From Boom to Bust – L.A.’s Public Housing Legacy
Trudi Sandmeier 00:07
This is Save As, a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier, Director of Graduate Programs in Heritage Conservation, and an Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture at USC.
Willa Seidenberg 00:22
And I’m Willa Seidenberg, Professor of Professional Practice in USC’s School of Journalism, and the producer of this podcast Save As.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:31
So we’re having a little bit of a timeout with our other co host. And we’re wishing her well.
Willa Seidenberg 00:37
We do wish her well.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:39
Indeed. But we today are here to talk a little bit about the legacy of public housing here in Los Angeles. So, in Los Angeles garden apartments are pretty common. They’re a pretty normal part of the everyday built environment of our city. And the public housing that we have is part of that garden apartment legacy. And really, it’s kind of an interesting history. It was developed between the wars between World War I and World War II, because it was a really forward thinking, great housing type that works well in a climate like we have here in Southern California. Two storey apartments that have access to green space in between and are human-scaled, not big, tall apartment buildings, but everyday apartment blocks that were low-scaled.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:36
The legacy of public housing is really different than many people think because they think of places like Pruitt Igoe, right, and the really notorious large-scale apartment blocks that were basically repositories for folks who didn’t have access to resources and didn’t have money. And were really down and out. And that it was kind of a vicious cycle, that once you lived in public housing you could never get out of. And the developers who were looking at creating public housing here in Los Angeles, were really going after a totally different model.
Willa Seidenberg 02:25
Yeah, it was really seen as a way to bring housing to the great number of workers and, later after the war, veterans who needed housing because Los Angeles was a growing place. There wasn’t enough housing for all the industry, the aerospace industry, when the war came along, there was a lot of war-driven needs. And public housing was seen as a way to get some nice housing for people that really needed it. The other thing that’s interesting about the public housing in Los Angeles is many of the architects that we associate with really incredible architecture in this city designed public housing in Los Angeles.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:15
Robert Alexander, Richard Neutra, Reginal Johnson, Lloyd Wright, Paul Revere Williams, these are all important architects who were doing work in Los Angeles. And they too, were part of this effort to build this housing. That was workforce housing was not excessively ornate or fancy, but it was considered humane and livable, and much needed for the folks who were coming to work in the wartime industries during the war. And then the veterans who were coming home after the war and needed a place to live in a place to call home. And this public housing served that need.
Willa Seidenberg 03:59
Yeah, and I think that what the interview that we’re going to hear today really points out is that there were great aims for public housing, it in the end did not become the projects that the designers hoped it would be, because it really was not funded. And it was not supported in the way that it should have been to make it be a successful program. And in fact, we can look at the demise of public housing, we can go back to Ronald Reagan, who in his first year, cut in half the budget for public housing. So that was really, I think, the beginning of the end of the success of public housing.
Trudi Sandmeier 04:43
And it doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. It’s not built in the same way. Now affordable housing is the path that the development world has gone in. And certainly that is the way that government agencies are intervening in helping to subsidize affordable housing, but it’s not the same path as it was when this public housing was originally created. So let’s take a moment and have a little listen to Willa’s conversation with Lesley-Anne Palaroan, and her research that she did for her thesis, but also what she’s been doing since then. So here’s Willa and Leslie.
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Willa Seidenberg 04:43
Welcome to the podcast, Leslie. And I’m really excited to hear about you and what you’re doing. Can you first give us a little idea of your background?
Leslie Palaroan 05:43
My background, in undergrad I studied architecture. And then the economy crashed in 2011. And I ended up doing a couple years with Habitat for Humanity as an AmeriCorps and I was building houses in Baltimore, rehabbing a lot of their row houses because the city decided to use their vacant housing as affordable housing. Through that process, I realize, okay, you can’t just build housing in the middle of nowhere and no next to any sort of grocery stores or schools, so I really started getting into urban planning. So I decided to get my master’s in urban planning. So the Price School of Public Policy at first, and then I found that the USC School of Architecture had a Heritage Conservation Program. And I was at the time I was really interested in anti-displacement work, gentrification. I was also an intern at East LA Community Corporation. So I was there really looking at some of the struggles that a lot of folks in Boyle Heights and East LA had in terms of staying in the community, keeping their homes, being able to get to work. A lot of folks were getting displaced to Inland Empire.
