Abstract
Fifty years after the national Kerner Commission report on urban unrest and fifty-three years after California’s McCone Commission report on the 1965 Watts riots, substantial racial disparity in education, housing, employment, and wealth is still pervasive in Los Angeles. Neither report mentions wealth inequality as a cause for concern, however. This article examines one key dimension of racial wealth inequality through the lens of home ownership, particularly in South Los Angeles, where the 1965 Watts riots took place. It also analyzes the state’s role in housing development in codifying and expanding practices of racial and class segregation that has led to the production and reproduction of racial inequality in South Los Angeles compared with Los Angeles County.
- © 2018 Russell Sage Foundation. De La Cruz-Viesca, Melany, Paul M. Ong, Andre Comandon, William A. Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton. 2018. “Fifty Years After the Kerner Commission Report: Place, Housing, and Racial Wealth Inequality in Los Angeles.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4(6): 160–84. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2018.4.6.08. This research is made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation’s Building Economic Security Over a Lifetime initiative. We especially acknowledge our Ford Foundation Program Officers—Kilolo Kijakazi, Amy Brown, Leah Mayor, and John Irons. Funding was also provided by the UCLA Institute for American Cultures, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, and the Haynes Foundation. This research is also part of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge’s (CNK) Kerner Revisited project. We are grateful to CNK staff, Chhandara Pech and Alycia Cheng, for their research and technical assistance. Direct correspondence to: Melany De La Cruz-Viesca at melanyd{at}ucla.edu, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 3230 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.