Garcetti's chief of staff, Yusef Robb, waves off the flight of Latino families and individuals as a sign of their own good fortune, arguing that Hollywood's Latinos did so well during the past decade that they bought homes in "the suburbs."
"We looked into the population shift in Hollywood," Robb says, "and the situation tended to be people making choices to their own advantage."
Ted Soqui
Ziggy Kruse, waitress-turned-activist, sees Eric Garcetti as a cold figure who supports regular Hollywood folks when it's "politically smart."
Ted Soqui
Manny Romero, groundskeeper at Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard
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Robb could not provide L.A. Weekly any data to back up his claim. In fact, it appears that Garcetti and his sizable staff — about 20 full-time personal aides — are unprepared to explain what is unfolding.
The hollowing out of Latinos in Hollywood is particularly dramatic in the dense, L-shaped chunk of six U.S. census tracts at the heart of Hollywood — tracts 1908.01, 1908.02, 1909.01, 1909.02, 1918.10 and 1918.20 — bordered by Western Avenue on the east, Seward Street on the west, Melrose Boulevard on the south and Sunset on the north.
Tracts 1909.01 and 1909.02 between Western, Gower, Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevard saw a net loss of 664 Latinos. Far fewer Latinos moved into than out of the neighborhood's increasingly costly apartments, condos and bungalows, resulting in a steep population decline. The same thing occurred in tracts 1908.01 and 1908.02 between Gower, Seward, Sunset and Santa Monica, where a net loss of 896 Latinos created a sharp overall population drop.
Just south of there, in tracts 1918.10 and 1918.20 bordered by Gower, Seward, Santa Monica and Melrose, a net 1,402 Latinos took off. Having lost 2,962 Latinos, the historically affordable housing in these six flatland census tracts is now a thing of the past, creating ground zero in Hollywood's working-class diaspora.
In 2000, about 80,000 people lived in Hollywood, and L.A.'s Department of Planning announced that 85,489 would live there by 2008. By 2010, only 72,000 did.
What's going on is clear enough to USC demographer Jared Sanchez. He says the data show "significant" gentrification, with wealthier households moving in — which inevitably contain fewer people than working-class households — while others get squeezed out.
Many will cheer this turn of events. Hollywood, the neighborhood, is richer, flashier and more attractive than at any time since its golden era. Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president Leron Gubler says, "We've made significant strides in cleaning up Hollywood, restoring community pride and creating a vibrant economy here in Hollywood."
Longtime Hollywood resident and Garcetti ally Ferris Wehbe says, "There has been big change in the area. Hollywood is going to soar."
The L.A. City Council in 1986 approved a 1,100-acre "redevelopment project area" with the aim of remaking Hollywood into a livable community. The nearly $1 billion Hollywood Redevelopment Plan was one of the most heavily subsidized projects in California, with taxpayers underwriting such items as a $32 million parking garage at the pricey Cinerama Dome and ArcLight Theaters and $98 million for Hollywood & Highland. Los Angeles County transportation officials broke ground in 1986 on the Red Line subway with stops along Hollywood Boulevard, at that time the haunt of heroin dealers and prostitutes.
In 1992, Leron Gubler, a soft-spoken, determined power broker, became president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which supervises the Walk of Fame and is one of the most influential champions of redevelopment. Politicians rarely run afoul of the Chamber, which counts among its members top executives from Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, real estate developer Millennium Partners, The CW television network, the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel and Hollywood & Highland.
At first, Gubler says, "We had a lot of homeless. The sidewalks were dirty. Businesses were closing left and right. ... People had given up on Hollywood."
In 1993, Jackie Goldberg was elected to represent Hollywood on the City Council, and she pushed hard for redevelopment. Gubler told her that first they should focus on "nuts-and-bolts" issues, which Gubler narrowed down to "crime and grime." The Chamber and Goldberg's office launched much-publicized efforts to make Hollywood's streets cleaner and safer.
But beyond the headlines, Mercedes Cortes and her neighbors were already on the job, creating a successful Neighborhood Watch that teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Department. So were many other Spanish-speaking residents, including Manny Romero, who worked as a youth organizer in unstable El Salvador, escaped that country's violent civil war, which took the lives of his family and friends in the 1980s, and moved to Los Angeles.
Romero eventually became the popular and well-respected groundskeeper at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, built in 1928, an important community center for Hollywood's Latino population.
In 1978, Romero moved with his wife and two children into a cheap bungalow on Las Palmas Avenue just south of Sunset. It was a few blocks west of De Longpre Park, which became a notorious cesspool of drug dealers and junkies in the late '80s and early '90s.
Romero suddenly faced a new kind of war. He went to incredible lengths to save his community, joining a neighborhood patrol group called the Hollywood Sentinels, whose members put their lives on the line by running drug dealers and gang members off of street corners. Criminals threatened to kill Romero and his family.
"I was scared of the gang members," Romero recalls, "but it didn't stop me from doing my citizen's duties."
The Chamber's Gubler and many journalists credit the 2001 opening of the concrete elephant–bedecked Hollywood & Highland mall, where the Academy Awards are held, for initiating Hollywood's turnaround. But low-income working folks like Cortes and Romero were key figures in first steadying the community's foundation.
