Taking the Long View of LA's Housing Crisis

Words by Nicole Shibata

Although I had been peripherally aware of the scrapbook since 2018, when I was hired as CSUN’s Metadata Librarian, it wasn’t until 2020 when conducting a metadata review of the Library’s digital collections that I began looking more closely at its contents. Part of my job is to oversee resource description of the library’s digital collections, which includes managing a lot of legacy metadata. With the transition to working from home in 2020  in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many new digital projects that required onsite labor were pushed to the back burner while cleanup and redescription projects (once deemed aspirational) could be done remotely and were shifted to the top of the priority list. The scrapbook had been digitized and published in the Library’s digital collections database in 2017 and although the original captions lacked much contextual information, many did include specific addresses and cross streets. Curious about what had become of these neighborhoods, I plugged the location information into Google Maps and discovered a long and complicated history of these spaces and the people who occupied them.

The need for low-income housing reached a critical point during the Great Depression, which had forced a record number of unemployed Americans out of homes they could no longer afford and into cheap, often makeshift structures, many within larger communities of shantytowns, or “Hoovervilles” as they were known at the time. The 1937 Housing Act established the United States Housing Authority (USHA), a federal agency that would provide $500 million to local authorities for “slum clearance” and low-income public housing. Los Angeles was one of the first cities to apply for Housing Act funding and was initially granted $25 million, the most any city in California had been awarded. 

The situation in Los Angeles was bad enough that the former president of the New York City Housing Authority commented during a visit to Los Angeles in 1939, that some areas on the East side “make New York slums look like Buckingham Palace.” While the city was quick to jump on Housing Act funding, the election of a new mayor who was critical of the project, along with wavering public opinion, and disagreements within City Council brought the plans to all but a standstill. With little progress made over three years, the USHA withdrew $10 million from the original award, leaving the city with $15 million. No longer able to fund the original 13 planned sites, the city moved forward with construction for 10 of them, one of which was William Mead Homes.

Planning photograph of site for William Mead Homes housing project showing railroad by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, courtesy of Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.

If you trace the history of the William Mead Homes site back to the early 20th century, you’ll find that the land it now sits on was owned by oil companies. During this time, LA was drilled heavily and for years crude oil was stored directly where the community stands today. A century later after many former residents were diagnosed with cancer, the soil was found to contain high levels of toxins. The city has since spent millions on cleanup efforts after facing multiple class action lawsuits filed by former residents of the complex.

The value of this land was also tied to its close proximity to the railroads. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, trains brought seasonal transient workers, primarily poor, white men who lived in hotels and other low-cost accommodations near the Southern Pacific Railroad depot, the area now known as Skid Row. In City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965, Kelly Lytle Hernández notes the strong political influence Anglo-American homeowners held at the time. Outraged by the growing influx of “tramps'' and “hobos'' into the Downtown core, they urged city leaders to take action. As a result, the city began incarcerating people in large numbers for vagrancy, ultimately growing the region’s prison system and setting an early precedent for how the city would respond to the homeless and precariously housed population for decades to come. 

Left: Photo of a home on Florizel Street from the Poor Housing Conditions in Los Angeles Scrapbook, 1938. Right: Florizel Street adjacent to Rose Hill Courts, 2021. Photograph courtesy of the author.

The other locations represented in Siegel’s scrapbook all fall within historically low-income neighborhoods or commercial and industrial areas like Skid Row in Downtown LA and Vernon. Only one other site besides William Mead Homes could be mapped to an existing housing development. Rose Hill Courts, a smaller, 100-unit housing project located in Montecito Heights, was also constructed in 1942 and photos from the scrapbook depict the original site as a rural, hilly area with dwellings spread out across what is now known as Rose Hill Park. The agrarian, hillside setting evokes early images of Chavez Ravine, the thriving Mexican-American hillside community in nearby Elysian Park that was destroyed in 1959 to make way for Dodger Stadium.

Several images linked to addresses on Pine Street, Effie Street and Yolo Drive appear in the scrapbook but do not show up on current maps of LA. Pre-1960 maps of the area, however, reveal these to be streets in the former Chavez Ravine community. Incidentally, Chavez Ravine was slated to be completely redeveloped for public housing and a major expansion of Rose Hill Courts was planned after the city received funding from the post-war Housing Act of 1949. Plans for both of these projects, which together made up more than half of the 10,000 housing units proposed across the city, were eventually dropped amid growing political backlash against public housing. 

Many visual records of LA’s poorest and most vulnerable communities exist in archives across the state. If you search for images of Los Angeles slums in Calisphere, a digital repository of California primary source material, you’ll find over 400 results across 12 collections and seven institutions. While Siegel’s scrapbook is not entirely unique, it provides a compelling example of how the histories of these spaces remain peripheral to the dominant, hegemonic narratives that continue to define and inform policy in our cities. It also reminds us how well-positioned we are as information professionals in reframing these histories. By digging a little deeper into the data, we can provide important alternate access points and context to our descriptive practices and significantly expand opportunities for discovery and understanding. 

More stories