Food Justice | South Central Farm Threatened, Again

Moderator’s
Note: Developers once again threaten the famous and once largest urban farm in
the United States, South Central Farm in Los Angeles. This time, City of Los
Angeles planners are considering a proposal to relocate a garment factory and
three trucking centers to the still-undeveloped farm site. 



This is an urgent
and timely matter and the farmers are asking for our support by sending a
letter to the planning commissioners by this Thursday, July 17. Please act now
and support the continuing struggle to restore the largest and urban farm in
the USA. Even short letters of support are welcome.

Save the South Central Farm in LA (Again)

EMAILS NEEDED BY THURSDAY, JULY 17

Tezozomoc | Los Angeles, CA | July 13,
2014

Eight years ago last month, Los Angeleños demanded
their city step up to the burgeoning environmental justice movement in a
citywide protest that centered on the small, working class Central Alameda
neighborhood and its South Central Farm. The protest culminated in thousands of
people from the Westside to the Eastside and from South Africa to Oaxaca
rallying against overdevelopment, industrialization, anti-immigrant sentiment,
and commercial food monopolies. It was a spontaneous occupation five years
before Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Los Angeles.

On a fourteen-acre plot in a poor neighborhood,
hundreds of people pitched their tents on the South Central Farm for three
months, and thousands of visitors, everyday people and famous ones, from around
the world made pilgrimages to the Farm. It ended on June 13, 2006 when sheriffs
raided the Farm, bulldozed the food and trees, and arrested 44 people. The
Farmers pledged then that, although displaced, they would continue the fight
for the neighborhood people's right to grow fresh food.
 

Between now and Thursday, July 17, the Los Angeles
City Planning Commission is asking for public comments on the environmental
impact of moving a garment factory and three trucking centers to the
still-undeveloped Farm site. Last August, dozens of Farm supporters jammed a
City Planning Commission meeting and demanded the EIR before development could
begin. That turnout forced the City to reassess its position and require an
Environmental Impact Report and public comment.


Emails in support of preserving green
space for the Central Alameda neighborhood should be sent to Srimal
Hewawitharana at srimal.hewawitharana@lacity.org.

The City needs to be told that, just as wealthy and
gentrified neighborhoods deserve green space for growing and supporting natural
habitat, so do poor neighborhoods. No neighborhood in Los Angeles should be
subject to the devastation that further industrialization will bring to the
Central Alameda neighborhood.

•  
Fourteen acres of green space will enhance property
values in this neighborhood hit hard by the housing crash, while trucks,
loading and unloading twenty-four hours a day, will further devalue already
devastated property values, forcing homeowners and renters out of their homes.•  
The proposed distribution centers will add over two
thousand addition truck trips daily to the narrow streets adjacent to
the neighborhood, creating a traffic nightmare for local drivers and dangerous
streets for children.•  
The trucks will add air pollution not only to a nearby
schools, a recreation center, and open-air markets, but will exacerbate
existing air pollution across the region, already contaminated by long-haul
trucks on the Alameda Corridor and by the nearby city of Vernon.•  
The trucks will contribute substantially to noise
pollution in a neighborhood that already suffers with the noise of hourly train
traffic along the Blue Line and approximately 10,000 car trips and day.•  
Twenty-four hour shipping operations will require
twenty-four hour lighting, a significant reduction in the quality of life for
the neighborhood.•  
As replacement facilities for existing business
operations, this project holds little hope for any meaningful new jobs.

This is the time to call on the City to celebrate
its residents' struggles for a green and livable Los Angeles. The South Central
Farm has a long history of struggle for environmental justice that needs to be
celebrated, not irredeemably erased and paved over.

•  
The destruction of the Farm follows an historical
Los Angeles trend of displacing Mexican and Central American peoples that began
in the Mexican-American War of 1848 and continued through the displacements at
Chavez Ravine (now Dodgers Stadium) and the Cornfield, an indigenous Tongva
site converted to a state park and tourist center.•  
In 1987, the people of the Ninth District defeated
the City's plans to convert the land that became the South Central for use by a
massive trash incinerator called the Lancer Project.•  
Following the Rodney King uprising, Mayor Tom
Bradley ceded the land to the people. The City sold it to the Harbor
Department, which issued a permit for farming and put the land under the
administration of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. By 1994, the people in
the neighborhood were clearing the land and growing food.•  
The Farmers cultivated over100 identified species of
plants, including fruit trees, medicinal plants, cacti, endangered black walnut
trees, and other species native to historical Mexico. The trees on the Farm
were considered so significant that they were transplanted to the South Central
Tree Collection, an exhibit at the Huntington Library. Unusual fauna for urban
dwellers included bats and red-tailed hawks. On the Farm was a Central American
and Mexican seed bank, destroyed in the raid on the Farm. The fourteen-acre
habitat should be restored, not paved over.•  
The Farm, its creation and its destruction, sparked
appreciation of the contributions of populations from south of the border and
awakened Los Angeleños to the need for an environmentally sound city. In
its wake, the City has instituted 350 school gardens and the right to grow food
on easements, farmers' markets have seen an explosion in popularity and dozens
of new ones have opened in every area of Los Angeles, and L.A. now has a
functional system of bike trails and trains. 

The South Central Farmers have now twice disrupted
city plans to industrialize the Farm. In 2008, the Farmers organized the
neighborhood to demand an Environmental Impact Report before building a Forever
21 sweatshop on the land, and the demands of that EIR ended that project.

Last year, the City was once again prepared to build
on the land without an EIR, and the Farmers once more mounted a campaign for
the EIR. That EIR too, could end development and force the City to recognize
the Farm again. The South Central Farm is the center of environmental justice
for all of Los Angeles, both as a much-needed green space for a working class
neighborhood long ignored by the City and as a symbol of a new Los Angeles that
acknowledges that all its residents deserve the right to grow food and live in
a healthy environment.

It is time, again, to save the Farm.