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Jenny Burman blogs at Chicken Corner that the LA Weekly's David Zahniser is a fellow Echo Parkster and describes the view of gentrification from her corner of the neighborhood.
Next door to my house is a house that has been owned by a Salvadoran-American family for about two decades. The sons who were raised there served in the Marines and the Army. The first time I met their mother, Benita, she told me she had breast cancer that had metastasized, basically hello, I will be dying soon. We became friends in a way that was limited by age, socio-cultural backgrounds, life-expectancy. But we were neighbors, and we liked each other and I visited her a number of times at her home. She never came to mine. During this time, she evicted a young artist who lived in the front house and wasn't paying his rent. Benita's brother cleaned the apartment, painted it, and they advertised it for rent. One day, Benita stopped to talk to me. She said she'd had a lot of calls about the apartment. She looked at me and said, "They are all white. Why are they all white?"
Earlier on News and Chatter:
Welcome to Gentrification City