day of the many ways our cities are improving — giving residents new reasons to feel connected, on all levels, to their communities. As it happens, one such improvement comes in the form of Watts Re:Imagined, a blueprint for sustainable urban revitalization that’s designed to promote economic opportunity, social equity, and environmental stewardship.
This initiative — representing a partnership between NRDC and the Grant Housing & Economic Development Corp, a 110-year-old Watts–based nonprofit — emerged in response to the 2011 shuttering of L.A.’s official agency for community redevelopment. In the void left by the city agency’s disappearance, Watts Re:Imagined has emerged as a homegrown action plan for marshaling the energies of residents, businesses, and community leaders in order to turn ideas into action. Its vision is at once hopeful and practical, ambitious and necessary, forward-looking and rooted in history.
Watts Re:Imagined will leverage an abundance of underutilized, community-based knowledge and expertise toward the creation of a new urban model, one that incorporates many of the ideas we now recognize as being integral to the health and prosperity of cities and their inhabitants. For example, on 103rd Street — a Watts thoroughfare that never fully recovered from the damage it sustained during the riots — the current streetscape marked by empty storefronts, vacant lots, and sunbaked sidewalks will be replaced with one where mixed-use buildings, public transit, enhanced park space, street trees, green infrastructure, and other forms of sustainable development will cohere into the vibrant, bustling whole we think of whenever we hear the words “urban village.” Schools, parks, the 103rd Street transit station, and other elements will be connected by a length of lushly planted, tree-shaded walkway that used to be a derelict and unsafe alley; the new “green alley” will do double duty, functioning not only as a pedestrian promenade but also as a means of filtering stormwater runoff.
With the increase in foot traffic that’s been shown to accompany such improvements, Main Street Watts (as the project is being called) will necessarily attract new businesses — stores, restaurants, cafés, and more — whose activity will only serve to reinforce the positive feedback loop of renewed vitality and growth. In a community where nearly two-thirds of residents lack a high-school diploma and where half the population earns less than $20,000 per year, the business-encouraging, job-creating dividend yielded by sustainable urban redevelopment has genuinely transformative potential.
As we’ve witnessed, tragically, over the last year, we’re still a long way from solving many of our biggest urban problems. Racial segregation, social and economic marginalization, and strained relationships between residents and the institutions that purport to serve them have clearly not gone away in the 50 years since Watts erupted. There aren’t any easy answers. But it’s important to note that there are answers. And they’re to be found in initiatives like Watts Re:Imagined — projects that recognize the direct, systemic relationship between a community’s economic health, its social health, and its environmental health.
Half a century ago, America watched in horror as Watts fell apart. Just a few years from now, I predict that we’ll all be watching — this time in awe — at what its residents have managed to build.
Written with Jeff Turrentine
