Urban Theater: The Drama and Ceaseless Advancement of Gentrification in Los Angeles
Illustrated Essay By Michael Shaw
Construction workers perform on stages as you make your way through urban space. Their work may be banal, repetitive, and predictable. These set builders craft our current and future cityscapes.
Where is the urban landscape not changing? Or perhaps: How fast is the urban landscape changing?
Zanja St., Culver West, Sept. 2022 (The Possibilities Are Endless), Digital photo, Dimensions variable, 2022.
Images © Michael Shaw.
Act 1: The Lot
Curtain opens. After a house has been razed, there is a very brief period when the lot is at rest, no more than a field of dirt.
Los Angeles is in a serious housing crisis. The Westside of Los Angeles, where I live, seems to be in a perpetual state of development. The area is inherently valuable due to its proximity to both the coast and mountains, and has become a second or third home to many tech companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and WeWork. Since moving to the Westside over a decade ago, I have witnessed not just gentrification, but advanced gentrification.
“Los Angeles is in a serious housing crisis.”
According to the UCLA Urban Displacement Project (UDP) (1), as of 2018, 10% of census tracts in LA County are classified as either “At Risk of Gentrification,” “Early/Ongoing Gentrification,” or “Advanced Gentrification.” One of the frequent explanations-cum-remedies to the housing crisis is that the city needs to build more affordable housing. But most of the building being done is luxury housing (2). Developers recognize that there is much more money to be made in high-end housing, so that is what they develop. There are zoning laws mandating new developments to have a certain number of affordable units in order for the developer to obtain a credit or be able to build in the first place. However, the limited “affordable” units are not enough to make any noticeable dent in the overall demand (3).
A neighborhood’s home values are most deeply affected by house flipping and redevelopment. A couple years prior to the start of the pandemic, my immediate neighbor sold his modest one-bedroom built in 1950 because he had some debts and wanted to retire. The lot included a very small guest house in the back. The property was listed as an 866-square-foot house on a 5,227-square-foot lot (about 0.12 acres). It sold for $1.05 million. Over the course of a year, the home was leveled and became a two-story, four-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom house that sold for $2.13 million in the summer of 2019.
Why is this happening?
(1) The UDP is a research and action initiative of the University of California Berkeley and the University of Toronto. UDP conducts community-centered, data-driven, applied research toward more equitable and inclusive futures for cities.
(2) Los Angeles is first in the nation in sales of luxury properties, according to Compass, the largest independent real estate brokerage in the United States.
(3) The term “affordable” is based on a percentage of median area income, which often is high to begin with, and thus not quite affordable to many potential renters.
The Possibilities Are Endless (Grand View house), Cyanotype on paper; 18 x 26 in, 2021.
Act 2: The Foundation
Concrete is poured. The beginning of a house or apartment building’s structure is the evenly spaced two-by-fours, vertical and horizontal.
Chuck Collins of Inequality.org (4) describes Los Angeles as “experiencing an empty homes crisis alongside acute homelessness.” He continues, “Tens of thousands of housing units are being withheld from the market by speculators and anonymous ownership entities (including trusts, LLCs and shell corporations) that are simultaneously overproducing luxury housing and fueling displacement, homelessness and a crisis in housing affordability.” Much of this land grab is invisible. What is overtly visible is the number of single-family homes and luxury apartment buildings going up daily. I have been persistently documenting, in photographs and cyanotypes, several construction projects I drive by en route to my studio. For over a year, a two-story Cape-Cod-style mansion went up a block from where I live. About a mile away, a slightly more modest pair of Cape Cod-style homes, ubiquitous in this part of town, were recently completed after about another year of construction.
So who actually builds all these structures?
“I have been persistently documenting, in photographs and cyanotypes, several construction projects I drive by en route to my studio.”
(4) Inequality.org has been tracking inequality-related news and views for nearly two decades. A project of the Institute for Policy Studies since 2011, the site aims to provide information and insights for readers ranging from educators and journalists to activists and policy makers.
A pair of homes in progress in the imitation Cape Cod-style on the Westside, adjacent to the 405 freeway.
Act 3: The Laborers
Set builders move about the stage. Workers perform a range of jobs over the course of a house’s construction. They often wear orange or neon yellow long-sleeved t-shirts, and occasionally hard hats, but not as often as you might think.
As far as who’s building all this, that can partially be answered by writer Carol Mithers’ probing article in Los Angeles Magazine about the “Great White Box” phenomenon. When analyzing gentrification, acknowledging how race and class come into play is key. Not only does gentrification disproportionately affect minority communities (5), but the construction workers doing the manual labor on these development projects are overwhelmingly made up of immigrant and Latinx workers, some of whom are undocumented (6). According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Hispanics (7) are overrepresented in the construction industry.” The same study reports that, “In 2020, 30.0 percent of construction workers were Hispanic, a share considerably higher than their 17.6-percent share of the total employed.” Arguably, the more prominent statistic is that “Hispanics accounted for 46.7 percent of construction laborers and 52.5 percent of painters and paperhangers, considerably higher than their share of those employed in the construction industry (30.0 percent).”
“When analyzing gentrification, acknowledging how race and class come into play is key.”
How much do construction laborers earn?
As of May 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the hourly mean wage is $32.86 within the construction and extraction industry in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metropolitan area. Though we can't lean on this number too heavily—it is not mentioned where day laborers fit into this data—let us assume that that hourly wage is a reasonable ballpark figure. A construction worker’s annual income, in the $68k range by the above metric, is not going to afford the buying power to purchase the house they are laboring on. And that gap separating worker from homeowner in Los Angeles is just one iteration of the inequality gap.
