Los Angeles Needs All Its Young Men

Byline: Kafi D. Blumenfield

In coming decades, an increasingly diverse Los Angeles will need its young men – all its young men, not just the most privileged – to take their places in society and work to build the economy, educate the next generations, preserve the environment and improve the lives of all Angelenos. But today low income and young men of color have the lowest life expectancy rates, highest unemployment rates, fewest high school and college graduates and most murder victims of any demographic group in Los Angeles.

Liberty Hill believes that there is a new reality ready to be built, a reality that recognizes the potential of this large percentage of our future adult population.

This week, I will begin to talk to friends, donors, foundation executives and other allies at the Uplifting Change Summit about Brothers, Sons, Selves, our case for Liberty Hill’s stepped-up investment in improving the lives of L.A.’s low income boys and young men of color. We will be posting our new ebooklet Brothers, Sons, Selves in the next few days. Look for it!  

As part of this stepped-up investment, Liberty Hill is managing an emerging campaign, co-created in partnership with The California Endowment, of L.A. community organizations. This statewide effort will build local strength and aggregate it for statewide impact. Affiliated campaigns are being led in Oakland and Fresno.

Our Steering Committee so far includes some of L.A.’s strongest community organizations working in communities of color including Brotherhood Crusade, Californians for Justice, Community Coalition, East L.A. YMCA, Gay Straight Alliance Network, InnerCity Struggle, Khmer Girls and Guys in Action, Labor/Community Strategy Center, as well as our smart strategic partners PolicyLink, Movement Strategy Center, Jemmott Rollins Group, Ideate California. Additional organizations may be added in the future.

Our first public campaign event will be a Field Hearing of the California State Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color slated for March 2nd from 3-6 pm at the Expo Center across from Manuel Arts High School. If you would like to attend, please email Anthony Foster on our staff. I look forward to being able to report-out our progress over the coming months!

Photo by Christian Santiego, age 18, courtesy of L.A. Youth, the newspaper by and about teens.

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From Food Deserts to Food Oases

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

Oh my gosh! It's suddenly Hanukkah, and Christmas is right around the corner!

Believe it or not, I’m not thinking about gifts. I’m thinking about cooking. And eating. Maybe for our family's potluck dinner I’ll prepare my crunchy marinated green bean dish–raw, fresh green beans and mushrooms, locally grown and organic. Whatever I decide to bring, everything will be organic, purchased from a farmers market or my local Whole Foods.

I’m lucky to be able to purchase wonderful produce. But how about residents in other parts of LA? It’s tragic that thousands of families in places such as South LA, East LA and other parts of the county have little access to decent produce, organic or not. It’s not surprising that in these “food deserts,” residents often suffer from poor health, including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, the Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores issued a first-of-a-kind report card on Los Angeles grocery chains. Even before this report was issued, many of us knew about the problems of food deserts. We knew that many chains don’t locate in low-income neighborhoods. That even when they do, the quality of the produce a chain offers is greatly inferior to the produce the same chain offers in other parts of town.

Members of the Alliance, organized by Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) (a Liberty Hill grantee), had surveyed grocery stores throughout LA. These markets were graded on service, selection of healthy food, job standards and accessibility. The report card not only confirms what we thought we knew, but also provides valuable new detail. Soon this report card will be up on the Alliance’s website.

KNBC-TV covered news of the Alliance’s report card, interviewing residents who contend with food deserts every day, in a segment that puts a human face on the problem.

LAANE and the Alliance are also striving for an economically healthier community, one where grocery workers are paid decent wages and afforded acceptable working conditions, where more markets will mean more jobs.

Alliance members have been hard at work, collaborating with the City of Los Angeles in crafting a policy to address the multiple problems of food deserts. While the exact language of the policy has not been finalized, the Alliance has described the details essential to incorporate into the policy.

Keep posted for further developments.

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Affordable Housing & Hermilo Quintana—An LA Story

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

Hermilo Quintana has always worked. He’s pressed shirts in a laundry, cleaned floors and toilets in a beauty salon, and cut diamonds in the Jewelry District. For the past eight years, he’s worked for K-Mart in "replenishment" — placing merchandise back on shelves from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m. most nights. With a salary of $11.33 per hour, he's grossed between $1,400 and $1,500 per month, or about $18,000 annually. Now that K-Mart has trimmed his hours, he makes less.

In the spring of 2009, the Quintana family moved from their rundown apartment to Mariposa Place Apartments. Their previous two-bedroom apartment cost two-thirds of Hermilo's gross wages. The apartment was noisy. The manager was slow to make repairs. Their son Henry slept on the living room sofa.

Today, now that Hermilo and his family live in the beautiful, new Mariposa Place Apartments, they have more money to spend for food, medical expenses and other necessities. Why? Because as tenants of this “affordable housing” complex, they pay far less in rent than they used to.