Leslie Palaroan 07:15
So that’s how I came to heritage conservation, more so from a preservation of housing standpoint. And I was also the intangible aspect of heritage conservation. I know with heritage conservation, there’s a lot of emphasis on the building itself, integrity, the material fabric, but I really liked that the program talked about the intangible too, like, how do you retain the community that was once there? How do you support communities as they change. But I’m also a first generation immigrant. And I feel like this is a typical story that we move to the United States from the Philippines, you come into a house that’s overcrowded because you have your parents there, aunts, and uncles, and then after a while, you’ll build up enough money to move into another house. And I feel like housing is really a way for people to not only build wealth, but also build the communities that they want, build the spaces that they want, be able to pull themselves out of poverty.
Willa Seidenberg 08:30
So you had been working with the East LA Community Corporation, and then you started the Heritage Conservation Program. I’m curious to know if there were any issues or projects you had been working on that you looked at differently after you went through the program or when you started the program.
Leslie Palaroan 08:52
So when I was at East LA Community Corporation, or ELACC, I was working on Boyle Hotel. And I was an intern at the time, so it was a bunch of closeout documents, making sure that everybody was done with the project. Everybody was in compliance with how we had rehabbed the project. It didn’t occur to me until later on that we were getting awards from the L.A. Conservancy and all of these other groups about how well we turned that building into affordable housing. Not only was it affordable housing, there is a Mariachi Union on the ground floor. And I thought to myself, okay, this is great. We did affordable housing, we did historic preservation, we don’t have to tear this building down. And then we’re also able to keep the mariachis in the neighborhood and connect them to jobs which also combats with anti-displacement.
Leslie Palaroan 09:46
We were also working on Linda Vista, which used to be a hospital, it’s in Boyle Heights, but that was also rehabbed into affordable housing for seniors, and that also got awards. And then we had a community organizing department. And at the time, there was this fight about Wyvernwood Apartments. And there was a big developer that wanted to come in and tear down all of these garden apartments. And we were looking at that, from a housing preservation standpoint, where we couldn’t have all of our Boyle Heights residents move and get displaced by this huge developer. So I started to connect the dots. And we can really use heritage conservation in a way that not only retains the built environment, but also the families in this community.
Willa Seidenberg 10:45
Yeah, it’s really great how you were able to make that connection with the real work that you were doing and seeing on the ground. You wrote your thesis on public housing, and conservation, which I think is such an interesting idea. How did you get interested in writing about public housing, in particular, and within that, I think we should also make the distinction between what people consider public housing and affordable housing.
Leslie Palaroan 11:16
I became interested in writing about public housing, because as I was working on affordable housing, there was always this talk amongst the developers and the contractors like, can you not make this building look like it’s public housing, or affordable housing, because a lot of people think that affordable housing can look cheap, or way too colorful, or a bunch of stucco. So we were always grappling because of the financial constraints of how can we make this affordable housing not look like it’s cheap. But it was always in my mind, like, I don’t want this affordable housing development to look like public housing. That’s what a lot of affordable housing developers think. Often people think, even affordable housing advocates, they think of how public housing as a failure, they think about Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, they also think about Cabrini Green in Chicago, and they’re these big, modernist buildings that eventually over time, because HUD didn’t have enough money, started becoming deteriorated, dilapidated. A lot of folks saw those towers as places where you really concentrated poverty and segregated people racially.