As an artist, I have a tangential relationship with construction workers as far as proximity, but otherwise we exist in entirely different worlds. My interest in homes, meanwhile, is bookended by my consumption of The New York Times’s real estate section on the one side, and my participation in the LA Tenants Union on the other. Much of my mission as an artist making work about housing involves reconciling these dichotomies.
How do we bridge the divides between blingy consumption, housing rights, and quality-of-life upheaval?
(5) According to a study done in December 2020 by a Stanford sociologist named Jackelyn Hwang, the negative effects of gentrification are felt disproportionately by minority communities, whose residents have fewer options of neighborhoods they can move to compared to their white counterparts.
(6) Undocumented labor is not included in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. For undocumented labor, there are no protections for how much they can make, and it is quite possible they are even more exploited.
(7) Though the US Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the term “Hispanics,” Space On Space acknowledges that this term is often inaccurate and debated. The AP Stylebook recommends the term Latinx/o/a/é generally to refer to people with origins in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Sawtelle, 2x4 Roof Phase (wide), Cyanotype on paper, 18.5 x 28 in, 2022.
Act 4: The Roof
A loud hammering noise echoes across the auditorium as a bold spotlight beams above a laborer's head. Yet another phase of a home’s construction reveals one variation or another of a roof structure. The most pleasing is the classic A-frame, as it taps into our earliest formulations of what a house looks like.
One snapshot of this labor inequality is what wealth editor Robert Frank calls the “Aspen effect”:
Wealthy residents have long since bid up real estate prices in Aspen and other exclusive resort communities to levels that virtually exclude middle- and low-income families. Most of the people who provide services in these communities – teachers, policemen, firemen, laundry and restaurant workers – must therefore commute, often at considerable distance. As a result, all roads into Aspen are clogged morning and night with commuters, many of whom come from several hours away.
I recall Santa Barbara as epitomizing this effect. With a city population of well under 100,000 residents, but a county population well over 400,000, many of those workers have to come from outside the city itself.
How do construction sites function in our day-to-day lives?
Grand View House, 2 Workers, 1 Truck, Cyanotype on paper, 18.5 x 28 in, 2022.
Act 5: Curtain Call
Construction labor, even if on private land, is often in public view. As participants in an absurdist urban theater, their work is inevitably caught up in capitalism’s status quo. The rest of us toil away in the privacy of stores, (home) offices, factories, and workshops. Construction workers do so out in the open.
Have you ever heard what sounds like an army of power sanders whirring near your house? The work on a construction site is done, for the most part, on private property, but the sound carries down the block. With bigger private projects, the construction activity extends out onto the road, closing off one of two or three lanes, sometimes for months at a time. The work becomes a destabilizer of both public and private life. Other than noisy distractions to be tolerated, the pace of construction projects is slow, but steady. Workers swiftly and confidently make their way around the uppermost two-by-fours of a high-end apartment build, scale the roof of a single-family build, or work in the shadows of the scaffolding.
Where does one even begin to challenge this status quo?
First, assess where you fall within this urban theater. If you are like many Angelenos just trying to get by, you may feel powerless when facing the massive problems in this city. Ask yourself, “Where do I have privileges and power, and how can I use what I have to make positive change?” I advise starting small, but starting somewhere: Mobilize local voters, or work on city council campaigns. Get involved with your local tenants' rights organization. Let’s hold our city council members and private developers accountable, one way or another.
“First, assess where you fall within this urban theater.”
Michael Shaw is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. Shaw is also the creator and host of The Conversation Art Podcast, launched in 2011. His work was included in the recent exhibition Sociality at LA Tate Gallery, It’s My House! at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, and has been exhibited nationally. He is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. He has been a member of the LA Tenants Union since 2019 where he advocates for tenant empowerment, helps guide tenants in crisis, and attempts to address the more egregious threats that further gentrification. As a Westside local, Shaw is the creator and head of the architectural-based art project, “Housing’s Final Frontier.”
Work Cited
"California Estimated Displacement Risk Model." UCLA Urban Displacement Project, www.urbandisplacement.org/maps/california-estimated-displacement-risk-model/.
Feder, Sandra. "Stanford Professor's Study Finds Gentrification Disproportionately Affects Minorities." Stanford University News, 1 Dec. 2020, news.stanford.edu/2020/12/01/gentrification-disproportionately-affects-minorities/.
Frank, Robert H. "Traffic and Tax Cuts." The New York Times, 11 May 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/05/11/opinion/traffic-and-tax-cuts.html.
Mithers, Carol. "Homes That Look Like Big White Boxes Have Taken Over the Westside’s Landscape." Los Angeles Magazine, 2 Nov. 2018, www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/great-white-box/.
"Occupational Employment and Wages in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim–May 2022." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8 June 2023, www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalemploymentandwages_losangeles.htm.
Quintana, Dolores. "Los Angeles Is First in the Nation for Luxury Home Sales." The New York Times, 11 Feb. 2022, smmirror.com/2022/02/los-angeles-is-first-in-the-nation-for-luxury-home-sales/.
"Tenants Unions in North America." Autonomous Tenants Union Network, atun-rsia.org/tenants-unions.
Recommended Reading
LA Development Map is regularly updated and shows exactly which Los Angeles neighborhoods are experiencing a real estate boom – mostly upscale apartments and commercial buildings – according to this City Watch article.
