“USC’s Neighborhood is so ghetto.”
It’s the kind of comment I’ve heard way too many times from USC students. Sometimes it’s said casually, as a joke, or even as a warning. People say it about South Central, about West Adams, about the streets surrounding campus, as if they are simply describing what they see.
But the word “ghetto” is not neutral.
Of course, USC students are not a monolith. Professor Philip Ethington, a USC historian who studies Los Angeles urban history, cautioned against treating the entire student body as if it views South L.A. the same way. USC’s student body includes first-generation, working-class and immigrant students alongside students from significantly wealthier backgrounds.
In his experience, students from working-class and Latino families tend to have a greater understanding of the communities surrounding USC.
“I think the wealthy students are more likely to call it a ghetto,” Ethington said.
Historically, a “ghetto” was an area where a marginalized group was forced to live because of legal or social exclusion. In the United States, the word later became associated with Black and Latino neighborhoods shaped by segregation, redlining and disinvestment. Today, it is often used as shorthand for a place considered poor, dangerous or undesirable.
Leland Saito, a retired USC professor whose research focuses on race, urban development and segregation, said these labels ignore how residents define their own communities.
“Words are important because they create an image of what a community is worth,” Saito said. When outsiders label a neighborhood a ‘ghetto,’ they portray it as a place with high crime and dysfunctional families, a place ‘not worth saving.”
Manuel Pastor, a USC professor who has extensively studied inequality, race and economic change in Los Angeles, similarly questioned whether the word describes South L.A. at all.
“If what you’re trying to evoke by ‘ghetto’ is something that’s just dangerous, filled with crime, and completely run down, it’s just not describing what is around us in terms of the people,” Pastor said.
For Pastor, part of the challenge is getting the details right.
“I’m an academic. I believe in precision. This is not precise.”, Ethington said. “It really misrepresents what the neighborhood is around USC.”
One of the clearest examples of that overlooked history sits just west of USC.
Sugar Hill, located in West Adams Heights near USC, was once one of Los Angeles’ most important Black neighborhoods. Hattie McDaniel, who lived in Sugar Hill, became the first Black Actor to win an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy in “Gone with the Wind”.
Ethington said Sugar Hill was part of a much larger Black community that developed under intense housing discrimination, including systemic redlining in Los Angeles. Because Black Angelenos were restricted from living in many neighborhoods, they created what he described as a “parallel world” around Central Avenue, complete with Black-owned theaters, businesses, doctors, lawyers and cultural institutions.
McDaniel’s Oscar was groundbreaking, but her role was also controversial. The “Mammy” character repeated a racist stereotype of Black women as happy, loyal servants who cared for white families, ignoring the violence and lack of freedom behind slavery.
Despite starring in the film, McDaniels was not allowed to attend its Atlanta premiere because of segregation, and was seated separately from her white co-stars at the Academy Awards.
Her achievement opened doors for Black actors, but it also showed how Hollywood celebrated Black talent while discriminating against Black performers. She was among several prominent Black residents who called the neighborhood home. Sugar Hill became a symbol of Black wealth, homeownership, and resistance in a city that tried to keep many neighborhoods radically segregated.
During the first half of the 20th century, Los Angeles housing was shaped by restrictive covenants that barred non-white residents from owning or leasing property in many areas. In Sugar Hill, White residents filed a lawsuit against McDaniel and other Black Sugar Hill homeowners in the 1945 case Tolhurst v. Venerable, arguing that racial restrictions in property deeds barred Black residents from owning or occupying homes in the neighborhood.
The construction of the Santa Monica Freeway cut through Sugar Hill in the 1960s. According to Segregation by Design, the state used eminent domain to acquire property in the neighborhood before demolishing homes to make way for the freeway. Eminent domain is the government’s legal authority to take private property for public use, provided property owners receive just compensation. Despite residents’ protests, the construction destroyed dozens of homes, including those in Berkeley Square, and displaced families from the historically Black neighborhood.
But the route itself raised questions about whose communities were being sacrificed.
In an article published after the freeway’s construction, the Los Angeles Sentinel questioned whether Sugar Hill could have been spared. As quoted by Segregation by Design, the newspaper reported that an alternative route was said to have required construction through USC’s fraternity and sorority row. While the account does not establish why state officials selected the final route, it reflects concerns about which neighborhoods were preserved and which were demolished.
For a community that had already fought against racial housing restrictions, the freeway’s construction brought another wave of displacement, permanently changing a neighborhood that Black Angelenos had fought to call home.
Still, the outcome is clear: USC’s fraternity and sorority row survived, while much of Sugar Hill did not.