Willa Seidenberg 12:50
You know, one thing though, I think that is interesting about LA is that it wasn’t really just started for poor people. I mean, wasn’t it really to just add some, you know, a lot of housing because they needed housing for workers. I don’t know if that was true other in other parts of the country
Leslie Palaroan 13:08
I think in other places in the United States public housing was to address all of the industrial work that was happening in the central cities, as well as to further segregate people, unfortunately. But in the case of Los Angeles, you had this influx of folks from the South coming in to help after World War II with the industry, but also the shipyards. So you had folks from the South coming in, you also had a lot of folks that were undocumented, helping out with the growth of Los Angeles. So, in Los Angeles it’s interesting because it’s different in the sense that public housing was a way to not only house so many people that are helping out with the city’s growth, but to also racially integrate, folks. Unlike what was happening on the East Coast or the Midwest, it was really a chance for the housing authority to integrate folks to retain and to retain workers at that time. I’m from the Bay Area. So when I went to LA, I would visit my friend who lives in Watts. And every time I would take the Blue Line, it was just very, a very distinct building type. Like it was built after the Radburn plan, which really emphasized cars at the perimeter, superblock acres of land and greenery around the one or two story buildings. So whenever I would go around LA, I would just think to myself, Oh, man, it’s clear that that’s public housing. But at the same time, I was curious as to why so many people really dis-invested in public housing? And how did these building types come about in the first place?
Willa Seidenberg 15:09
And how would you distinguish the kinds of public housing that you talked about in your thesis that you see in LA, from those modernist towers that you see in Chicago and in the East.
Leslie Palaroan 15:25
So the architects for the public housing in LA at the time, they really wanted to take advantage of the fact that we have good weather in LA, the fact that we have a lot of sunlight, and they were really driven to racially integrate the families and the residents. So that’s why there was a big emphasis on having only one to two storys, having windows that look out to the greenery. So if you’re a parent, and you’re in the public housing, you can see your kids playing with your neighbors friends. And it gotten to this point where a lot of people were concerned about how public housing was all over the place. And some people thought that HACLA was a communist agency.
Willa Seidenberg 16:19
And HACLA would be the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles.
Leslie Palaroan 16:24
Right, right. So people were thinking HACLA’s communists, they want to give housing to everybody. Why does HACLA want to racially integrate everybody, and the fact that McCarthyism was around, a lot of folks were concerned, and that eventually led to the demise of a lot of investment in public housing. And then, because public housing had such a stigmatization around it, a lot of folks decided to not use public housing anymore. They scrapped that whole idea and HUD started investing in just affordable housing and affordable housing is different from public housing.
Willa Seidenberg 17:10
Do they even build public housing anymore?
Leslie Palaroan 17:14
No, they don’t. You leverage low income housing tax credits in order to get public and private equity to build affordable housing as opposed to public housing. You’re primarily dependent on HUD and federal sources to fund everything, whether it’s the maintenance, the vouchers, the programs. So affordable housing is more widely used now to provide housing for low income residents.
Willa Seidenberg 17:53
So why did you see public housing projects here in LA as potential preservation projects?
Leslie Palaroan 18:03
I saw public housing projects as potential preservation projects, not only from the historical standpoint, as I was looking through the documents, I didn’t realize that the garden apartments in particular, and HACLA, were able to be the first public housing developments to racially integrate families. At the time when public housing was being built in Austin, and other areas in the country, they used public housing to actually segregate people. But also the fact that the style of the building is so apparent because of the way that the building was built, the green spaces, as well as the superblocks that they inhabit. And then from another standpoint would be that I think that affordable housing is such a need. So in the case of some of these projects, like I had mentioned William Mead, in Chinatown, there was a lot of worry amongst the residents at the time, that my thesis that the whole thing would get demo-ed. And so a lot of the residents are looking at public housing from a preservation of housing standpoint, and then you have the preservation folks looking at the garden apartments from a standpoint of not only architectural integrity, but from a historical standpoint. So when you bring those two together, not only do you retain a historic resource, you’re able to look at the past and see how many people actually strove to provide housing for people.
