Cara DiMassa at the L.A. Times reports that the inescapable currents of gentrification are oozing farther south toward Washington Blvd. That's right near Trade-Tech College, along the Blue Line. Had a hunch.
A while back I was walking along that street trying to imagine myself living in one of those crumbling industrial buildings. Most of them appeared empty. A few housed small garmentmaking operations. Still, the streets seemed pretty vibrant. And the signs were everywhere: redone buildings, new little shops. "Welcome to Gentrification City."
But, as DiMassa's story notes, the city's new "Opportunity Area" is already claiming victims. Next hot hood? San Bernardino? The commuting working-class is always at the cutting-edge. From Mike Davis in The Nation:
Soaring rents are relentlessly driving the families of low-wage workers toward the desert and far away from major job concentrations. The hard-core poor -- senior citizens, the handicapped, parolees and families cut from welfare -- are also being expelled to the hinterlands. This is the second, more pathological source of the Inland Empire's demographic dynamism. As one local economist complained recently: "What you are seeing is the exporting [of] the coastal communities' problems to the inland region." Indeed, during the 1990s individual poverty increased 51 percent in San Bernardino County and 63 percent in Riverside County.