Hermilo personifies the decades of effort that Liberty Hill and our grantees have invested in affordable housing.

This is a Liberty Hill success story. But the success didn’t come about quickly or easily. It came about through vision, strategic thinking, determination, the support of others—and much more. Read about it here.

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Unionizing Carwash Workers—It Won’t Be Easy

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

After the CLEAN Carwash Campaign, a Liberty Hill grantee, uncovered massive violations of wage and health and safety laws, two carwash owners, brothers Benny and Nisan Pirian, were investigated by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office and charged in a 174-count criminal complaint. 

The brothers subsequently were sentenced to a year in jail for minimum-wage violations, a loud wake-up call to owners of LA’s 500 carwashes.

At the moment, no carwash workers are unionized. And until this recent verdict, little incentive existed for owners to treat workers well. But behind the scenes, the CLEAN Carwash Campaign, a coalition of 140 community, health, safety and labor groups in LA, has been engaging in a particularly complex process of union organizing.

Tuesday, in a New York Times article, labor reporter Steven Greenhouse described CLEAN Carwash Campaign’s efforts to unionize carwash workers.

Greenhouse quoted Chloe Osmer, CLEAN Carwash Campaign strategic coordinator; Peter Dreier, a Liberty Hill advisory board member, and Rabbi Jonathan Klein, executive director of CLUE-LA, also a Liberty Hill grantee.

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Struggling Against Poverty, For Transparency

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

After the California state legislature finally completed and passed its 2009 budget, California Partnership (CAP) members were incensed. CAP, a Liberty Hill grantee, decried the fact that vulnerable communities and families in Los Angeles and throughout the state had been tremendously harmed by losing more than $2 billion in services.  CAP members pointed to California’s closed door budgetary process as an important factor in the loss of critical services to the poor and were determined to wage a campaign.

Liberty Hill has always been committed to securing and increasing services for the poor and has long supported CAP, a statewide coalition of more than 120 community groups, in its efforts to combat poverty. 

In March 2010 CAP kicked off a statewide campaign for budget transparency at a community forum in Los Angeles funded by Liberty Hill. The 100 community members in attendance listened attentively, first to Jean Ross of California Budget Project and then to a panel of elected officials:  Assemblymembers Bob Blumenfield; Hector de la Torre and Karen Bass. The community leaders were heartened when these Assemblymembers asserted their strong interest in creating a transparent budgetary process.

Next step: CAP took its campaign on the road. More than 150 CAP members gathered at the Capitol to demand transparency. At the offices of Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, Assemblymember Martin Garrick, Assembly Speaker John Pérez , Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Governor Schwarzenegger, CAP members demanded that they “let the sunshine into the budget process,” emphasizing their message with yellow beach balls and singing “Let the Sunshine In” as they marched through the Capitol corridors. CAP members succeeded at having lengthy, substantive discussions about both transparency and services to the poor with staff in four of the five legislators’ offices; Assemblymember Martin Garrick’s staff barred the door!

One week later, Speaker Pérez, who himself had previously advocated for a transparent budgetary process, issued a press statement promising more transparency and “no more Big 5” (the “Big 5” being the Speaker of the House, the Senate President pro Tem, two legislators representing the minority party and the Governor, who traditionally make decisions in private). It appeared that legislative leaders had listened to CAP activists and the Speaker, because they avoided the usual process and instead took the governor’s revised May budget directly to an open conference committee.

There was no telling how long legislators would maintain their open conference committee approach, so California Partnership members persevered.  They worked with statewide partners and together launched an online petition demanding budget transparency that gathered more than 6,000 signatures. At the Governor’s Los Angeles and San Francisco offices, they held large street actions promoting both transparency and more dollars for services to the poor, attracting lots of attention with their “die-in.”

As of today, the legislators have maintained their open process, although that could change. California Partnership believes that, for the moment, the transparency that’s been achieved has kept the focus on the need for a more balanced solution to the state budget crisis and the need for more revenue to support essential community services. 

[For the record, Assemblymember Bob Blumenfield is the husband of Kafi D. Blumenfield, President and CEO of Liberty Hill.]

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Critical Need: Supportive Housing for the Homeless

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

The need for additional supportive housing for the homeless is critical, for both humanitarian and financial reasons.

A new study released by the Economic Roundtable illustrates the exorbitant costs borne by Los Angeles County to provide the many services–health, mental health, justice system and welfare—needed by the homeless.

The county spends on average $8,083 per homeless person for the10 percent of homeless people requiring the greatest amount of service. By contrast, those homeless persons in supportive housing cost LA only $710 per person per month.

