The Future of Watts

Watts is marked for a massive redevelopment effort. The project, recently approved by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency board, will aim at revitalizing more than 1,900 acres of decaying homes, public housing projects, small businesses and industrial sites. More than two decades after the angry riots of 1965, a combination of economic, transportation and political factors makes the revitalization of the depressed area a real possibility.

Nationally, the problems of the inner city have grown worse over the last two decades. Despite a high rate of poverty in black ghetto areas before 1960, rates of joblessness, out-of-wedlock births, families headed by females, teen-age pregnancies, welfare dependency, serious crime, drug addiction and gang violence did not begin to rise rapidly until after the mid-1960s, and did not begin to reach catastrophic proportions until the mid-1970s. The Census Bureau reported recently that minority poverty is once again on the rise; the proportion of black Americans living in poverty was 33.1% in 1987, up from 31.1% in 1986.

Watts is 86% black and 13% Latino. Although there are numerous pockets of well-maintained single-family homes, much of the area is physically and economically blighted. Many of the area’s 56,000 residents are poor, and many are on welfare--especially those in the run-down, dangerous housing projects like Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs. Unemployment among young black youths in Los Angeles County is above 40%. In Los Angeles County as a whole, 19% of the house-holds have annual incomes under $10,000, but in Watts the figure is an appalling 48%.

The proposed project would be 10 times the size of the first Watts redevelopment venture, which was started in 1966 and is now nearly complete. The initial project concentrated on rebuilding the commercial strip along 103rd Street and Compton Avenue that was burned out during the riots. After years of arm-twisting, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley finally found a major supermarket, Boys Market, willing to do business in Watts. To the surprise of skeptics, the Martin Luther King Jr. Shopping Center is an economic success.

Because of financial incentives that Watts can offer as both a city redevelopment area and a state and federal enterprise zone, officials believe that they will be able to attract new commercial and industrial ventures to the area. In addition, the completion in the early 1990s of the Century Freeway on the south and the light rail line from downtown to Long Beach on the east, combined with the Harbor Freeway on the west, will make Watts easily accessible to the Harbor area, the airport and downtown, and therefore attractive to light industry.

Politically, redevelopment in Watts makes sense for at least three reasons: First, Bradley is up for reelection and South-Central Los Angeles is one of his electoral bases. Second, critics say that the redevelopment agency has concentrated too much on downtown projects and not enough on reviving blighted neighborhoods and providing low-income housing. Third, the next President--whether George Bush or Michael S. Dukakis--will probably be more attuned to cities than President Reagan has been.

The difficult problems of inner-city neighborhoods like Watts require persistent efforts aimed at root causes--not symptoms. The serious social troubles of the black ghetto will not be corrected until there is a significant increase in employment in the inner city and the emergence of a stable middle class whose members can serve as social role models. The new drive to revitalize Watts must keep these two goals high on the agenda.