Hybrid Problem Solving

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-252
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Community Benefits ◽  
Real Estate Developer ◽  
Close Juxtaposition ◽  
The Will ◽  
Community Benefits Agreement

This chapter evaluates how the close juxtaposition of civic and noncivic in hybrid civic action provides better ways to discern whether or not, and how, nonprofits express the will of people in their immediate locale, and whether or not they pose an effective alternative to governmental action, as some commentators argue. All that should help clarify how civic action really works. The chapter focuses mostly on a locally prominent and successful, nonprofit affordable housing developer, Housing Solutions for Los Angeles (HSLA). It then compares HSLA briefly with efforts by a Tenants of South Los Angeles (ISLA) committee to administer the housing provisions of the community benefits agreement (CBA) that ISLA's campaign won from the Manchester apartments developer. This was a different kind of hybrid. ISLA's affordable housing work for the community ultimately was both financed and constrained by a big, for-profit real estate developer — the Manchester property owner.

How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Public Issue ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Housing Problem ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Conditions

This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.

What Is Winning?

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-175
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
Trade Offs

This chapter looks at scenes from the two main coalitions (Housing Justice and Tenants of South Los Angeles) to show just how different their campaigns were and why that matters, even though both fought for affordable housing. Accomplishments make sense only inside strategic arcs; scene style shapes the strategic choices advocates make. Scene style inflects the meaning of particular strategies and goals as well as winning itself. The chapter presents two trajectories of collective problem-solving that unfold on varying timelines, toward tentative and evolving goals. The two coalitions and their trajectories reveal different trade-offs that go with each, differently styled line of action. None of this is to imply that goals and outcomes themselves do not matter. In fact, accumulating evidence shows that different styles do shape outcomes that matter to advocates and the scholars who study them. There is much more to find out about how style contributes to outcomes as scholars usually treat them. The point is that one learns valuable and practical things when one understands particular outcomes in the context of strategic arcs that make those outcomes more, or less, meaningful to advocates and their constituencies.

How Low–Income Residents Can Benefit from Urban Development: The LA Live Community Benefits Agreement

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leland T. Saito
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Community Benefits ◽  
Political Resources ◽  
Community Benefits Agreement

Large urban development projects highlight the vast disparities in the economic and political resources controlled by developers as compared to low–income residents. Studies have documented the negative impact of such projects on neighborhoods, such as the displacement of residents. This case study of the largest development project in contemporary downtown Los Angeles analyzes how a community coalition that included low–income residents successfully negotiated with the developer the first comprehensive Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) in the nation. This 2001 CBA addressed the interests of low–income residents and now serves as a model for major CBAs across the country. This article draws upon regime theory and urban political economy in examining the resources, organizations, and coalition composition behind the CBA. It suggests that CBAs represent a significant increase in political power for low–income residents when they ally with service sector unions concerned about permanent, living wage jobs. Low–income residents drew upon neighborhood and immigrant networks to organize even non–citizens. The L.A. coalition could also take advantage of the political opportunity provided by the fragmentation of growth interests and the strong real estate market in the city.

Retail Workers

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-263
Author(s):  
Scott L. Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Community Support ◽  
Community Benefits ◽  
Public Subsidies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Bunker Hill ◽  
The City

This chapter charts the Los Angeles community benefits movement, launched at the turn of the millennium to strengthen low-income communities by transforming local redevelopment. The movement was built on an emergent partnership between community-based organizations promoting “equitable development” in the face of gentrification and labor movement groups, led by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), challenging the city-sponsored proliferation of low-wage jobs, especially in the multifaceted retail industry. The legal instrument used to codify campaign victories was the community benefits agreement, or CBA—a contract under which a developer agreed to provide specific levels of living wage jobs, affordable housing, and other benefits in exchange for community support for project approvals and public subsidies. Because CBAs offered a proactive response to redress negative development externalities through contractual compromise, they rested on a distinctive model of community organizing—leveraging the power of broad-based coalitions to extract benefits through negotiation—and thus enlisted a particular role for lawyers focused on strategic counseling and contract drafting. This chapter traces the evolution and outcomes of Los Angeles’s seminal community benefits campaigns: from the nation’s first CBA with the developer of a transformational downtown sports and entertainment complex anchored around the Staples Center, through a $500 million CBA centered on environmental mitigation in connection with the expansion of the L.A. International Airport, to the Grand Avenue CBA, which focused on affordable housing production in a proposed upscale development on downtown’s Bunker Hill. Following this arc, the chapter shows how the CBA movement conferred significant benefits on low-income communities and institutionalized pro-labor policy in the city—while also revealing tensions in the community-labor alliance at the movement’s heart and the limits of contract-based solutions to inequality.