Willa Seidenberg 20:02
Yeah, I think it’s interesting because you mentioned that a lot of people felt like public housing was a failed policy. But when you look at the rise of homelessness in, particularly California, you sort of realize that at least there was a home, there was a place for people to live, whether maybe people outside of those projects thought that they were good places or not. Did you meet with people who lived in the public housing projects and talk to them about their feelings about their buildings being demolished.
Leslie Palaroan 20:40
So in my thesis I talked to, I have a friend that lived in William Mead apartments, and she didn’t know all of the history around the garden apartments and public housing. Once I told her about it, she was really proud that that had happened. And then, from actually living there, she really thought that her buildings were very sturdy. There was this funny situation that happened, because I told her a lot of preservationists are very particular about windows. And I told her, well, preservationists want you to keep the metal windows. And then you have HACLA wanting to turn it into vinyl windows. And then she said, well, I would want to keep it steel metal windows, because I could hear somebody breaking into my apartment. So that was pretty interesting to me that there was the connect there. But in terms of some, there were some residents that I had interviewed in Jordan Downs, and a lot of them were in support of actually razing the public housing because it just brings a lot of bad memories. And a lot of deferred maintenance and having to just trying to survive in not so great housing conditions. So you have a mixed bag, like a lot of folks were proud that they live there because they had created these connections with not only themselves because they were able to play outside with their kids, but they also had connections with their neighbors. And because they were living with really low income, they depended on one another in order to survive. Then you also have people that think, oh, they just really segregated us in these superblocks. We felt like an impoverished island. And there was a lot of violence.
Willa Seidenberg 22:55
Right, a real mixed bag. So do you consider the public housing program to be a failure?
Leslie Palaroan 23:02
I do actually, I do think it was a failure. It was well intentioned. But when you have not a lot of funding sources that are able to support the building itself, the construction, which is why a lot of the East Coast and Midwest public housing really deteriorated because they had cut costs. I do think it’s a shame that HACLA and these public housing authorities don’t have a lot of access to capital. If they did, then the buildings wouldn’t have deteriorated as much, there would have to be so much deferred maintenance. You wouldn’t have these racially segregated and income segregated islands in the middle of neighborhoods.
Willa Seidenberg 24:04
Well, and I guess, once things start to deteriorate, the people who live in those buildings are less likely to want to keep them up. And it’s just kind of a vicious cycle that not funding them adequately leads to a kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Do you feel like people in those kinds of communities don’t understand that appreciation or haven’t developed that appreciation that they might live in a place that is historic and has meaning not just to them because they live there, but to other people?
Leslie Palaroan 24:41
It’s hard when you don’t have a lot of money. You’re just getting by? It’s hard to step back and really question what was here before. I also think we need to rely a lot on talking to our elders and talking to the folks that have been in communities that have been impoverished for a long time, because they have seen folks come and go, they have a big stake in where they live. They don’t necessarily see it as an impoverished area. So I think we need to harness just talking to our neighbors about what had happened here before. Where I live in Oakland now, we rely a lot on our elders to tell us what had happened with all of the jazz corridors that got razed during urban renewal. What had happened in a specific building a long time ago. And we just need to figure out how to capture that.
Leslie Palaroan 25:46
I think what what happened last year with all of the Confederate statues coming down and realizing, Oh, my gosh, the White House is built by slaves. And a lot of America is actually built by people of color. So really looking at the past and seeing the contributions of people of color. I will say that I was part of a few people of color in the program. And we always had this idea that heritage conservation was primarily like a white man field. But if we open it up to different narratives and histories, like my neighbors down the street, who have been here for 40 years, they talk about what had happened before everything had gentrified. So a lot of these buildings in this program that we talked about, were built for one reason or another. And some get designated as historic, some become a community asset. It just depends on the person’s or the neighbors’ perception of what is important at the end of the day.
