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

neighborhoods possess various forms of capital (social, political, financial, and cultural) that can help them sustain their immigrants' milieu. To sustain their communities in the face of large-scale, top-down redevelopment, however, they need the help of local government, with important agents within the local government also seeking to sustain the ethnic makeup of the neighborhoods. In the MacArthur Park case, the councilor's office in LA provided legitimate institutional and political power to pressure other city institutions such as the planning agency, the MTA, and the redevelopment agency. In the case of MacArthur Park, the process of co-evolution between the neighborhood's endogenous organizations and the city's organizations could proceed because three main variables—immigrant capital, CBO grassroots power, and Latino citywide political power—converged to sustain the Mesoamerican immigrants' milieu.

The book finishes by summarizing the main findings as they relate to the occurrence and mechanisms of co-adaptation and co-evolution in the MacArthur Park neighborhood. These new understandings lead to some reflections and to five key lessons, which directly address the initial problem that inspired this study: the redevelopment paradox of displacing low-income populations through large-scale, top-down projects. These five lessons include (1) encouraging interaction among stakeholders involved in revitalization; (2) increasing affordable housing in an area targeted for redevelopment; (3) encouraging both informal and formal types of interaction between the community and planning institutions; (4) encouraging diversity (variation of agents and strategies) within redevelopment projects; and, lastly, (5) encouraging large-scale redevelopment projects in areas identified as being likely to sustain the new capital investment without social disruption or displacement of the already present community.