A piece on the humor site Cracked, "4 Thriving Communities That Rich People Destroyed On Purpose," tells an old story: modest-but-decent places "redeveloped" into (1) Dodger Stadium, (2) Brazil's Olympic venues; (3) the Salton Sea, and (4) Central Park, respectively.
(We note that the segment on the Salton Sea is the odd man out, and we can't figure out how that one fits with the other three. But no matter.)
In telling the story of the destruction of Los Angeles' Chavez Ravine to make way for the ballpark, the piece links to the above video, which contains interviews with many of the Ravine's former residents. The video also recounts how, using eminent domain, the City of Los Angeles condemned the homes in the village, supposedly to make way for a new, modern housing project.
The homeowners were offered about $10,000 for their homes and promised that they would have first rights to units in the new buildings. But predictably, the amount of compensation they were provided was legally inadequate as well as insufficient to purchase replacement homes elsewhere in LA, and the promised housing project was never built, only the stadium. The video also shows that even one of the head planners of the housing project was unaware of the real end game and the forces at play. For more, see Angeleno Gideon Kanner's multiple takes on Chavez Ravine here. As we were reminded recently when we revisited our review of the documentary "You've Been Trumped," new and flashy isn't always better, and many people may prefer modest and comfortable to promises of the latest and greatest.
At the same time, there's the danger of viewing the past through an overly romantic lens, particularly when the former residents of Chavez Ravine interviewed in the film who recalled life there fondly were by and large children when they resided there. Kids can have a much different view of the hardships of life than their parents. I was reminded of that by my parents' experiences: both grew up in depression-era America, mom in a dirt-floored, corrugated steel roofed house on an Oahu sugar plantation (now the site of Aloha Stadium), and dad in a rural town in upstate New York. Yes, they had family and community, but life was also very, very difficult. Although later they both looked back with some nostalgia, neither thought that they had made a mistake in leaving the hardships of their youths.
But they had the choice to leave that life behind. And maybe that is the difference between their view, and those of the former residents of Chavez Ravine, who were forced out and had no say in their own destinies. The video shows that even decades on, the pain of being deprived of a choice remains palpable.