Grocery Workers

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-310
Author(s):  
Scott L. Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Grocery Store ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Local Planning ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
Community Benefits ◽  
Big Box

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-268
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
Social Advocacy ◽  
New Policies

This concluding chapter presents the practical findings on coalitions and social advocacy. It argues that civic action is not intrinsically good or bad, polite or risky, enlightened or reactive, humane or hateful. Neither is it necessarily a substitute for governmental action; in the United States, growth in civic action has accompanied growth in governmental initiatives. Civic action comes with no guarantees. Los Angeles housing advocates fought for more power over decisions about housing made, or allowed, by local government and private developers. When governments institute new policies to address social problems, such as through affordable housing mandates, it is often because of the pressure of civic action. Yet civic action is not necessarily always “progressive.” Sometimes people engage collective problem-solving with the goal of reducing citizen steering power.

Who Can Say What, Where, and How?

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-197
Author(s):  
Paul Lichterman
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
Field Works ◽  
Discursive Field ◽  
Crucial Part

This chapter studies how advocates “construct” social problems through claims making. Claims are demands, criticisms, or declarative statements that actors make in relation to public debate. By definition then, claims makers publicize problems for collective problem-solving. Claims making is thus a crucial part of civic action. Claims making happens in the context of not only a style of interaction but also a set of conventional categories for making claims. A discursive field provides those basic symbolic categories that advocates on multiple sides use to make claims about a problem. Scene style keeps some ways of talking about social problems outside the discursive field altogether, and relegates others to marginal enclaves or subordinate status inside the field. Following the action of claims making in the Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalitions, one can learn how a discursive field works.

scholarly journals African Americans’ Access to Healthy Food Options in South Los Angeles Restaurants

2005 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 668-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaVonna Blair Lewis ◽  
David C. Sloane ◽  
Lori Miller Nascimento ◽  
Allison L. Diamant ◽  
Joyce Jones Guinyard ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Healthy Food ◽  
South Los Angeles

Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Training of High-Risk Teens in the Community of Watts, South Los Angeles, 2013–2014

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shamika Ossey ◽  
Sharon Sylvers ◽  
Sona Oksuzyan ◽  
Lisa V Smith ◽  
Douglas Frye ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Emergency Response ◽  
Low Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Risk Groups ◽  
First Aid ◽  
South Los Angeles ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Response Team ◽  
Cpr Training

AbstractThe Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) concept was initially developed for adult members of the community to help prepare for disasters and minimize damage when disasters occur. CERTs also served as a tool for building community capacity and self-sufficiency by supporting a diverse group of people working together in dealing with challenges affecting their communities. The novel approach to CERTs described here sought to involve high-risk youth from low-socioeconomic status communities in CERTs and first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training to help them build ties with communities, stay off the streets, and become leaders in the community. It also helped to provide different perspectives on life, while building more resilient communities better prepared to minimize damage when a disaster strikes. After the successful launch of the first high-risk teen CERT cohort in Watts (27 CERT-trained and 14 first aid/CPR-trained), the project was expanded to other community groups and organizations. Seven additional cohorts underwent CERT and first aid/CPR training in 2013 through 2014. This initiative increased CERT visibility within South Los Angeles. New partnerships were developed between governmental, nongovernmental, and community-based organizations and groups. This model can be used to expand CERT programs to other communities and organizations by involving high-risk teens or other high-risk groups in CERT training. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2017;11:605–609)

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