As USC is looking to expand their research facilities in Boyle Heights at the USC Health Sciences Campus, the issues of gentrification start to rise. 50 protesters marched last week in East LA to oppose the seven story, 202,000 square-foot building that USC is trying to implement. The protesters want respect, and the community wants to be heard.
This isn’t USC first rodeo in terms of expanding their campuses without listening to input from members within that community. When the university expanded its new and improved USC Village in 2017, more families and community members faced displacement causing them to face economic issues.
In both of these instances, USC is “pricing out” residents. In this case, the residents of Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, Romona Gardens and El Sereno will be affected by the gentrification.
The university plans to build the ‘Discovery and Translational Hub’, which would include laboratories, a lecture hall and a cafe.
Thomas Buchanan, the vice dean at the Keck School of Medicine discusses what the hub will comprise of.
Thomas Buchanan: This is going to be right in the center of our campus. So, it’s physically a hub, but also operationally a hub where we link up community patient and population research with basic research to develop new treatments and diagnostics and then test those and initially get them to the clinic in our hospitals and clinics.
He adds that a new building is imperative to continue the research that USC is doing.
Buchanan: So, the only way we can grow in the research program and grow that impact that we want to have is by building a new research building...So basically, we want to expand our ability to do cutting edge research and therefore expand its impact. We have about a little over 200 research teams now doing federally funded research at USC. We want to double that in the next 7 to 10 years.
Buchanan adds that one of the aims is to benefit the surrounding communities.
Buchanan: We want to make sure that the research we’re doing is done with the communities that surround them at our campuses so that the results will be applicable to them. As we get more precise on how we should treat people from different backgrounds and also how we treat individual patients.
Cinthia Gonzalez, a tenant coordinator for the East Side opposes this development.
Cinthia Gonzalez: So as a coalition, we stand against any development and particularly development in our surrounding areas to Boyle Heights that have no real solutions and no real plan on how to include the neighborhood. And our are deep concerns of gentrification.
Gonzalez emphasizes how concerned she is because she states that residents are not being prioritized. She adds that there have been conversations with the university regarding the building of the hub.
Gonzalez: We’ve had concerns and many different and conversations with the U.S. prior to this development, transnational hub development. And none of the concerns that we have brought up based on what the community is saying, based on community members themselves, is taking into consideration.
Gonzalez led a march against gentrification to show the public that there are actual people being affected...It all correlates really down to how or how corporations and landlords see people as profit and don’t see them as human beings that need housing.
Buchanan, however, notes that it is not the university’s intent to cause problems in the surrounding areas.
Buchanan: But it’s certainly not our intention to take anybody’s homes away. It’s not our intention to make anybody’s life worse. We are doing this from those of us that come to work every day thinking about how to do research for better health... We want to make sure that we’re doing that with and for our local communities. So, this building is really about that. And I hope that the community will understand that we’re not building the Death Star in East Los Angeles, where we’re basically here to build something that’s really going to be highly beneficial to the communities. And we’d like to work with them to make sure the building has as little impact as possible in their lives, but to make sure the building goes up and can have what we know will be beneficial effects for health of people in general, but especially being relevant to the people in our communities.
The planning commission will next meet on December 7th regarding USC’s permit.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Amrita Vora