Willa Seidenberg 27:02
So from your work that you’ve been doing, since you got out of school, do you see that people who work to create more affordable housing, see the synergy with heritage conservation, and and working with that end of it to preserve buildings? Or do you see that more people are interested in building new construction?
Leslie Palaroan 27:29
A little bit of both, I definitely see heritage conservation and affordable housing aligning, especially for developments or buildings that are empty and folks want to turn it into affordable housing. It’s just, of course, because of the cost constraints that we have, because we garner public financing, as well as leveraging low income tax credits, it’s a little bit difficult to undertake those projects because they’re so expensive. And that goes back to what I was saying in my thesis is that how do we get more funding so we can support both affordable housing and heritage conservation?
Willa Seidenberg 28:15
So after you finished the heritage conservation program, you went back up to the Bay Area, and you’re now working for the Satellite Affordable Housing Associates. What does that organization do and what do you do within it?
Leslie Palaroan 28:32
I still work in affordable housing as a developer, so Satellite Affordable Housing provides housing for very low to low income folks throughout the East Bay. And we provide housing for veterans, seniors, families, folks with special needs. A few of the projects that I’m working with are pretty interesting. They’re joint developments with the nonprofit. So because there is such a big housing crisis here, a lot of the nonprofits and churches are actually leasing their land to us, a portion of their land to us for affordable housing. I’m working with Adult Day Health Care nonprofit in the East Bay, and they’re leasing a portion of their land for us to build 82 units for senior housing, which is a good project because you have adult day health care for folks that have Alzheimer’s or can’t take care of themselves, but their families don’t want to send them to assisted living. And they send their family members there, but you also have senior housing next door plus that inter-generational daycare. So that’s a pretty exciting project and then another project that I’m working on, so we’re building a Native American Women’s Health Center on the ground floor and then 76 units of housing above. And that project has been very interesting in the sense that we did a lot of community outreach to the Native American tribes and the urban tribes, as well as trying to figure out the history of Sausal Creek, which is this creek nearby the project site, and it was a creek where a lot of Ohlone folks would go and follow the water to the Bay. So they did a lot of gathering for their food. And the fact that the ground floor is a women’s health clinic, we also talk about how Native Americans in the past would take care of their children. So there’s this whole idea of basket weaving, and putting babies in baskets. So we have integrated a lot of basket material, or weaving into the look of the building.
Willa Seidenberg 31:00
Any plans for you coming up? Or any new projects? Or what do you see as your next chapter?
Leslie Palaroan 31:08
New projects, I’m actually helping a group of community folks who live in southern Alameda County, they are starting a community land trust, which is basically a different form of housing. It’s just how do you make the land below structures affordable in perpetuity? So it does come into question, what do we conserve? Do we conserve open space? Do we conserve buildings? How do we get some of the buildings historically designated because they are an asset to the community folks just don’t know.
I’m also trying to get back more into heritage conservation. I feel like I’ve been in affordable housing for a very long time. It’s a great career, and I love it. But I’m always trying to figure out how do we merge housing preservation from housing advocate standpoint, and then preservation from a heritage conservation standpoint?
Willa Seidenberg 32:20
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and LA misses you.
Leslie Palaroan 32:26
Sometimes I miss it too. Sometimes I get sad because of all the nice weather you have. And there’s a big conservation community there as well as affordable housing community. And love tacos. I miss the tacos.
Willa Seidenberg 32:42
You’re welcome to come back anytime. Thank you, Leslie.
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Willa Seidenberg 32:50
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Save As. Tune in next time as we explore one of California’s many interesting, diverse and historic places.
Trudi Sandmeier 33:06
This podcast was produced by Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. And the Save as logo was designed by Fern Vargas. Special thanks to the communications team at the School of Architecture for their support.
Willa Seidenberg 32:50
For more information and show notes visit our website at Saveas.place. Please subscribe and tell a friend while you’re at it.
Trudi Sandmeier 33:06
Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