Saito said freeway construction across Los Angeles repeatedly placed the burden on communities of color. He pointed to Boyle Heights, where he grew up and where several freeways cut through the neighborhood. Meanwhile, communities with more political influence were sometimes able to resist similar projects.
“There was supposed to be a freeway through Beverly Hills, but that community had the political power to stop it,” Saito said.
The contrast shows that freeway routes were not simply technical decisions. Political power helped determine which neighborhoods were protected and which ones were expected to accept destruction in the name of regional progress
For USC students, that history should be impossible to ignore. Many of us walk past fraternity houses, attend events, and enjoy a campus environment shaped by decisions made long before we arrived. Yet few stop to consider what was sacrificed to preserve those spaces. Families lost homes, neighbors lost each other; but most importantly, residents lost a community that represented Black achievement and stability in a city that often denied both.
When students call the surrounding neighborhood “ghetto,” they treat the area as if it simply failed on its own. They ignore the fact that communities like Sugar Hill paid a price for the Los Angeles we know today. Students should be careful when dismissing the neighborhood with a single word; they erase those sacrifices and overlook the human cost behind the landscape they move through every day.
So the question comes down to this: what do you know about “ghetto”?
Sugar Hill should remain understood as a historically Black neighborhood. Its story is about Black wealth, Black homeownership, and the racism Black Angelenos faced when they tried to live in neighborhoods that white homeowners wanted to keep segregated. Recognizing similar histories elsewhere in Los Angeles should not diminish Sugar Hill’s significance. Its destruction and the displacement of Black residents deserve to be understood on their own terms.
At the same time, Sugar Hill exists within a broader history of Los Angeles sacrificing communities of color for projects described as progress. One of the clearest examples is Chávez Ravine, a predominantly Mexican American community made up of the neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop.
During the early 1950s, the city used eminent domain to acquire the land for a proposed public-housing development. Residents were told they would have the first opportunity to move into the new housing. But the development was canceled, and the city eventually made the land available for Dodger Stadium. PBS documented how families were pressured to sell or forcibly removed, including residents who had resisted eviction for years.
Sugar Hill and Chávez Ravine are not interchangeable histories. Sugar Hill was a center of Black wealth divided by freeway construction. Chávez Ravine was a Mexican American community displaced through eminent domain and a failed housing promise. Still, both show how words such as “progress,” “modernization,” and “development” can hide who is being asked to pay the price.
During the era of redlining, federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps graded neighborhoods according to their supposed lending risk. The descriptions collected by Mapping Inequality show how race and ethnicity influenced those judgments. Many neighborhoods with Black residents were marked in red and labeled “hazardous,” even when they contained homeowners, businesses, churches and established community institutions.
Historians debate how widely banks used the exact HOLC maps when making individual lending decisions. But the broader system of housing discrimination is well documented. As the Federal Reserve History explains, federal housing policy and private lending practices treated Black residents and racial integration as risks to property values. The Federal Housing Administration encouraged restrictive covenants and often favored newer, predominantly white suburban developments over older urban neighborhoods.
That made conventional mortgages and repair loans harder to obtain in many POC communities. Residents were denied opportunities to purchase homes, improve their properties and build wealth. The visible effects of that discrimination could then be used as “proof” that the neighborhood had been a bad investment all along.
Federal urban-renewal policy followed a similar pattern. The Housing Act of 1949 provided federal funding for “slum clearance” and urban redevelopment. Once officials labeled a neighborhood a slum or blighted, demolishing it could be presented as an improvement rather than displacement.
The University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality project found that federally funded urban-renewal programs displaced hundreds of thousands of families between the 1950s and 1960s. Communities of color experienced a disproportionate share of that displacement. Although some projects improved housing, others destroyed close communities without giving displaced residents enough assistance or a realistic opportunity to return.
Redlining, urban renewal and freeway construction may seem like separate chapters of Los Angeles history, but they followed the same pattern.
A community was labeled as risky, neglected or blighted, and that label was then used to justify denying it investment or clearing it away. Afterward, residents were blamed for the damage those decisions left behind.
When asked how much poverty and disinvestment could be connected to policy rather than the people living in a neighborhood, Pastor’s answer was immediate: “Personally, all of it.”
“We live in a political economy that tends to blame the victim, that tends to put culpability for the situation on the people who are in it, versus the system that created it,” Pastor said.
That history is what USC students miss when they call South L.A. “ghetto.” The word makes inequality look like something the community created, rather than something shaped by decades of policy. It gives outsiders the power to decide what the neighborhood is without listening to the people who live here.
As Saito put it, “The person with power applies the label, and makes it stick.”
Edited by Emma Kahn and Daniela Mattson.