Gentrification

Domingo and Esther Chan and their two children have lived for years in a rent-controlled apartment near MacArthur Park, paying $403 a month for the tiny space, dominated by a queen-size bed. Then last year, their apartment building was sold, and the new owner immediately began pressuring the Chans to move out, they said. A man known to them simply as "Rocky" frequently came to their door, pressing them to take $2,500 to vacate the unit.

DRIVE around Silver Lake and you quickly see why the neighborhood has become a geographic byword for hip. Old storefronts abut sleek new businesses, comfortably ramshackle bungalows sit next to million-dollar Modernist architectural gems.

The much-touted revitalization of downtown Los Angeles has brought luxury lofts and trendy restaurants to the city center along with a growing cadre of private security guards who do everything from patrol the streets to clean up trash. Riding on bikes and in SUVs and armed with pepper spray, batons and sometimes handguns, the guards downtown now number about 100.

They're going toe-to-toe to keep from getting towed. Mobile home residents in Culver City are fighting an effort by the city to replace their park with nicer housing, a neighborhood renewal project they say their community doesn't need. City officials have labeled two Grand View Boulevard mobile home parks "blighted" and picked a private developer to draw up plans to replace the parks' 43 coaches, possibly with townhouses.

Investors hoping to profit by owning apartment buildings are venturing into some of Southern California's meanest streets to rehabilitate neglected properties, including one complex involved in the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division scandal. Despite the economic slump, these investors say, demand remains high for apartments that working-class renters can afford, especially in many parts of the Southland where primarily Latino populations have outgrown the housing supply.

THERE'S a scruffy brick apartment building at the corner of 7th and South Park View streets in Westlake that hints at the history and possible future of the neighborhood. On the ground floor, a pharmacy and health clinic with signs in Spanish sit next door to an inexpensive Honduran restaurant.

SANTIAGO SANCHEZ and Yolanda Ibarra were running out of time. It was already mid-March, and in less than a month they and their six children would have to leave their $662-a-month apartment in an old building halfway up a dead-end street in Echo Park. They'd been scouring neighborhoods to the north, east and south of downtown Los Angeles for vacancy signs. But even after repeatedly lowering their expectations, they hadn't found a single thing they could afford.

It's a friendly, laid-back place -- a cozy hole in the wall where locals can gather to sip latte and share neighborhood gossip. But the talk Friday at the tiny Bishop coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles was about how gentrification can send a business soaring. And then turn around and slam it straight into the ground. That's what happened to the Bishop, which closed its doors Friday night -- a victim of its neighborhood's success.

Pedro Galindo moved into the Higgins Building four years ago, part of the first wave of urban adventurers who set roots in the fledging loft district north of skid row. Back then, the 24-year-old substitute teacher recalls, the converted 1910 beaux-arts office tower had a definite vibe. "The coolest people were here. There were rooftop parties and barbecues," he said. "It was a very social building. You would have parties every weekend."

Nestled along a southern stretch of Santa Monica Bay, Manhattan Beach was for decades a middle-class ocean lover's paradise. It was a place where a teacher's salary or an aerospace worker's wage could pay the mortgage on a comfortable, if modest, house within walking or bicycling distance of the beach. Let the rich have their Malibus and Newport Beaches--Manhattan Beach's affordability made possible a seashore lifestyle that was famously laid-back and unpretentious.