Tobar's first NYT column: Gentrification is easing LA segregation

Gentrification is reducing the segregation of Latino areas such as Highland Park, Hector Tobar writes. LAO file photo.

Los Angeles might be the most multi-ethnic big urban area in the U.S., but it is also the most segregated when defined as whites and Latinos living apart. In the first of his new opinion columns as a regular New York Times contributor, former LA Times writer Hector Tobar focuses on the good things gentrification is doing for Highland Park, in the flats below his Mount Washington neighborhood. "Yes, gentrification is something we smart and cultured people are supposed to denounce as an insidious force," he writes. But it's not that simple.

The NYT calls the piece Viva Gentrification! A sample:

My wife, Virginia Espino, who is Mexican-American, knows these neighborhoods well, especially the community called Highland Park. She grew up there in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was still integrated, before “white flight” was complete. In the decades that followed, Spanish-language ads took over the billboards, and the complexions of the locals became almost exclusively cinnamon and café con leche.

The barrio has its charms. And also its pockets of highly visible urban dysfunction, including a brick tenement where groups of young men gather. Police cruisers aggressively patrol against alleged neighborhood ne’er-do-wells, who are often arrested in full public view.

But today in Highland Park there are more open houses than street vendors. There’s a vegan restaurant, alongside a very un-vegan fleet of taco trucks. The local bodega sells not just homemade salsa and cards for cheap phone calls to Guatemala, but also espressos and overpriced Pinot Noir in bottles that have corks instead of twist-off caps.

“I saw them all move out,” my wife said one day, referring to the neighborhood’s white residents. “And now I’m watching them move back in.”

In Highland Park, as in other Latino barrios of Los Angeles, gentrification has produced an undeniable but little appreciated side effect: the end of decades of de facto racial segregation.