A year ago, high school junior Stephanie Cisneros had never heard the word "gentrification," but in many ways, she already knew what it meant. She was watching it happen all around her in the Echo Park neighborhood she's called home since she was 5 years old.
Stephanie saw working-class neighbors losing their rental units, only to see the apartments revamped and priced far higher than before.
She saw old storefront businesses close and disappear. Familiar faces, gone.
"I said, 'What's going on here?' " Stephanie recalled.
Curious and troubled, she began carrying a borrowed digital camera around the neighborhood to document the changes.
On Saturday night, Stephanie's 17th birthday, the public got an early peek of her work during a screening of a short cut of the film she's making on the neighborhood's gentrification. It prompted a discussion on recent changes in the neighborhood.
"It reflected the sentiments of the community," said Humberto Flores, 34, a film student who attended the screening at the volunteer-run Echo Park Film Center on Alvarado Street, itself fighting a proposed tripling of its rent. "The neighborhood is coming up ... but some are getting pushed out."
Flores added: "If I were to leave my apartment ... it would go up $400."
It's a view that many others have been expressing in Echo Park, where the overwhelming forces of Southern California's tight housing market have been causing gradual shifts in the neighborhood's demographics and income levels.
Residential and commercial prices have been rising rapidly, forcing out low-income working families and young bohemians.
Stephanie, who lives with her two younger sisters and parents, immigrants from Mexico City, said a former landlord often reminded the family that their apartment could command two or three times their roughly $500 monthly rent.
That spurred Stephanie, a student at Downtown Magnets High School, to action.
Since June, she has spent hours interviewing business owners and residents on weekends and after school. She has researched the area's history, the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council and housing cooperatives.
With help from multimedia coordinator Jerold Kress at the Bresee Foundation's community center near Koreatown, Stephanie hopes to finish the film by next summer and may enter it in competitions.
