Planning the Barrio: Racial Order and Restructuring in Neoliberal Los Angeles

Abstract

Scholarship examining the legacy of early twentieth-century zoning and real estate practices on present-day urban landscapes has provided significant insight into the ways public officials appraised communities of color at the national and city scale. However, less is known about how local policy makers evaluated communities of color through the social movements of the 1970s and austerity policies of the 1980s. Analyzing Los Angeles City planning and administrative archives from the 1970s to 1990s, I assess how local policy makers arrived at regarding historically racialized and disinvested places such as Boyle Heights as potential sites of investment during the last quarter of the twentieth century. I find that city policy makers briefly categorized Boyle Heights as fit for preservation grounded in its socioracial composition and, later, designated the barrio as ancillary to intensifying efforts to revitalize downtown. Following the evolution of appraisals of land use during this period of transformation historicizes contemporary gentrification processes.