The Intuit Dome, future home of the Los Angeles Clippers, is set to open its doors to basketball at the beginning of the 2024 NBA regular season. Bruno Mars will headline the first event in the arena with two shows on August 15 and 16.
The 18,000-seat, $2 billion arena constructed by AECOM-Hunt Turner is just over a mile south of the Rams’ and Chargers’ home venue SoFi Stadium. The 26-acre site will include a practice facility, sports medicine clinic, team offices, retail space and a large outdoor plaza with basketball courts that will be open to the public.
The construction of Intuit Dome marks a landmark for the Clippers franchise, which has never technically owned its own stadium. The team has continuously rented its previous venues, dating back to its time as the Buffalo Braves in the 1970s. The organization has been a tenant of its current venue, Crypto.com Arena — formerly known as Staples Center — since 1999.
While the opening of this extravagant arena may jumpstart an exciting new era of Los Angeles Clippers basketball, Inglewood residents feel it will only add to the ongoing gentrification of the area.
Liliana Trejo, a lifelong resident of the city, said she felt “overwhelmed” since the announcement of Intuit Dome.
“My reaction was like, ‘Damn, we don’t even have room to breathe,’” she said. “We just got this one stadium [SoFi], and we’re seeing the effects of having a billion dollar venue and what was happening to the city…so on top of that, it’s like, boom, here’s another stadium.”
Trejo explained that Inglewood residents felt they had no say in the arena’s development. She recalled that during the preliminary discussions for SoFi Stadium’s construction, community meetings were advertised to give residents a chance to voice their concerns and opinions.
This time around, however, such meetings were not promoted, Trejo said. She also expressed that she feels the Intuit Dome should fund projects that benefit the stadium, such as the upcoming Inglewood transit connector, an estimated $2 billion dollar plan.
“Why aren’t you pitching in to this thing?” Trejo said. “You’re the beneficiary but the mayor is securing federal funds. So it’s like, pay your fair share, be a good neighbor like you claim you want to be.”
Inglewood residents are not the only group to oppose construction of the Intuit Dome. Back in 2018, Madison Square Garden Co. filed a lawsuit against the city of Inglewood and Mayor James T. Butts Jr.
The company, who owned the Forum at the time, claimed it was tricked into surrendering its lease to use vacant city-owned land for overflow parking at the Forum. Murphy’s Bowl LLC, the company behind the Intuit Dome project, would countersue.
Eventually, all disputes would come to an end after Clippers owner Steve Ballmer purchased the Forum from MSG for $400 million.
Trejo is not the only resident who disapproves of the construction of Intuit Dome. Yaritza Gonzalez serves as co-founder and co-director of operations for the ING Fellowship, a local initiative that aims to guide and inform the local youth community about issues pertaining to Inglewood.
When describing the ING Fellowship, Gonzalez said, “We’re a grassroots organization that was founded by residents from Inglewood that were born and raised there that saw that there was a lot of changes happening to their hometown.”
“We realized that we wanted to have a space where young people, ages 18 to 30, can be able to organize and advocate around different social justice issues that are happening in Inglewood,” Gonzalez said. “Including, you know, gentrification…and to be able to advocate and find ways of learning how to do so.”
Gonzalez shared her initial reaction to the announcement of Intuit Dome’s opening in 2017.
“I just didn’t understand why they needed so many stadiums in one location,” she said. “Given that we already had the forum as a space and then the SoFi Stadium as another entertainment space, having another stadium given all the impacts that the other two were already having…I just didn’t understand the logic behind it.”
Gonzalez said she expects traffic and rising rent in Inglewood to worsen.
“Some people that live in that neighborhood can’t even get to their houses in time, just because of how bad the traffic is,” she said. “My parents’ house, which is where I used to live, is about five blocks away from the SoFi stadium. The freeway exit from the 405 is right by the stadiums…so to get out of the freeway and get to my house is just really difficult sometimes.”
Gonzalez explained that residents and business owners have seen a rise in rent since the stadium’s opening was announced.
“As someone that would love to live in their own neighborhood, it’s very challenging to do so when rent is so high,” she said. “I had friends that had to move out to other neighboring cities or further away because they just couldn’t afford to live there anymore.”
The city of Inglewood does have rent control. Rent can rise between three and 10% per year.
Gonzalez explained that she feels that residents of Inglewood are an afterthought when it comes to the construction of these massive venues.
“[I have] mixed feelings about the stadiums, just given the fact that there’s just been a lot of false promises,” she said. “We’re the people, the residents that had lived there for years, and we are not able to reap the benefits that were supposedly promised by the city. It’s really frustrating to see all these false promises of like, oh, like the community is going to benefit from all this like revenue that’s gonna come in because of these stadiums.”
She expressed that the ING Fellowship is continuously working to amplify residents’ voices, particularly pertaining to this issue.
Erin Aubry Kaplan, a columnist who contributes to the Los Angeles Times opinion pages and lives in Inglewood, emphasized the detrimental effects stadiums in the city have had on people of color.
“The people who are most vulnerable are the black and brown people who live here,” Kaplan said. “Inglewood was, for as long as I’ve known it, a working-class city. Affordable. But it’s no longer that.”
“It’s the city in LA county that has the largest Black population. It’s like 40%, now it’s dropping…it’s like the symbol of the future of communities of color,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan touches on the negative effects major stadiums have on Black communities in Inglewood in her recent column titled, “Will ‘all that glitters’ turn L.A.’s last solidly Black city white?”.
Her piece highlights the rise in housing in Inglewood since the stadiums began to roll in, with the median price of a home reaching $900,000.
“I think it’s harder to pay rent in some instances than to buy a house [in Inglewood] because they just keep spiraling up,” she said.
Kaplan also said that these billion-dollar stadiums are harming the schooling system in Inglewood.
“Our school district is imploding,” she said.
Kaplan said that the Inglewood Unified School District has been receiving funding from the state since 2012 because of a decrease in student population. As a condition of that yearly loan, the school district is required to sell its land.
She explained that more often than not, these sold land plots are used for developments that harm the community.
“Morningside High School sits less than a mile from Intuit Dome…that’s land that’s already being prepared for new housing. It doesn’t look good,” she said.
Kaplan expressed hope for the future, saying she wants to see development, but in partnership with the people of Inglewood. She explained that gentrification is business-driven and is dictated by the market.
Similarly to Gonzalez and Trejo, Kaplan expressed her disapproval of the city’s local government.
“You know, the biggest cheerleader for all development is our own city government,” Kaplan said. “Our city officials are telling us this is all wonderful for us, but we’re experiencing something very different.”
Intuit Dome officials declined to comment for this story.
Inglewood City Hall did not respond to request for comment.