Recognizing the critical need for affordable housing for both the homeless and other low-income Los Angeles residents, Liberty Hill for decades has invested effort and dollars in the struggle to gain sufficient affordable housing.  Liberty Hill’s support in winning the $100 million Los Angeles Housing Trust Fund, a source of subsidies to developers of affordable housing, is a major example.

Stay tuned for Liberty Hill’s coverage of our investment in affordable housing over the past 10 years. Through articles, videos and photographs, we will tell this compelling story on Liberty Hill’s website in September.

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Growing Global Movement to End Poverty

Posted by Barbara Osborn.

Joyce Appleby, a Liberty Hill Advisory Board member, penned a thoughtful piece over the weekend about the global movement to end poverty. It's not only possible. It's happening!

Advocates for the poor are pushing against the same obstacles that 18th century opponents of slavery confronted: acceptance of an evil because of its familiarity. It's hard to be outraged by a condition that's been around for millenniums. Even the Great Emancipator despaired of ending poverty.

Quoting Scripture, Abraham Lincoln said that the poor will always be with us. That attitude once applied to slavery. Then, with remarkable suddenness, the idea of abolition aroused a cadre of reformers who changed public perceptions in less than a century.

So do we really have to accept that poverty is too firmly entrenched to ever be dislodged?

A worldwide movement is gaining momentum to disrupt complacency about poverty, and one of its centers is right here in Los Angeles.

Friday’s Vote on Rent Increase Moratorium

Byline: Rebecca Rona-Tuttle

If you live anywhere in Los Angeles, you can assist hundreds of thousands of low-income people who live in rent-controlled apartments to avoid rent increases. Contact your city councilmember! The need is urgent!

“We need immediate action to protect tenants from unfair rent increases!” Chris Gabriele, executive director of People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER), told Liberty Hill.  “The LA City Council will vote this Friday, May 7.” So far, only three city councilmen are on record as supporting a proposed moratorium on rent increases: Herb Wesson, Richard Alarcon and Ed Reyes.

Affordable housing activists are asking LA residents to do any or all of the following:  phone or e-mail their own city councilmember, contact more than one city councilmember, regardless of district, and attend the city council meeting Friday at 10 a.m., LA City Hall, 200 N. Spring St., LA CA 90012, 3rd Floor. “Show your support of affordable housing!” Gabriele urged.

Click here for a list of city councilmembers and their contact information.

The council’s Housing, Community and Economic Development Committee voted Wednesday 3-1 in favor of a moratorium that would bar owners from raising the rents on 630,000 units of rent-controlled housing. Otherwise, rents will increase July 1, some by as much as five percent.

That’s 630,000 apartments, and conceivably more than a million low-income individuals who are struggling mightily during our economic downturn and need their remaining dollars for food and medicine here in L.A., the nation’s housing UN-affordability capital.

Councilman Herb Wesson favors the moratorium in part because it would give the city council time to consider various proposals, such as one to tie any future rent increases to the inflation rate. Meanwhile, the fight between rent control advocates and landlords is heating up. Read details in today’s LA Times.

Two of the organizations broadcasting an urgent call for action are POWER and Coalition for Economic Survival (CES), each supported for many years by Liberty Hill.

Seniors surviving on Social Security payments, single moms who have lost their jobs and folks who simply don’t earn much will be grateful for your support.

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More on What the New Homeless Numbers Mean Or Don’t Mean.

Bill Pitkin, who blogs at povertyblog.net, has more to say about yesterday's homeless numbers. Bill is a Sr. Program Officer at the Conrad Hilton Foundation and used to be United Way's numbers cruncher.

Here's an excerpt: When the 2007 numbers came out lower than 2005, a common justification was that the count became more precise as the methodology improved, implying that the earlier count wasn’t as accurate. Having been briefed on this year’s methodology, I agree that the 2009 count is the most reliable we’ve had yet. But, it still begs the question of whether we’re really seeing declines. As one news article characterizes it, “whether the drop was real or the by-product of fuzzy math in previous years, is hard to say.”

Read the whole post.

ACORN in Perspective

Liberty Hill funds ACORN's work in L.A. The ACORN L.A. office was visited by the two individuals posing as a pimp and prostitute this past July and were shown the door. We are in touch with local ACORN staff to discuss their quality control practices.

It is unfortunate the hoopla stirred up by these tapes is causing many to overlook the outstanding work ACORN has done nationally and locally. Political journalist Joe Conason weighed in this morning with a thoughtful piece on Salon.

ACORN's recent accomplishments include helping nearly 50,000 homeowners access foreclosure prevention services, playing a vital role in raising the minimum wage in six states, and leading the fight against predatory lending.

For the range of current blog-bloviating on the story, see this New York Times round up.

Go to the next page for California ACORN's September 21 response to the news.