Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

to the immigrant neighborhood. Such community institutions, nascent in the 1980s and early 1990s, have continued to grow and develop since then. Today, MacArthur Park maintains a strong immigrant niche economy comprised of small businesses catering to the needs of the immigrant neighborhood. They include paralegal and immigration services, health care clinics catering to a cash economy, and various types of small-scale entrepreneurs. The neighborhood maintains a strong sense of entrepreneurship, with people willing to take high risks to start their businesses and find their niche in this immigrant economy, which is both formal and informal. Such small-scale entrepreneurs include the informal street vendors who sell their ethnic foods to immigrants returning from work or sell beverages that could only be found in Mesoamerica, such as atol de elote. The neighborhood also maintains a strong housing market focusing on the housing demands of immigrants, who sometimes double up or triple up in apartments and can thereby afford to pay high rents. Other endogenous institutions maintain a transnational nature, such as the hometown associations throughout the neighborhood that send remittances back to their home countries to provide social or recreational services supported by their expatriates. The amounts of remittances sent to the home countries also represent the economic influence and transnational connections MacArthur Park maintains to Mesoamerica. Walking around the neighborhood also reveals an ambiance of Mesoamerican culture, projected through the people walking in the park, the retail merchants, the street vendors, the street murals, and the types of cultural amenities in the neighborhood. Still other organic institutions include the networked community-based organizations (CBOs), with strong histories of political activism focusing on providing both social services and community action programs in the neighborhood. Hence, MacArthur Park has maintained many organic institutional mechanisms, giving the neighborhood a true sense of place—a form of milieu that makes it a true neighborhood.

It was within this dynamic and complex institutional environment of competition that the city of Los Angeles decided in the early 1990s to pursue a large-scale revitalization project, spearheaded by the construction