Introduction
The history of Los Angeles very much speaks to the well-knitted class and racial segregation engineered through its urban planning and real estate policies. As she aptly puts it in her essay “Analyzing Class and Housing through the Lens of Critical Urban Theory,” it goes, “It is integral to bring deep-seated disparities to reckoning and rectify the tendencies that such inequalities have continued to pose as challenges to the matrix of urban societies that have become modern.
Main Argument of the Article
As Laura Redford said, “This founding mythic discourse of Urbanos Los Angeles is the blueprint preconceived and methodic expression of the acts of intermixing class and race segregation onto the building blocks of City urban development.” Much easy to realize that discrimination in historical texture at the heart of cities is not accidental but a product of calculation practices and policies in real. As may be seen in her article. These salient measures were soundly designed by powerful developers and policymakers who would be making their interests in a processing Los Angeles conflate with the interests of the different communities that live, work, and play in order to shape the sprawling City toward a new mode and status quo, benefiting highly privileged portions of its population (Schleier, 2021). In that respect, as Redford’s work demonstrates, the adopted strategies make Los Angeles into a City of divided communities and, in the final instance, why past injustices need to be attended to in the shaping of current and future urban policy. Author’s Evidence
Laura Redford argues pointedly throughout her article in a way that such segregation in Los Angeles was, indeed, closely linked and linked within the interaction of class and racial components.
Thus, Redford portrays the all-pervasive use of restrictive covenants as a main instrument in the hands of the real estate developer in controlling the commercialization of the neighborhoods with an effect of an effective bar against people of certain races and economic groups. In particular, she laid the blame on “redlining” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) for driving through this harsh division through their prejudiced lending policies that supported and systematized institutional racism (Michney, 2022).
Furthermore, Redford elaborates more and lays greater emphasis on complicity in the legal system when he says that “restrictive covenants were maintained by courts in most cases,” for the divisions. In a sense, the way Redford so craftily demonstrates, here is a revelation of how private real estate interests have politically “colluded” with public policymakers to provide for a landscape to segregate in such a stratified way that it would assure neighborhood according to class and let us be frank, race considerations effectively imprinted on the social fabric of Los Angeles. Personal Position on the Argument
I agree with Redford’s argument on the deliberate intertwining of class and race in Los Angeles’ segregation.
Systemic exclusion with historical documentation as evidence is ensured via the involvement of restrictive covenants and redlining. From my vantage point, it is buttressed by the longevity of disparities of urban infrastructure and resources reflecting observations by Redford. Redford describes what makes these engulfed differences still displayed today in modern cityscapes between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots,’ as can usually be directly traced back to these discriminatory practices, underpinning the relevance of an article and the necessity of today to redress such historical injustices in urban policy and planning.
The Role of CCRs
The principal way CCRs operated was not reactive but active. The main way that CCRs function is that they did not just respond after the fact to an attempt to integrate a neighborhood but actively kept up and furthered class and racial segregation in L.A.,” Redford (Peña, 2021).
These binding agreements wove not only the racial demographics of neighborhoods into property deeds but also created and bound economic barriers, making sure the communities stayed homogeneous and exclusive. This article explicitly discussed the minimum construction costs, stating that “certain racial groups could not own dwellings” set in CCRs to snag and form a segregated Milwaukee social landscape legally. In this very orchestration of urban space through CCRs, further and wider orchestration of systemic discrimination translates into a longer-range scenario for the racial and economic divide in the City.
The Role of Courts
Laura Redford puts a mirror on the role of the courts in maintaining segregation in Los Angeles (Rovner, 2023).To that aspect, in the states where the Courts were upholding restrictive covenants, it quite literally legitimized housing discrimination and empowered it with the possibility to exclude minority communities and revitalize the racial borders systematically. Those kinds of court decisions, for example, Shelley v. Kraemer, rooted to place the judicial system in a pivotal role, scripting urban demographics, and how segregationist the status quo became. Such exclusionary practices got legal fangs that placed veneer acts with a respectability that further got inscribed in the nature of the City residential development. The role of the advertisement played and the ordinary ideas.
The need to advertise spatial adjacency principles integral in the perpetuation of segregational ideologies was clearly shown with the use of adjectives full of coded language connoting racial and class exclusions through such neighborhoods- be it through “exclusive” or “for the chosen few,” it was clearly to say countless times that these were euphemisms that sent out signals to the targeted white buyers- the areas were indeed segregated (Rovner, 2023). Such messages continued incessantly within the realm of existence which found quick resonance between and actively capitalized on the vogue societal norms and bestial prejudices of the time. This is what accounted for the desensitization and perpetuation that developers and City planners put much care into crafting.
Impact on Neighborhoods and Policies
In this view, the impacts of class and race segregation have already spilled their impacts over the localities, giving out an enriched demographic composition plus socio-economic status (Redford, 2023). Mines, with their heritage of restrictive covenants and redlining, opened clefts into shares of their own in wealth, education, and health—the legacy mirrored in permanent residence segregation, economic disparities, and irregular distribution of resources and opportunities, a reflection of its historical design up through modern times.
As noted by Laura Redford, the roots of segregation in Los Angeles were deep in history and deliberate acts within policies that shaped the urban landscape. In many ways, the historical lens of the context of the history of the transformation of the landscape offers necessary lessons towards contemporary urban development and beleaguers with reckless abandon the fact that there is a need to address prior injustices and push for more equitable presents. There is also an ignorant policy that merely ignores the fact that mixing and the settlement of two groups would bring about peace, harmony, and economic development.
References
Redford, L. (2023). Structures of Power in Los Angeles Urban History.
Rovner, M. A. (2023). (Un) Settling Segregation: Architectures of Race, Labor, and Home-Building in Progressive Era Los Angeles. University of California, Los Angeles.
Peña, M. (2021). Investing in the Inner City Through Public Schools Evaluating California’s Equitable Education Finance Policy (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University).
Michney, T. M. (2022). How the City survey’s redlining maps were made: A closer look at HOLC’s mortgagee rehabilitation division. Journal of Planning History, 21(4), 316-344.
Schleier, M. (Ed.). (2021). Race and the Suburbs in American Film. State University of New York Press.
Rovner, M. A. (2023). (Un) Settling Segregation: Architectures of Race, Labor, and Home-Building in Progressive Era Los Angeles. University of California, Los Angeles.
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