On Thursday last week, local activists and community supporters stormed Cathedral High School’s gymnasium to crash the evening farce, a “public comment” hearing and education presentation for the Dodger Stadium proposal to build an aerial gondola over the residential apartments in Chinatown to transport attendants of the games to the stadium.
Despite the community dissenters being escorted from the hearing, the message got across, the LA ART (Aerial Rapid Transit) project proposed by Frank McCourt, the former Dodgers owner is unwelcomed in Chinatown. The initiative for the project is not only unfeasible and disruptive to residential life in Chinatown, its undemocratic, the developers are moving forward without effectively hearing out the community; passing out disposable public comment cards at last Thursday's meeting is a performance of democracy.
The project itself is also receiving sponsored backing from McCourt Global, Frank McCourt’s business and LA Metro, which has no disclosed how much money they are investing or taking from the project.
Hugo Garcia, an organizer who supported the Thursday action, and with Save Elephant Hill in neighboring El Sereno, said “They destroy the unity of the people that are opposed to the project by making you just fill out a written comment. They don’t want to see the community united.”
“So, what we’re doing about it is turning it into our own … and having a conference right here, without their permission.”
This $300 million private project attempts to build a disruption for the community, even a recent UCLA study published showed how unproductive the gondola would, but of course the point of the development is not to just drive-up attendance, but actually to stir up gentrification and self-evictions from historical tenants. Read more about this claim in Knock LA.
Luckly, CCED, Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, the community-tenant defense movement of Chinatown, and organizer of the Thursday action are leading the leverage campaign against the LA ART project will continue to persist until the gondola construction ends.
A project that doesn’t only plan to undemocratically develops an infrastructure project without the local community-tenants' consent, as Douglas Carstens, an attorney representing the California Endowment in litigation against the project clarified,
“Everybody who pays sales tax in all of LA County goes into funding Metro and its operations. But what Frank McCourt in this operation is doing is privatizing those dollars, taking public land like the rights of way over Alameda, or portions of the State Historic Park that are public property, [and] privatizing it for their own purposes.”