LOS ANGELES: DODGER STADIUM
The Mexican-American community of Palo Verde, before-and-after the government forcibly evicted residents and demolished the neighborhood to make way for Dodger Stadium in 1959.
Ostensibly for the purpose of building public housing on the site, the city had begun seizing the land through eminent domain in late 1950, using predatory tactics to coerce residents to sell their homes at significantly deflated prices (1). Public housing was never built. Looking to attract a Major League baseball team (as LA was by far the largest city without one), the city instead offered the land to Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for the purpose of building a stadium. O’Malley accepted the city’s generous offer (with the city transferring the land virtually free of charge, and even offering to pay for the extensive land regrading that would be required for the project), moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958 (2). The following year, to begin construction on the new Dodger Stadium, the city sent LA County Sheriffs to forcibly remove the remaining families from Palo Verde (and the neighboring communities of La Loma and Bishop), seen in the third image. After dragging the remaining residents out of their houses, government wrecking crews proceeded to immediately demolish the remaining structures, with residents watching as their homes were destroyed. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.
The publicly-funded destruction of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop for the construction of the privately-owned Dodger Stadium is yet another instance in which “urban renewal” funding (specifically from the 1949 Federal Housing Act, responsible for many of the projects covered on Segregation by Design) ultimately led to the dispossession and destruction of a community that public authorities viewed as “undesirable” (3). Even had public housing been built, the destructive nature of the project would have transformed a community of homeowners into a community of renters (4), depriving residents of one of the primary sources of generational wealth.
When the public housing project was canceled in 1953 (due to Red Scare-era fears that public housing represented “creeping socialism”), rather than returning residents’ property or putting the land to public use, the city used it as leverage to attract a sports franchise, transferring the land back to private interests in the process (i.e., the Dodgers).
Forces opposed to the Dodgers project filed a lawsuit against the city in 1959, citing the stipulation that land acquired under the 1949 Housing Act be used for the “public good.” “Federal law required the city to reserve the land of Chavez Ravine for appropriate public purpose after the public housing project had been abandoned,” writes Laylaa Abdul-Khabir for UCLA Law Review. “The legal question was whether a baseball team and its privately-owned stadium could qualify as public purpose under the Federal Housing Act.” The case ultimately made it to the California Supreme Court, which sided with the Dodgers, “permitting ‘public purpose’ to be interpreted in a way that could grant substantial private gain.” (5)
Similar to how the city acquired the entirety of Bunker Hill through eminent domain, evicted residents and demolished the neighborhood, then offered the land to developers virtually free of charge (see previous posts for more on Bunker Hill), the destruction of the Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop is another instance of tax-payer funded “urban renewal” being used for private gain at the direct expense of marginalized communities (6).
ENDNOTES
1. Davis, Mike. “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.” Verso, 1990.
2. Caragozian, John. “Chavez Ravine and the Dodgers: Myths and Realities.” Los Angeles Daily Journal, 2021. https://www.cschs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/History-Resources-Caragozian-Chavez-Ravine-the-Dodgers.pdf.pdf
3. Davis
4. Nusbaum, Eric. “Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Live Caught in Between.” Public Affairs, 2020.
5. Abdul-Khabir, Laylaa. “From Chavez Ravine to Inglewood: How Stadiums Facilitate Displacement in Los Angeles.” UCLA Law Review, 2018. https://www.uclalawreview.org/from-chavez-ravine-to-inglewood-how-stadiums-facilitate-displacement-in-los-angeles/
6. For more on this phenomenon, see Harvey, David. “The Political Economy of Public Space.” https://davidharvey.org/media/public.pdf