The small, wood-frame house in the shadow of the Watts Towers was no home buyer's dream. But back in 2004, Victor Agustiniano and his wife, Remedios, were in a frenzy to become homeowners. And despite warnings about neighborhood crime, they snapped up the two-bedroom house with the big yard for less than $300,000.
Agustiniano, a 35-year-old home improvement store worker, was familiar with South Los Angeles. In the early 1990s, he dropped out of high school and made a living as a street vendor there, selling corn on the cob smothered in mayonnaise and cheese.
During the 1992 riots, he and his wife -- childhood sweethearts from Mexico -- hunkered down in their apartment near Vermont Avenue and watched the unrest on television.
Today, the family lives in a three-bedroom addition Agustiniano built behind the small house, which is now a rental property.
"This is my home," he said with pride. "This is where I live, and I have had no problems here."
Agustiniano and his wife are stakeholders in today's South Los Angeles and are emblematic of a major trend in the area: a substantial demographic shift. In 1990, Latinos and African Americans each comprised 47% of the area's population; today Latinos outnumber blacks 2 to 1.
But that ethnic transformation is one of the few dramatic changes in an area that for decades has known one constant: poverty. According to a newly released report by UCLA's School of Public Affairs, almost one-third of the area's residents have been living below the poverty line since 1990.
"South L.A. has been a neglected part of the city," said Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., dean of the School of Public Affairs. "There have been efforts to rebuild, but those efforts haven't been as successful. And that's because we have not developed a strategy for dealing with the long-term and persistent effects of poverty."
The UCLA report points out that the area is a place of stark contrasts, with solid middle- and upper-class pockets -- View Park and Baldwin Hills -- on the west and communities that lag behind nearly every measure of prosperity farther east. It's most often defined as an area of immense need.
A year after the 1992 riots, UCLA released a lengthy report describing the unrest as a "predictable outcome" of a festering crisis in a region where joblessness, hopelessness and a crippling lack of skills and education existed side by side with wealth, privilege and opportunity.
